Browse by Tags

In a recent announcement we now offer the ability to downgrade the Premium technologies in R2. More information can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/sbs/downgrade/default.mspx with a FAQ at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/sbs/evaluation/faq/bizsolutions.mspx . Please note that this is a time limited capability due to the End of standard support of SQL 2000. If you have licensed a copy of Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 Premium Edition (which includes Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition), but your line of business applications are not yet available on the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 platform, you may be able to request downgrade rights to SBS 2003 SP1 Premium (which includes Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition the version of Microsoft SQL Server that shipped with Small Business Server 2003 and SP1), and use the downgraded SQL Server in your SBS 2003 R2 environment. You may exercise this downgrade through the channel in which you licensed your original version...

There was a short burst on e-mail the other day about this, but I thought I would share. The situation was that someone was adding SBS to an existing domain, not a problem, but the existing domain had some trusts set up. Since SBS does not support trusts things did not go well. So, to follow up we need to remind everyone that when doing this you get a short period of time to make everything within the SBS constraints or things stop working. Details on how to do all of this are documented in the Knowledge Base (KB)article mentioned below. Here are the bones of the internal notes: You can add one SBS to an existing domain, but the SBS requirements have to be met within a certain grace period. (14 days, according to KB 884453 .) By the end of that grace period: The new SBS 2003 computer must be a domain controller that is installed on the root of the domain. The new SBS 2003 computer must hold all the Flexible Single Master Operation (FSMO) roles. The new SBS 2003 computer must be a global catalog server and must...

I love Vlad's straight talking. If you get a chance read the whole of the blog entry Vlad Mazek - Vladville Blog » Blog Archive » Windows Server 2003 SP2 EEULA & CYA because as far as I am concerned he is preaching to the converted. I will stand by my view that Service Packs are tested as much as possible, but you need to do your own validation (see Who should test software and service packs - I think vendors,customers and partners - others thi ) to ensure that your application vendor is also happy to support their products on that service pack. If you only have MS products, check the release notes AND SUPPORT.MICROSOFT.COM as both may well have important information. I've extracted part of Vlads process to avoid a bloody head - read his post for more as people like Susan Bradley wishes she had :-) However, a part of me wonders just how heavy the rock was. You know, the one that he was under since Microsoft started releasing service packs. As painful as the above is to read, and as painful as this...

It has been around for a little while now, but this is a MUST do for us - whether you think things are great or poor. Please fill in the survey and then we can stay up all night and look at the results using the latest holo-projection equipment to understand the multi-dimensional nature of what it takes to please our small business partners. If you don't fill it in, then my R2-D2 projection system will not be used and we will take the 3 replies (two posted by me as a test) and you only get one answer this year. OK, so this is a little humorous, but I hope you get the idea - we need the feedback to make things even better. Don't think you only need to answer it if you need to moan, or you think things are great. Confirming things either way (or even the fact that we have more than one type of partner out there) is all "goodness" as one of my managers used to say. Have I said enough yes? Fill it in, send it off, spank us if we don't respond! Announcing the SBS Community Survey for 2007! The...

SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition FIX: Failed assertion message in the Errorlog file when you perform various operations in SQL Server 2005: "Failed Assertion = 'fFalse' Attempt to access expired blob handle (3)" http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=933766 FIX: SQL Server 2005 does not reclaim the disk space that is allocated to the temporary table if the stored procedure is stopped http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=931843 The Batch Requests/sec counter of the SQL Statistics performance object increases one time for each RPC in SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=936637 List of known issues when you install SQL Server 2005 on Windows Server Code Name "Longhorn" http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=936302 How to use Windows Management Instrumentation in SQL Server 2005 to change the account of the SQL Server service or the password of the SQL Server service programmatically http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=936492 A user who is not a member of a required role...

I get asked about this quite a lot - so Microsoft has this thing, the "TAT". I've looked at it and it is just a bunch of questions. Yep, but you can change the questions and all the results are stored and if you know what you are doing, you can use it to build an IT strategy for your customers which means that you go back to them regularly and take their IT onto the next stage for their business. I don't think this is rocket science, but perhaps it is something that we don't do enough of - look for the opportunities in a programmatic way. Now of course, this could be a very slavish process, but at Steve says: The questions are now much more relevant to the SME market and you don’t feel so uncomfortable asking your customers. We don’t just run through all the questions one after the other but slot them in to the rest of the presentation. It feels less like the Spanish Inquisition that way! We’ve conducted several surveys so far and they don’t just have to be prospective customers. You can...

