While several of the features of URA are compatible with Windows 8 only, many organizations will take a while to upgrade their clients and will need to deploy URA with Windows 7 compatibility. We already discussed earlier about the configuration options this requires, and saw how you can select this option in the URA wizard and configuration.
For the most part, Windows 7 clients behave exactly like Windows 8 clients as far as URA is concerned. They too inherit the configuration when Group Policy is updated, and use the Windows Firewall to establish the IPsec tunnels. One thing that is different is the fact that they don't have the NCA built into them, so the visual side of that is a little different. As we said earlier, a similar software called the DCA (DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant) is available for installation on Windows 7 URA clients, which provides the same functionality.
The DCA is not actually required for the regular DirectAccess connection...