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Registered Servers

Erik Darling shows how to set up registered servers in Management Studio:

And if you hip and hop over to the Connection Properties tab, you can set all sorts of nifty stuff up. The biggest one for me was to give different types of servers different colored tabs that the bottom of SSMS is highlighted with. It’s the one you’re probably looking at now that’s a putrid yellow-ish color and tells you you’re connected and that your query has been executing for three hours. Reassuring. Anyway, I’d use this to differentiate dev from prod servers. Just make sure to choose light colors, because the black text doesn’t show up on dark colors too well.

In team environments, I’m more a fan of Central Management Servers.