SBS Diva talks about not being afraid of the cloud

Susan Bradley talks about how partners shouldn’t be afraid of the cloud, but yet embrace it. Video courtesy of VarVid.

http://varvid.tv/2010/sbs-diva-susan-bradley-shares-her-insight-on-wpc-2010/

Aaron Booker of Varvid had a nice sit-down with Susan Bradley, known as the SBS Diva, at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2010. Susan made a point to emphasize how important it is for VARs to upgrade their SBS Competency in order to stay attractive to customers and hopes that partners will not overreact to some of the comments on the cloud frenzy… Susan and Aaron talked about Aurora, SBS v7, and lots more.

For what it’s worth, Susan updates her blog from a laptop seemingly from the 1920s, an an extinct Cingular wireless card:

Read More

Simplify your Client Story with Windows MultiPoint Server 2011!

Back in February of 2010, Microsoft launched a new product, called Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, which is designed primarily for the education market to help schools increase computing access to more students for a lower total cost. Today the public beta of 2011 is available for you to try.

As an IT Consultant, why should you care?

If you look at the solution, MultiPoint can actually reduce the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of clients in a small business.  Much of the hard work of running products like Windows Small Business Server Codename “Aurora” and Windows Small Business Server Codename “SBS7” is dealing with client computers, keeping them patched and secure.  Typically in a small business each employee might have one sometimes two computers to manage.  With the release of MultiPoint Server 2011, you can reduce the number of clients in your infrastructure that need maintaining, while keeping (or if you choose, increasing) the number of virtual workstations via terminal services.  Using Terminal Services in App Sharing mode, and normal clients takes some of the risk away, but you still have to worry about patching those “thin” clients.  With MultiPoint server, you simply just patch the server and you’re done.  Simply join it to your “Aurora” or “SBS7” domain, and let your users log in to the MultiPoint server.

So what’s new with Windows MultiPoint Server 2011? We’ve been listening to customer and partner feedback and here are some of the new things you’ll find:

1. Desktop thumbnails that make it easier for teachers to orchestrate activities across the classroom, see what students are working on, and interact with student sessions.
   
2. Support for connecting thin clients over the LAN. This allows for virtually unlimited distances between stations.
   
3. The ability to string multiple MultiPoint Server “pods” and manage them from a unified MultiPoint Manager console. Great for labs and libraries where there are a large number of stations in a single place.
   
4. Split screen capabilities at each user station. Turn one screen into two separate stations for a new way of collaborative learning between students.
   
5. An ISV extensibility model based on a common SDK with the next versions of Windows Small Business Server and Windows Home Server, which enables ISVs such as learning and classroom management providers to integrate with MultiPoint Server.
   
6. Support for domain join to integrate Windows MultiPoint Server with your existing Active Directory infrastructure.

If your organization is struggling with providing enough computers for your users, decreasing technology budgets, limited technical support and outdated hardware and software, I encourage you to check out Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 today and to take a look at the enhancements we are thinking about for through the now available Windows MultiPoint Server 2011 beta.

You can read the official public blog post here, on the SBS blog.  Or if you’d rather jump right in, try out the Beta!

Read More

Windows Server Codename Aurora–Demo

Yours truly , sitting in my office at Redmond, talk about the differences between “Aurora” and “SBS7” as well as provide a 5 minute demo of Aurora. We’ll be going more in depth at SMBNation, as we have a whole 90 minutes just for Aurora!

To comment on the TechNet Edge video, point your browser here.

You can download the Aurora Tech Preview here.

Read More

Customizing what is an e-mail alert on Aurora and Vail

[This post comes courtesy of Adrian Maziak, our System Health PM]

Windows Server “Aurora” is currently in Beta (You can download it from Connect, or read about the beta announcement). You’ve had it for a few months, and have probably run out of things to try on this beta. Well, I wanted to get you back involved with some customization goodies for the health and monitoring alerts that are built both into the Aurora and the Vail products that will carry into the final release.

In previous versions of Home Server, Monitoring could only be done without an add-in in the local console, or from the system tray icon on a local client. You needed something like @WHSTweet to get the alerts off the box (which by the way was a wicked application, I use it for my V1), or perhaps another add-in that I’m not aware of. Also, in previous versions of Small Business Server, there was an Exchange mail server locally to send the alert. But in Aurora there is no exchange server, that’s saved for SBS7.

With Aurora or Vail we provide the ability to insert a “SmartHost” email server that you can send mail through. This can be an email server that lives out on the Internet that you have access to, or the one at your ISP that you simply have access to simply by being part of their network.

However, not all alerts will generate e-mail. The health team took a hard look at all the alerts and have made a call on which ones might be critical for the admin to know immediately, and which ones that can wait until the admin is on the network. But while we optimize this for certain scenarios, we may have missed yours. This is where customization comes in.

