Monday, May 30, 2011

Finding and Listing Add-ins for Small Business Server Essentials

Microsoft PinPoint

Finding Add-ins for Small Business Server Essentials

If you’re looking how you can extend your SBS Essentials software with add-ins designed specifically for the SBS space, then you want to point your browser over at the Microsoft Website to find the SBS Partners.  This allows you to find applications for all the versions of SBS, but to get right into the add-ins for SBS Essentials, you can skip a click and jump right to the PinPoint directory.  PinPoint is an online Marketplace for Microsoft that you can use to find services or software that suite your business.  Simply go here and you can search for the software you want.  Note that WHS 2011 and SBS 2011 Essentials share the same SDK.  As a result you see both SBS and WHS items listed here.

Listing your Add-in in the PinPoint directory

So you’re an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and you want to list your add-in in the PinPoint directory? that’s pretty easy too.  Before starting you first need to:

  1. Join the Microsoft Partner Network. Before you can begin listing your applications
    on Pinpoint, you must create an account with the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) and create a descriptive overview for your company. It can take up to five business days for your new account to activate in Pinpoint after establishing your membership in the Microsoft Partner Network.
  2. If you are already a member, or have finished the step above, the next stop is to create your PinPoint profile.

Once you are a Microsoft Partner and have a PinPoint profile, you can being to list your application for discovery by customers world wide.  This this process is 8 steps and you can save as you go!

To get started, download this handy PDF guide.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Can Small Businesses use Windows MultiPoint Server? Yes, Yes they can!

Yours Truly (Sean Daniel) talking about MultiPoint

Varvid‘s Aaron Booker caught up with influential blogger and Microsoft SBS Program Manager Sean Daniel to discuss how Multipoint‘s traditionally education-focused offering can also work well for small- to medium-sized businesses. Multipoint is big on universal connectivity, emphasizing ease-of-use without the need for much training. To learn more about Multipoint, go to http://microsoft.com/multipoint.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Windows Small Business Server Essentials 2011 on TechNet Edge

[Video]

Key items talked about in the interview:

  • SBS 2011 Essentials on an HP Proliant Microserver for under $1000, 25 CALs included
  • Scale for greater users to an ML110
  • All the simplicity of Windows SBS 2011 Essentials on simple hardware

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Looking to Migrate to Small Business Server 2011?

If you’re looking to migrate to Windows Small Business Server 2011, and aren’t completely sure where to get started, you have your choice of migration options from Microsoft. 

The migration solutions provided are well documented and tested by Microsoft, but do require extra hardware, and do require you to change the computer name of your server.  Additionally, these migration whitepapers are free of charge for you to use.

There are other solutions that you can choose such as the Swing Migration, which at an additional fee you can get a customized migration paper, and access to the Swing migration forums.  Both are valuable resources and you need to determine which is best for your customer’s business.  Both solutions get you from point A to point B, the better place on SBS 2011 Essentials or Standard

Monday, May 16, 2011

How to Split a workstation in Windows MultiPoint 2011

David Belanger shows how to split workstations in MultiPoint Server

My friend and co-worker David Belanger demo’s at Microsoft’s TechEd how to split a station in two on Windows MultiPoint Server 2011.  It’s pretty brain dead simple.

How USB thumb drives work with Windows Multipoint Server

David Belanger shows how USB thumb drives work with MultiPoint Server

How to projection works with Windows MultiPoint Server

Dean Paron shows how projection works with Windows MultiPoint Server

Windows Home Server saves the day…

Being in my position, I often come across people wishing Windows Home Server was this way, or had this, or didn’t do that.  I suppose it’s the nature of the job to focus on what needs improvement, but every once in a while it’s nice to reflect on what works really really well.

