SBS 2008 – Officially Essential

I saw various blog posts pop with morning with news of some announcements from Microsoft

Dave Overton has some posts with some good info

“Windows Essential Server Solutions family of products” announcement

Windows Essential Business Server Announcement

Small Business Server 2008 (formally known as Cougar) announcementThis officially places SBS and EBS directly under the same umbrella.

There is also a brand new web site covering lots of detail for SBS here and EBS here

The product overview gives a glimpse of some of the software with a couple of screen shots of the management console (which is still labeled cougar!) and the new remote web workplace

Also mentioned is “integration with Office Live”. Very vague but i’ll be interested to hear more about this

When you buy SBS you’ll also get a years subscription to ForeFront and OneCare. This takes the “all-in-one” solution a bit further on. If the re-newal price point is good this could get interesting in the A/V market

I understand the need to bring all this together under a single “family” of products and i like how SBS and EBS are interchangeable depending on the size of your customer and their needs. I have client who from a user size perspective (about 35 users) and should really be using SBS but their technology usage means they have currently have four “regular” windows servers. EBS would fit really well here

My initial question is, since this is all under the same family will we be able to move up the products as the client grows

If an company starts with SBS 2008 standard,grows a bit. Adds premium server for the SQL capability, grows a bit more and decides they need EBS. Will they be able to scale up? or is this a transition/migration job?

I commented before on how i was initially disappointed that we were “losing” SQL to the second premium server. I still think this but i’m now only disappointed from geek “i want everything” perspective. Looking at my client base, (sharepoint aside) very few of them are currently using SQL so to make this premium and move onto another server makes more sense to me know

Can’t wait to see more of it!

Microsoft press release information here:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/serversolutions/default.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/feb08/02-20EBFamilyPR.mspx