Friday, December 17, 2004

New subnet? Use Change IP!

There's a reason for the SBS wizards. Primarily to ensure the right things happen. If take a second to step out of the Small Business world and look at the larger corporations and how they operate you realize. Hey, they have a server (or two or one hundred) just dedicated to running Exchange, they have a server dedicated to being a domain controller, they have another one for SharePoint, and yet another one for ISA.

And it doesn't end there, they have specialists that monitor and tweak these boxes, I would be some of these specialists know the product better than some developers who worked on the product!

Do you know the product this well?

The wizards are really your indepth knowledge and security to ensure the right things happen each time you want to make a change. I know that any of those large business admins try to run SBS, it's too complicated, because trying to do all the steps manually is far too cumbersome! Like the Change IP tool for example. Changing the IP address of a member server with a single task is easy, simply open up the network card properties and change it. But change it on SBS? You have Exchange issues, mobility issues, sharepoint issues, AD issues. Using the SBS wizards and tools will ensure the right things happen, every time. And to top it off, some changes don't even have UI, like service binding to the appropriate NIC!

So don't feel like you're not a real admin if you use a wizard. Use the wizard, save yourself some time, and use that time to provide more value to your end users, instead of figuring out why your clients cannot connect to Exchange after your simply changed the IP address of the server.

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