So there I am being a good citizen and not releasing confidential information and then I read about Cougar on the web. I then find that my fellow bloggers are also talking about these products in some form or another. Finally, to top it off, I am challenged by Susan Bradley to answer why Small Businesses need Exchange 2007.
Enough is enough, so I decided to finally start the conversation on these products.
1st up, lets examine Exchange 2007. You can NOT run it on an existing SBS 2003 server as it requires Windows Server x64. The various features and licensing of Exchange 2007 are discussed on my post here. To get Exchange 2007 today, before the launch of Cougar, you will need to buy a 2nd server, Exchange 2007, Windows 2003 Standard x64, Exchange 2007 CALs. This is NOT something for most small businesses. So who is it for?
If you want:
- People who need LOTS of Exchange storage
- People who like the idea of a continious backup of their Exchange store
- Unified messaging (including phoning and talking to youe Exchange Server)
- Hosted message filtering before it reaches your server
- Forefront security (Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware/Anti-Spam)
The last 3 require an Enterprise CAL, but can still be delivered with Exchange 2007 Standard.
If these, along with the newer OWA, clustering support and Windows Crossbow additional support are of interest, then your customer may well be too. If not, then many small businesses, for the price point and the simplified support using the wizards, will enjoy SBS 2003 R2 today until Cougar ships.
What is in Cougar, well it is a very simple statement today - based on Windows Server Longhorn, with Exchange 2007, latest Windows SharePoint Services and almost certainly some / all of System Center / ISA / SQL and more. If it helps, I am part of the limited beta of Cougar - and it is nice. The newer technologies are great and again more will be revealed in the future, but Cougar is slated for 2008, so not something to get super excited about just yet.
Centro is SBS grown up for businesses of 50-250 CALs. It will probably be multi-server and is being built by the same team ad the Home Server and SBS. If you want to keep up to date on this, go look at Kevin Beares blog.
ttfn
David
Posted
Mon, Jan 8 2007 12:38 PM
by
David Overton