"For a long time Samba was a bit of a problem child -- difficult
to configure, but also spotty in its support for different
iterations of SMB (e.g., Vista shares vs. XP shares). Samba 4
promises to fix all that -- to "just work" out of the box, and to
implement a great many things that previously required a Windows
server. Another key feature, support for Group Policy on Windows
clients, ought to make it that much easier to administer Windows
machines from Linux boxes."