Each health alert is defined in a health definition file. These definition files are stored in C:\Program Files\Windows Server\Bin\FeatureDefinitions\Microsoft Base\definition.xml.config.

For example, if you were to scroll down in this file to the “AutoStartServicesVistaWin7Client” for the alert about auto started services on clients that aren’t running. This doesn’t alert by default via email, but if you wanted it to, you can add a line to the XML file <Escalate>true</Escalate>.

<HealthDefinitionConfiguration Name="AutoStartServicesVistaWin7Client">
<Configurations>
<Enable>true</Enable>
<Escalate>true</Escalate>
</Configurations>
<Arguments>
<Argument Name="Description">don’t touch this stuff</Argument>
</Arguments>
</HealthDefinitionConfiguration>

Likewise, if you are getting an alert via email that you really don’t care about, then simply open up the definition xml file and remove the <Escalate> line.

Important Tip: Make sure you back-up the definition.xml.config file before you change it. You never know when you’re going to need to revert back to the default version!

Some Known SmartHosts

SMTP Server	SSL?	Auth?	Port	Logon Information
smtp.live.com	Yes	Yes	587	Full LiveID username & Password
smtp.comcast.net	Yes	No	587	Must be in Comcast’s Network
smtp.gmail.com	Yes	Yes	587	Full GMail username & password
smtp.mail.yahoo.com	No	Yes	25	Email Name and password

*Subject to change without notice

Example using the Live Smart Host

Read More

I’m headed to SMB Nation, are you?

So this year SMB Nation is in Las Vegas, NV, and I have the pleasure of flying down from my home office here in Victoria, BC to demo and show the Windows Server Codename “Aurora” product, and a co-worker of mine, Michael Leworthy will be doing the demo of Windows Server codename “SBS7”. 

Aurora will debut at 9:15am on Friday morning, grab a cup of coffee and head on over to my session where I will demo and present the Aurora product.  I’ll also be answering many of your questions about the Aurora product.  Later on the same day, at 3pm, Michael will be presenting the many features and answering your questions on SBS7.

Michael and I will also be passing through the Microsoft booth from time to time on both Friday and Saturday, so if you miss a session or have follow-up questions, you can find us there.

Hopefully I’ll see you at my Aurora session, if not at the booth.

Read More

Small Business Server 7–Interview with Björn Levidow

Björn Levidow, Group Program Manager for SBS, tells us about some of the new enhancements in the next version of Windows Small Business Server 2008 (SBS 2008), currently called "SBS 7" for short. You can download the SBS 7 Preview by going to this Connect site.

Full video & comments on Technet Edge.

Read More

Windows Small Business Server “7” Released to Public Beta

This morning Microsoft released the Windows Small Business Server “7” release to Beta.  This marks yet another major milestone for the Windows Server Solutions Team, now releasing both the Windows Home Server “Vail”, and Windows Small Business Server Hybrid Edition “Aurora” into beta.

SBS 7 marks a major release in the *next* set of all-on-premise solutions.  Updates include:

• Base OS is updated to Windows Server 2008 R2
• Exchange is updated to Exchange 2010 SP1
• SharePoint is updated to Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010
• Windows Software Update Services is updated
• The new Remote Web Access (RWA) experience is newer (and matches Aurora!)
• Bug fixes
• etc

You can try out the new SBS “7” beta by pointing your favorite browser to the SBS Connect site, or jump straight to the downloads page.  Don’t forget if you need help, or find an issue to give us feedback, or talk about it in the Newsgroups.

More details can be found on the Official SBS blog.

Read More

Our first Aurora add-in, which also works on Vail

Looks like our first Aurora add-in has shown its head!  the AWIECO RemoteLauncher.  If you want to try add-ins, then go ahead and try this one out.

The AWIECO RemoteLauncher add-in for Small Business Server "Aurora" and Windows Home Server "Vail" Beta Refresh is a free and useful add-in, which gives you more administrative possibilities to manage your SBS or WHS remotely. With this add-in you have access to predefined System Tools like

• Windows Explorer
• Command line
• Event Viewer
• Services
• Control Panel
• Computer Manager
• Device Manager
• Registry Editor
• Task Manager

on your Small Business or Home Server directly over the Dashboard. If you need other tools and applications to run over the Dashboard, you can simply add them by a right mouse click. Through this add-in, you can start applications installed on your Server from your client.

Read More

Dana Epp – SBS MVP and Security Expert talks about Remote Access and security precautions to take

Dana Epp on Five by 5–Securing Remote Access

Dana covers important topics about what you can do to give your employees remote access, while at the same time ensuring the security to your network is maintained.  Learn more about Dana’s AuthAnvil program at Scorpion Software.

