I have my 1^st Technet Article published in the news flash today. The article is below and it talks about why SBS is right for small businesses – for the “IT Pros” in the world – i.e. those who are technical by nature.

To add a bit more to the article, I have included several links in this to pictures of the reports.

Hello,

My name is David Overton and I am the Head of Technology for Small Business in Microsoft UK. I spend a good deal of my time explaining the benefit of Microsoft Technology focused on the small business market. Windows Small Business Server 2003 (SBS) is a product that is perfect for those organisations who are looking for a single server that does everything in one box and meet the requirements of 75 users or less. In the one box you get Windows Server 2003 standard, Exchange 2003 standard and a host of SBS specific wizards and tools that ensure it is simple to install. What is more the price is less than that of Windows Server 2003. (Further wizard pictures for To Do List, Adding a User 1,2,3 or the network management tools)

For those who are scared by Active Directory implementations or find group policy management a little out of their league, SBS provides simple wizards to make this process easy, although all the traditional tools still exist if you wish to delve deeper.

One area that I have found always causes issues in smaller businesses is connecting to the internet and managing all the network settings such as DHCP, DNS, RRAS, firewall settings, e-mail configuration - this is all done by a simple wizard that many people say they wish they could have on Windows Server by itself - it takes a good 2 minutes to configure all these in a safe and secure way.

The next best thing about SBS is the capability to access the system remotely. This is done by the Remote Web Workplace which is a web page that is built automatically that provides access to OWA, configuration script for RPC over HTTP, a pre-configured Connection manager download to enable configuration free VPNs and one of the best features, web based proxying to remote desktop to your PCs or the server. All these are configured by SBS automatically, including 4 simple templates that enables you to choose what a user can get access to. We even provide secure access to the intranet site that is built in SharePoint by default.

Finally, the system has a host of management and reporting tools that back the server up every night and sends a full diagnostic report to you every morning giving you information about how healthy your server is and has been.All this makes SBS great for small business as it is packed full of tools that make managing the system very easy and yet getting the full power and more of the individual products. One final tool, should delivering these systems get ahead of you, you can contact a specialist in small business solutions by going to the consultant finder tool too.

Ttfn

David

http://uksbsguy.com/blogs/doverton