Andy's Techie Blog

You’ve more than likely heard that Microsoft are ending development of EBS with immediate effect. If you browse to the website you’ll see this

(eventually…I got this and the regular product page randomly on each page load)

There is also an an announcement on the official SBS blog

“New IT Trends Bring Change to Mid-Market Product Line”

This didn’t exactly come as a massive surprise. If you work in the SME market hands up who sold lots of EBS?

When the product was initially announced it sounded like an interesting proposition but I had a few problems making it “fit”

Comparisons to SBS are bound to happen so that’s where I’ll start!

SBS works because it fits really well into a couple of scenarios that met a need for small businesses

New company, first network, first server

Obvious really. New company, buying infrastructure to get started. Decides to do it right from the offset and goes for SBS

Existing company, existing network, first server

A company that’s grown and needs to go from that peer to peer network to their first server

Existing Company, existing network, replacement server

You know the type. They’re using a “beefed up" PC as a central storage area for their files or they have been sold sold a more expensive "big daddy” Windows Server for sharing files and have no other functionality

As a side note Windows Foundation with some hosted services thrown in could easily swap out for SBS depending on the size of the company

So where in comparisons does EBS fit?

That was my problem.

Business that were generally large enough to look at EBS don’t really fit any of the above

New companies generally don’t start out needing to support 50+ users straight away

Existing companies that have grown to that size do so for a reason and they’ve usually made their IT mistakes and got something in that fits well. Usually “big daddy” Windows server but they pay enterprise prices because there isn’t a product specifically for them. Hence the introduction of EBS!

Since most existing companies like this generally have decent enough networks running it’s difficult to justify ripping the whole thing out and starting again.

So the other scenario I see is the businesses reaching the upper limits of SBS

I actually have this exact scenario going on at the moment with one of my clients and have agonised over EBS vs the regular server products

One of the issues I had was with the “Security Server”

The client in question had already made investments in protecting themselves at the gateway with a dedicated hardware firewall so had no need for Forefront Threat Management Gateway and were already covered by a message hygiene solution so no need for the Exchange Edge role so what exactly were they going to use this server for?

If you are doing it the traditional way then it’s a whole physical server you just don’t need. Obviously you could virtualise it but it’s still a running server that you need to provide support for, patch management, etc  (* this is based on my understanding being that you have to roll out ALL the servers to make EBS work. If I’m wrong please correct me)

There is also another point made by Andy Trish (UK SBSC PAL), that I saw on an email discussion tonight I hope Andy won’t mind me quoting him

They were trying to sell to a market that didn’t need the resellers knowledge to install and support
We wanted to sell using our knowledge to a market who we wanted to get rid of their support and use ours.

Andy is spot on here. Companies of this size have grown up enough to usually have some sort of IT function in-house. They may lean on a support company for advice or specific project work but they’ll make their own decisions about infrastructure. They’ll already have a happy system ticking over quite nicely. What benefit will they actually gain by ripping it all out and replacing it EBS. Slightly simplified licensing and Remote Web Workplace? Technically there really isn’t anything in EBS they aren’t already doing

Again I have a client where a similar situation occurs. They run about 30 internal staff and some external staff. They are quite a technology smart company and don’t run SBS as they have been running multiple Windows servers before SBS was actually relevant (I’ve known this company a LONG time!)

They improved the system a server at a time and now have pretty much all the servers in the EBS stack

File and Print, Domain Controller, Exchange, SQL, ISA (at one point, that has gone now though)

While EBS looked like a decent fit here it would be at the expense of ripping it all out and starting from scratch. This obviously makes no sense.

We actually had the same discussion around SBS a while back with them but what benefit would they get from ripping the whole thing out to start again with SBS?

The killer SBS/EBS feature they don’t have natively is Remote Web Workplace. There are other options for this though such an SSL VPN device or TS Gateway. Remote Web Workplace would be great here but they’ve done ok without it so far

Obviously this all my opinion and very specific point of view. In some ways though it’s a brave decision for Microsoft to just cut their losses and continue with the stuff that does make money so maybe we should applaud them for that

If you’ve already purchase EBS though Microsoft will be making an limited time offer (June 30th to December 31th) available to transition onto the regular products. Someone will have to actually perform the transition which will have a cost attached so it’s not entirely free

So as Guy Gregory said in tweet earlier

Farewell Essential Business Server, we hardly knew thee.

As always your own opinion more than welcome via comment below or email!

At a recent AMITPRO meeting we had a presentation on Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS)

This is hosted SharePoint, Exchange, Live Meeting with other services on the way

I could see the attraction for a large company that is maybe running their own Exchange implementation (for example) and moving it off-premise into the could obviously bring some cost savings and do away with some management headaches

The problem i had was relating this to small business (I’m picking on Microsoft here but I’m thinking hosted services from anyone)

Generally small businesses will need at least one server in-house so they can at the very least do file and print sharing. For us this has meant SBS 2003 (and now SBS 2008). Regular Widows Server works about the same price or more so SBS has extra features and easy management

Since Exchange (and SharePoint) comes as a part of this why use the hosted service? (i know this is over simplifying the whole thing but bear with me)

Today Microsoft announced a product that joined the dots up a little for me

Windows Server 2008 Foundation (press release)

The product is basically Windows 2008 with a 15 user limit and some limitations such an 8Gb memory limit and no virtualisation capabilities

The idea is this would sit on a lower spec server and provide basic file and print and remote access services

I‘ve had conversations with potential new clients recently who are looking at a first server and though i never thought I’d think this SBS 2008 is actually “too big” for them. They are generally growing business who have reached the stage where they recognise they need a server based system

SBS 2008 +CALs is more expensive than SBS 2003 at the lower end and you also need a slightly beefer server (4GB minimum)

Foundation could now fill this gap

A single server in-house for the day to day stuff and then get some hosted mailboxes and voila! You could load SharePoint and WSUS and you would have a pretty decent feature set. The downside is the nice simple SBS management wouldn’t be there but if the client is taking up a managed services offering that wouldn’t really matter to them as that’d be your job!

While I’m not getting too excited about this it certainly giving me some ideas and will give an interesting alternative when talking about that first server.

No official details on price yet but the software will be available pre-installed on servers from manufacturers such HP, Dell, etc and they are looking at the under-$1000 mark (seems awfully familiar to what they said about Home Server)

Couple of other posts i found are here and here 

One to keep an eye on

Update: As usual SBSDiva has a great post on this here where she compares it to a brick…you know for building stuff with

More links here and here