Many of you know that I am a Star Wars fan (anyone seen my avatar?), but you may also remember me telling everyone to "Use the wizards, Luke, use the wizards" over 3 years ago when explaining that SBS can help make life easier.

Today, when playing catch up on a number of blogs, I noticed this article from Susan Bradley that said all I wanted to say / have been saying:

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2006/04/08/89925.aspx

A blog worth reading, and I especially like the start:

Well..actually more likely.. once you screw up the box so much .. you learn yourself why there are some wizards you should just never bypass.....

and the biggie... the granddaddy of the wizards that you should not bypass unless you want me to personally hunt you down... is the basic install wizard of Small Business Server in the first place.  HandyAndy's web site has the screen shots..but make your life and your customer's life easier by letting the box install everything as it wants to be laid down by that SBS installer.  I don't care if you don't use Exchange and use Pop protocol inside of Outlook (ugh).  I don't care if your client doesn't know what Sharepoint is....there just might be a time in your clients future that they might need it and want it and then you'll have to get those bits back on the box.  Thus it's easier to install the SBS box and let it do it's "thing" and then when you are done, then go back and inside the "services" manually disable those services you don't want running.  But do yourself a huge favor and let the box do what it wants do to.  And don't even think that you can install SBS "by hand" like the big server boxes.  Do ensure that user folders and Exchange get moved over to different partitions of course, but don't even think of installing a SBS box by hand the "manual" way.

I really couldn't put it better, so read the who entry, then have a look at the blog - you will not regret it :-)

ttfn

David