I did a quick scan and it seems that this month Office is the main target of updates, along with one critical one for Windows Server (for DNS RPC attack) and one for IE7. Worth a quick download and install :-) I also got this in the mail today: Apple QuickTime 7.x must be upgraded to 7.1.5 or higher. On the security updates: Microsoft is releasing the following new security bulletins for newly discovered vulnerabilities: Bulletin Number Maximum Severity Affected Products Impact MS07-023 Critical Microsoft Excel (all currently supported versions) Remote Code Execution MS07-024 Critical Microsoft Word 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 (Mac) Remote Code Execution MS07-025 Critical Microsoft Office (all currently supported versions) Remote Code Execution MS07-026 Critical Microsoft Exchange (all current versions) Remote Code Execution MS07-027 Critical Internet Explorer - all current versions on all currently supported versions of Microsoft Windows Remote Code Execution MS07-028 Critical CAPICOM, BizTalk Server Remote Code Execution...

I thought you should be aware of this WSUS 3.0 on SBS White Paper Released [Today's post comes to us courtesy of Chris Puckett] WSUS 3.0 has released. You can download it here . For information on installing WSUS 3.0 on your SBS 2003 SP1 or R2 server, check out the Installing WSUS 3.0 on SBS 2003 whitepaper. The issue blogged in February 2007 regarding Vista updates not synching in SBS 2003 R2 has been fixed in WSUS 3.0. If you experienced performance issues like high cpu usage by svchost, a UI hang and long scan times, the new new WUA client included with WSUS 3.0 addresses these issues in combination with the MSI update in KB 927891 . It’s important to note that the new client is only a partial solution for the svchost/msi issue and clients must have both KB 927891 and the new 3.0 client installed for a full solution. Source: The Official SBS Blog : WSUS 3.0 on SBS White Paper Released Having looked at the whitepaper it seems it covers the following areas: Install WSUS v3 on 2003 SBS SP1 and R2 (when to...

Just a quick note to say that if you have a SBS customer who has some PCs with Vista then you will need the updated ISA firewall client. You will need to go to this page - ISA Server Firewall Client Firewall Client for ISA Server Brief Description Firewall Client for ISA Server installs the Firewall Client software on 32-bit and 64-bit computers running supported Windows operating systems. It is also worth noting that the install script will look something like this \\Servername\shared folder\SETUP.EXE /Q /P "SERVER_NAME_OR_IP=Servername ENABLE_AUTO_DETECT=0 REFRESH_WEB_PROXY=1" Note this will almost certainly force a reboot due to the changes in the Winsock stack. ttfn David Technorati Tags: ISA , ISA Firewall client , SBS , SBS Premium

So you may remember the call for help that led to the article How to add public folders to the list of contacts in Outlook : We currently have several public folders which contain email address and contact information for people outside of our company that we want to keep up with. I would like to put these in the All Contacts list on the server, so everyone can open it and reference it when sending email. The only thing I can find it to put them in Active Directory so they can be on the list. Surely there is another way to get this done, but how. I also am not opposed to manually typing them in (and weeding out old contacts), but don't feel very comfortable putting 800 outsiders in my AD. Having proposed the solution in the above link, I then got back the following reply: Thanks David for the reply. I have some address books in the public folder that I have done that to, but was trying to move away from the public folder and have the addresses included in the "All Contacts" under the "All Addresses" section for...

I was recently asked by someone how to do this. Considering the fact that there are pre-defined public folders in SBS, including those for contacts I thought it was worth sharing this with a wider audience. Set this up for a customer using SBS and they can easily share contacts across the whole business. Add the contacts folder to the favourties list and they are also cached offline :-) I found the answer by experimentation, but then this article describes it well too. The magic tab in Office 2007 (and 2003) is pictured below from my system. How to add Public Folder Contacts to the list of Address Books First thing you need to make sure that the public folders has a contact list created. Also, double check the permissions so that your users can view the contact list. To setup the Contact List in the Address Book navigate to your public folder and find the contact list you want to add. Right-click on the Contacts Folder and click properties . Click on the Outlook Address Book tab. Check the box next to “Show...

I had some apps fail on my machine yesterday after I got back from the TechNet event, so off I went to diagnose. It was then that I discovered that the help and support service had gone. Vanished, Vamoosh. I did find this little baby in the event log though: Event Type: Error Event Source: HELPSVC Event Category: None Event ID: 16387 Date: 14/03/2007 Time: 11:44:31 User: N/A Computer: SERVER Description: Service could not be deleted Being of a speedy nature I fired a mail off internally only to be told "yep, we know about and are investigating and we have already blogged about it" - http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive/2007/03/20/help-and-support-service-missing-after-installing-windows-2003-service-pack-2.aspx There is a fix there, which I used, works and is great, so no harm done, just a small panic.