Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Aurora and SBS7 have a new name! Announcing SBS 2011 Standard & Essentials

This morning over on the Official SBS blog, we announced the names of both Aurora, SBS7 and the Premium add-on.  Both products have been hammered on pretty hard in the current beta, having been downloaded more than 9000 times to both partner and consumer community testers.  So what are the final names?

Aurora shall be known as Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials.  This product is perfect as a first server for small businesses, giving them a cost-effective/easy-to-use solution to help protect, organize and access their data.  As you already know, this product will connect up to Office365.  SBS11 Essentials can be used by up to 25 users and requires no CALs for access to this server (CALs still apply if you add a TS-in-app-sharing server though!).  Pricing for SBS11E is still to come, but we expect to release this in the first half of 2011.  To learn more about Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, download the datasheet.

SBS7 shall be known as Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard. This is designed and priced for small businesses with up to 75 users, delivering that familiar SBS 2008 Standard, enterprise class server technology as an affordable all-in-one solution.  SBS7 helps protect information with server backups and more on-site features like email, SharePoint, and WSUS.  Licensing is consistent with SBS2008 where CALs are required.  Estimated costs are at the official SBS blog, but today state ~$1096 with CALs at $72 (all in USD).  Again, this will be released in the first half of 2011.  To learn more about Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard, download the datasheet.

I also wanted to announce the Windows Small Business Server 2011 Premium Add-on. This add-on can be applied to both SBS11e or SBS11s and includes access to another copy of Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and SQL Server 2008 R2 for the small business.  The secondary server can be used for many different purposes, including LOB applications, roll-based such as TS-in-app-sharing (with additional CALs), a BDC, virtualization through Hyper-V, etc.  Again, estimated costs for this sku are at the official SBS blog. but today state ~$1604 with CALs at approximately $92 (all in USD). 

To learn more about the Windows Small Business Server Family, download the family overview brochure.

To download previews of Windows SBS 2011 Standard and Essentials you can visit here.

To read the official SBS blog post, visit here.


1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am excited! SBS2008 was a big change from 2003. I just hope that some of the items I was thinking about would be great to have in this new 2011 version. Thank you for the update.