Small Business Server

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An all-in-one server suite for enhanced productivity.

There never seems to be enough time or resources when you're running a small business. Here's where server technology can help. The award winning Windows Small Business Server (SBS) is secure, efficient and flexible. Security helps protect your business data with backup and efficient file sharing, printers and applications through central storage. Run your business from virtually anywhere and see how SBS 2008 can increase your productivity.

What is Small Business Server, Exactly?

• Full version of Windows 2008 Server standard
• Full version of Exchange 2007 Server standard
• In addition a fully downloadable Full Windows SharePoint 3.0

At first glance it is basically a Vista Server that greatly expands managed computer experience with User Access Control (UAC) useful with the phenomenal rise in bots and zombie computer networks. Powerful new group policies and greatly enhanced firewall in Windows 2008 allows network access protection that you can use to set requirements making sure users have pre requisites or service pack levels assured and antivirus is functioning well and up-to-date.

Disk-Based Backup: what the header doesn't say explicitly is tape based backup is no longer supported on Windows Server 2008, Microsoft decided really that the future is disk based, disk backup is faster and its easier to retrieve data from.

Exchange making the Difference

Two core features of a server running in a network are file serving-sharing and email, when it comes to mail there's been a lot of room for improvement. A difference between Exchange 2003 and 2007 is that 2007 has been designed to use 70% less disk IO, that means if Exchange 2003 hammered the disk trying to get information off the disk or tried to get information to the disk, Exchange 2007 needs to talk to the disk 70% less than Exchange 2003.

How did they do that

The reason why you will also need to run on 64-bit to install Windows Small Business Server 2008. The 64-bit architecture allows Exchange 2007 to use memory more efficiently and a lot more of it, it's able to cache a lot more information reducing the need to read and write to disk frequently. That's a major feature.

In addition we have more database size and number flexibility, database size can be larger than the old 75GB limit. I will say now and later you really want to keep database sizes around 80 to 100 Gigabyte top. Also the number of databases is flexible, in the past we have only been able to have a single mailbox database and now being able to have up to four mailbox databases allows us to have more databases and keep the relative size smaller.

Transport rules allow all sorts of new possibilities when it comes to how we handle mail. In the past just to add a global disclaimer to the bottom of all company emails would require a third party product to add the text there at the bottom, all we do now is add a new transport rule.

Better Outlook Web Access experience and ActiveSync has been improved. ActiveSync is the technology that allows us to send mail, calendar, tasks and contacts to a Windows Mobile phone. One of the main improvements to ActiveSync is you can now send a remote wipe and completely wipe all the data off the device if it gets stolen and there's quite a few more as well.

Better support for large mailboxes, used to be if your mailbox was more than 2GB you were running into a lot of issues now its not unreasonable to have a mailbox 4GB up to 10 GB in size especially if you pair that up with Outlook 2007 SP2 which included a lot of features for optimising the ost file Outlook keeps.

Complex recovery tasks are now automated, if you have ever worked with Exchange before and had to do a disaster recovery pulling your hair out reading TechNet articles on EseUtil.exe and trying to figure out what command to do next and hoping you didn't do things in the wrong order. A lot of those tasks are now automated and will run the recovery process for you and report results.