SBS 2003 Migration to new hardware

Richarde:

Ricard00

I overcome this by not selling hardware (or software).  I specify it, source it and then get the customer to pay for it direct (usually to dell with whom I can usually negotiate a good deal).  I then charge the customer my time for doing that, plus, of course the time to setup and administer their network.

I find that this gives me as much profit as the (tiny) margins on hardware would provide, and it is always 'someone elses box' so if things are wrong with the hardware you don't get quite so tarnished.

It's an approach which has worked for me for the last five years, and I have never had a customer question it.  It is also a nice feeling that all the money that drops through your letter box belongs to you (and the taxman) and not a load of creditors.

Rich hi,  we do the same for clients with credit reports that don't quite make the mark.  Making the sale is the skill, the delivery (and payment) is (usually?) more simple.

But certainly make a charge for the time & effort.  G

The whole point of me existing, as far as my customers are concerned, is so that they don't have to 'do' anything IT related.

I provide maintenance, hardware, installations, upgrades, license managment and just about anything else they don;t want to be bothered with.

Profit on hardware is always 20% for me, and I buy everything from Dell.  I can make a bit more on any workstations I buy as I customers with maintenance contracts must still pay for a new machine to be added to the network, so about £100 profit per PC and a lot more per server.

Most customers appreciate the fact that they need to pay up front for this stuff and they certainly appreciate it when I suggest to them that I'll have to let them go elsewhere if they can't becuase that tells them that I really can't stump up on their behalf.

Anyway, does anyone have experience with the swing migration kit...

Great news, Virtual Server just got a lot cheaper - about $0, or when travelling over the pond £0 :-)

 

ttfn

 

David

I have now tried Jeffs method for moving SBS to new hardware and I am happy to report that it works.  I can see potential issues depending on the hardware, but in my tes case it worked really well.  Great news.

This now leads me on to a further licencing question.....

I have a customer who currently has SBS installed on thier server from an Action pack for which they are no longer valid and we are in the process of moving them away from that.  The first step in that process was aquisution of a valid SBS license.

We decided to tie this is with new server hardware and therefore we are going to purchase a new server with an OEM SBS.

Using Jeffs migration method for new hardware we will still be using the existing copy of SBS on the new server and thus the installation will still be the action pack copy.

So in effect I suppose I have two questions:

1) Is it legal to continue using an action pack copy when clearly that hardware has a valid OEM license attached to it.

2) Is there any way to change the product details on an existing installation to make the action pack installation details match that of the OEM license.

Paulie