Active Directory support. This release is able to join an ADS realm as a member server and authenticate users using LDAP/Kerberos.

Unicode support. Samba will now negotiate Unicode on the wire, and internally there is a much better infrastructure for multibyte and Unicode character sets.

New authentication system. The internal authentication system has been almost completely rewritten. Most of the changes are internal, but the new authoring system is also very configurable.

New filename mangling system. The filename mangling system has been completely rewritten. An internal database now stores mangling maps persistently.

New “net” command. A new “net” command has been added. It is somewhat similar to the “net” command in Windows. Eventually, we plan to replace a bunch of other utilities (such as smbpasswd) with subcommands in “net”.

Samba now negotiates NT-style status32 codes on the wire. This considerably improves error handling.

Better Windows 200x/XP printing support, including publishing printer attributes in Active Directory.

New loadable RPC modules for passdb backends and character sets.

New default dual-daemon winbindd support for better performance.

Support for migrating from a Windows NT 4.0 domain to a Samba domain and maintaining user, group, and domain SIDs.

Support for establishing trust relationships with Windows NT 4.0 domain controllers.

Initial support for a distributed Winbind architecture using an LDAP directory for storing SID to UID/GID mappings.

Major updates to the Samba documentation tree.

Full support for client and server SMB signing to ensure compatibility with default Windows 2003 security settings.