MS Finally Gets It Right

Just back from Seattle (Microsoft's Headquarters) where we attended SMB Nation. This is the world's largest gathering of Microsoft Small Business Specialists. A tech with SBSC behind their name is certified on MS SBS 2003 Standard or Premium Edition. At this 4 day workshop, the best of the best debated, discussed and debunked Microsoft's newest offering in the smb arena, Small Business Server 2008.

SBS 2008 becomes available to the public on November 12, 2008 along with MS Essential Business Server, the bigger brother to SBS. This has been a long time coming, and is not just a pretty upgrade to the exsiting product, SBS 2003 R2. In fact, it is a major rewrite of the core operating system. SBS now joins the ranks of 64 bit operating systems.

What does this mean to you and me? More memory, for starters. SBS 2008 will now allow up to 32 gigabytes of RAM. Currently, SBS 2003 only supports up to 4GB, which is one of the biggest gripes about Small Business Server. After you load up a server with core server software, add in Internet Information Services (IIS), Sharepoint Portal (an internal website), Windows Software Update Server (WSUS), Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA), then finally load up MS SQL database, there's not much memory left to run things.

With SBS 2008 Premium comes a new way of doing things. Premium will come with TWO server licenses. One to run SBS 2008 and all that entails, and another Windows Server 2008 license you can install on separate hardware and run SQL database on. This, my friends, is wonderful news.

Stay tuned for more info regarding this.

To your success,

Tim