On an internal discussion alias for Home Server, we had a fellow Microsoft employee leverage Windows Home Server to remotely assist his father, and I wanted to share that story here.  This same sort of story can show you what you can do with SBS 2011 Essentials as well.  Here is the story:

My parents recently moved down to NC. My father is an avid golfer and recently retired from State Farm after 25 years which explains why NC. Prior to the move south they lived about 40 minutes from me in north eastern Pennsylvania. I first installed a WHS in their home after getting tired of hitting numerous issues trying to setup remote control of their machines with the constant external IP changing. WHS solved that issue for me since it did dynamic updates in order to host the remote access webpage. I was happy for many months being able to log into the remote access webpage and then remote control their machines from the available computers connections tab. On a few occasions while they lived in PA minor issues happened that WHS was the savior but nothing major usually only saving a few hours of time for each incident.

Fast forward to last night around 9:30 at night when my father calls me in a panic stating that my mom is going to kill him for being on “her” computer. All he wanted to do was quickly check some Pittsburgh Steelers news site that he frequents. Well that site had a link to another site that my dad decided to check out and BLAM virus! We have all dealt with viruses before, some worse than others but this one was really annoying and pretty well thought out if I do say so myself. The virus somehow watched for any .exe file to be run and then popped up a dialog saying the .exe you ran contained a virus and to pay $39.99 to remove the virus. I tried all the usual tools to help me get rid of viruses in the past taskmgr, cmd, regedit and msconfig none of them would launch, I even got frustrated and tried sol, spider and chess also blocked.

The last course of action was to walk my dad through booting into safe mode and see if we figure out what is kicking off the virus and stop it from running. I checked the usual auto run locations and nothing fishy was there. I was stumped and without being able to remote control the machine I was in serious trouble. My next idea was to use my “dads” machine to download from my WHS the DART tools .iso which includes a version of system sweeper to scan for the virus. Well my dad convinced me to forget the DART disk and just make sure the virus was gone by going to the WHS and applying the backup from Monday at 3:00am. I remoted my dad’s machine and downloaded the restore CD from the Microsoft site [restore CD provided in box, later discussed on thread] and then walked my dad through the restore wizard. I got lucky that the network driver was built into the CD so no issues there and before we knew it the restore was off and running. I got an email from my parents this morning about how excited they were to have their PC back and they didn’t need to waste time and money shipping it back and forth.

I have since upgraded their browser to IE9 and installed any outstanding important updates on their PC to help stop this from happening again but if it does I know the fastest and easiest way is to have WHS save my bacon!

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Small Business Server 2011 Hands On Labs

imageToday on the Official SBS Blog, the SBS 2011 Hands on Labs are released.  Recently attending the HTG Summit, we debuted these hands on labs for both Standard and Essentials. 

The labs are pretty awesome, they are all hosted on the Internet and you can launch into Virtual environments where you can play with an SBS 2011 Standard or SBS 2011 Essentials network before you buy it, or walk through a scenario after you bought it to make sure you have it ironed out. You can even send it to your employees to train them, or if you’re brave, your customers!  You can even walk through setup.  Close the VM and it’s back ready for the next person to try.

Windows Small Business Server 2011 End-End Scenarios

Access videos, Interactive HOL’s and click-thru demonstrations of the end-end demo’s for SBS 2011 Essentials and SBS 2011 Standard

Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials Technical Training

This technical training course provides you with the knowledge and skills to install, configure, administer and troubleshoot a Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials infrastructure. The course focuses on deployment, configuration and administration using the SBS 2011 Essentials Server, Management Dashboard, and add-in extensions.

Access this entire 6 HOL training today online

Download the partnering Training PowerPoint’s (you can also download the HOL click-thru’s for each of these modules below in the click-thru section)

Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard Technical Training

This technical training course provides you with the knowledge and skills to install, configure, administer and troubleshoot a Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard infrastructure. The course focuses on deployment, configuration and administration in the SBS 2011 Standard console, and SBS 2011 Premium Add-on.

Access this entire 6 HOL training today online

Download the Training PowerPoint’s, Videos and Click-Thru’s for this training