Read More

Try out Windows Server Codename “Aurora” and a new version of Windows Server Codename “Vail”

Today is a special day, because not one, but TWO products make it to public beta.  The Small Business Server mystery sku known as “Aurora” and the next public beta of the Home Server sku, known as “Vail”.  It’s official once it’s on the official blog!

Vail, you’re probably familiar with (if not just a little bit) as it’s been in public beta for a while, but this version has more stuff!  For example, you can now change users passwords, or set a password policy, or even change the password of the home server!  An a lot of the bugs and reports that you, our beta testers have submitted, are now fixed

Aurora is the new server, you’re probably not familiar with

Aurora is a light weight version that provides the essentials of what a business needs.  You know, data security, protection, backup, access.  All that good stuff.  You might notice that Vail and Aurora have similar consoles, that’s on purpose.  The base platform of the system is similar in nature, but Aurora uses the Active Directory to store it’s users so you can have that single sign-on and user management experience you’ve become familiar with in a business.  It also has shares, and PC backup, and the familiar remote access webpage, now coined “Remote Web Access”.

I’m planning on a series of posts over the next week to get you acquainted with “Aurora”, but for now, you should get started!

As always, Aurora is available over on the Microsoft Connect Website, and so is Vail.  Remember to test it out, beat it up, and file those bugs.  Now’s the time to make sure your business or customer’s business can be fully operational on Aurora, so let us know if it’s not, we want to hear from you!

More details about Vail public preview 2

More details about Aurora public preview

Read More

Discovering Windows Server Codename “Aurora”

HP has teamed up with Becky Och’s, one of our Senior Program managers on the team to talk about what’s in Windows Server Codename ”Aurora”, the new cloud integrated version of Small Business Server.  Becky recorded a short video with the HP Coffee Coaching team to get you up to speed.  As with all Coffee Coaching videos, this one is 4 minutes, which makes it a great video to get up to speed on “Aurora” while you’re wolfing down your morning coffee.

Jump into Coffee Coaching and get more great videos from HP and Microsoft on “Aurora” and other Small Business Products: http://www.facebook.com/CoffeeCoaching

Read More

Guy Haycock discusses the SMB Announcements at WPC 2010

Up on VarVid.tv, Aaron managed to get our Product Planner, Guy Haycock, on camera talking about the announcements of “Aurora” and “SBS7”.

Source Video: http://varvid.tv/2010/microsofts-guy-haycock-discusses-the-smb-announcements-at-wpc-2010/#ooid=puNDRrMTrKPQKyx6UJhYGs_eUWh4s8sn

Read More

Windows Server Codename “Aurora” Video Walkthrough

Wow, over on WeGotServed, Terry found an awesome video that talks about Aurora from our very own Michael Leworthy, product planner for SBS. He talks about the differences between “SBS7” and “Aurora”, and why you might want Aurora over SBS7

Source is We Got Served.

Read More

Announcing the next releases of Windows Small Business Server

Today we (as in our fearless leader Kevin Kean) pulled the lid off what our team has been working on for the past few years. Two new versions of Windows Small Business Server. That’s right. TWO new versions.

From a traditional standpoint, we’ve continued the single-server mantra with Windows Small Business Server “SBS7”. This version includes updates to all the major products in SBS, such as Windows Server 2008 R2, Exchange Server 2010 SP1, SharePoint 2010 Foundation, WSUS 3.0, and SQL 2008 R2 (with Premium edition). These new versions provide our customers with security and management. We also included a brand-spanking new version of Remote Web Workplace! This version of SBS will continue to support the familiar 75 users

The second version, code named Windows Small Business Server “Aurora” is the new edition of SBS. It’s cheaper than SBS7, and is even a lighter weight “first server” option for small businesses as is a hybrid server delivering both on premise services, as well integrates with the cloud. It also includes PC Backup, and server backup/restore capabilities. The same new version of Remote Web Workplace! This version of SBS will support up to 25 users.

“Aurora” also brings a key new functionality of add-ins to drive integration between new and existing on-line services with Aurora. Developers can find the SDK on Connect. We have been working with a lot of partners with SBS Aurora such as Symantec, Level Platforms and Disk Keeper are all making statements this week around plans to integrate products with SBS Aurora. HP is not only showing SBS Aurora in their booth at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, but has a sneak peek at http://www.facebook.com/CoffeeCoaching. And you’re sure to hear more as we get closer to releasing the preview.

You can sign-up to be notified when the Preview of these servers are available over on the SBS Connect website.

It’s nice to finally be able to talk about the products I’ve been working on for the last number of years!

[Official Blog Post on the Official SBS Blog]

[First discovered review of SBS7 and Aurora, by Paul Thurrott]

Read More