Presentation on SBS 2011 Essentials and Standard on top of HP hardware, by yours truly!

I’ll be visiting the Vancouver Island Computer Experts(?) User Group at the beginning of February for a presentation on Small Business Server 2011 Essentials and Standard running on HP hardware.

• Date: February 2, 2011
• Time: Welcome at 6:30, kick off at 7pm, runs until approximately 9:30pm
• Location: Camosun College Lansdowne (3100 Foul Bay Road, Victoria, BC)

More Details & Registration can be found here

Learn about:

• Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, formerly known as “Aurora”
• Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard, formerly known as “SBS7”
• HP’s Small Business Server line, such as the ML330

Come to see what’s new in the new versions of Small Business Server, ask some questions, check out two different pieces of Hardware from HP, the Intel based ML 330, or the HP MicroServer hardware so you can make the right choice for your businesses between which version of Small Business Server you should get, and which hardware you should get to match that solution.

Abstract:

Join Sean Daniel, Senior Program Manager from Microsoft Corp. as he talks about small business server solutions coming from Microsoft and HP. See what’s new with Small Business Server 2011 Standard and Essentials and learn about HPs offerings for Small Business server hardware.  As a Small Business program manager for 10+ years, he’ll talk about the new servers as well as be able to answer questions on the old servers from Microsoft.  Come with questions on the new or old products, with his experience in the field, he’s perfect to bounce questions off.

If you are an IT support shop, your companies "go to IT person", an independent IT person, the manager/implementer for your small business, or interested simply interested in small business technology, this evening is for you!!

Register here.

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Feedback Request: Help us improve SBS 2011 and Windows Home Server “Vail” Online Help

The Home and Small Business Server documentation team would like to hear from you!! Please visit Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials Online Help and Windows Server Code Name “Vail” Online Help websites, check out their content, and then click What do you think of this website? Take a quick survey at the top of the page.  The survey is anonymous so you can give it to us straight up!

This information will be used to improve the experience and content on this website, bringing more value to consumers like you!

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Windows Multi Point 2011 and How it Fits into Your Small Business

I’ve talked about Multi-Point before, and I mentioned it in my presentation at SMBNation in Las Vegas at the end of last year, but yet I still get the questions about education only, or can we use it in business? 

Well, it’s true that the current version of Multi-Point, 2010 that’s available today is out in the field for education only (or at least it’s hard to get or manage if you’re not in education).  If you’re in the market for it, because you like the idea of a single computer and multiple users, there were two major problems.  The OEM edition was non-domain joinable, and only supported 10 users.  The Academic version was only via volume licensing to qualified people, and supported 20 users and the beloved domain-join functionality.  So really, if you wanted something useful, really do have to be in the education field to even get your hands on it. 

Also, there are some features that are good for education, but kind of confuse users outside in the working world, like if you put a thumb-drive into one of the USB ports at a workstation, it appears to all the work stations.  Good for education, not so great for business.

Well, if you wrote off Multi-Point 2010 for business, you probably haven’t been paying attention to the new Multi-Point 2011, currently in Beta (obtain it here)

With Windows MultiPoint Server 2011, the licensing and purchase model has been simplified.  There are still two versions as before, with similar restrictions:

• Windows MultiPoint 2011 Standard – still cannot join a domain and still has a max of 10 work stations
• Windows MultiPoint 2011 Premium – CAN join a domain as before and can have up to 20 workstations

The most important piece of information to note in the SMB space, is that BOTH of these MultiPoint editions are offered in multiple Microsoft licensing channels.  So now you don’t have to be a large school to actually purchase the more useful edition of MultiPoint.

What’s better, is that USB issue mentioned above is fixed, a USB thumb-drive only appears to the session its plugged into, and not all the users on the server. 

Additionally, the 2011 version of WMS has support for thin clients.  Here is where I think the big win for Small Business lives.  If you have 12 XP workstations, you can simply obtain 1 copy of MultiPoint Premium and now each of those XP workstations have another 5 years of life but yet, they get a full Windows 7 experience when used as a WMS workstation over the network. 

What??

Yeah, that’s what.  WMS is essentially a turnkey TS server on steroids.  You can TS to it, or you can plug in USB based workstations, or use OS down-level desktops.  I’ve even seen old useless Linux based laptops, that have support for RDP be instantly turned into a powerful Windows 7 workstation.

If you’re a VAP, selling it should be a breeze.  Just show the business owner the console where you can get a thumbnail of each individual workstation.  Business owners will love that they can snoop on their employees desktops for when they are using Facebook, or other non-productive functionality, or even to just confirm employee behavior.

You can really tell that the Windows MultiPoint Server, and the Windows Small Business Server teams share the same floor in Building 43 at Microsoft, our consoles look similar.  Sadly, they do not completely integrate for this release.

I’ve installed WMS into my SBS 2011 Essentials (Aurora) network and it works great.  I haven’t tried on an SBS 2011 Standard network, but there is nothing to prevent it from not working.  I’m seriously considering having the standard version run at my house for when guests arrive and want to use a computer.  Even John Zajdler has tried it in his Aurora Network…

If you haven’t tried it yet, and it’s interesting to you get on it because the release candidate is already out.. which has gotta mean it’s close, right?

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Happy New Year, what’s in store for you in 2011

First off, I wanted to wish all my followers a very happy new year.  2011 is shaping up to be a killer year for small businesses.  There is so much new Microsoft technology coming out to make business more efficient, it’s hard to keep tabs on it all.  I also wanted to apologize to my followers about my lack of posts.  I’ve just returned from a 5 week paternity leave and before that, I was getting my stuff in order.

First, Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard edition as Released to Manufacturing (RTM!).  This release is pretty exciting and signifies a number of different milestones both internal to our team, and external to the public.  Let’s focus on the external. 

SBS 2011 Standard offers small businesses a completely on premise solution to run their business, including the new Exchange Server 2010 with SP1, SharePoint Foundation Services 2010, and the coveted Server 2008 R2 base operating system, bringing security to a new level.  If you’re familiar with SBS 2008, then you’re in luck, because this product brings a bunch of new functionality, but the learning curve will be super short for you, but it still has enough meat in the product to keep it interesting.

For example, the New and Enhanced features of SBS 2011 Standard are:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard as the base OS, with it’s added security and speed over the 2008 base platform
• Exchange Server 2010, with SP1 brings greater reliability and performance to your small business.  In addition to many additional features like resource sharing (my personal favorite)
• SharePoint Foundation 2010 makes using SharePoint even easier!
• WSUS 3.0 with SP2 to help you manage patches with ease
• The new version of Remote Web Access (formerly Remote Web Workplace), with movable widgets.
• A redesigned http://companyweb
• Improvements into automated domain management
• An updated Best Practice Analyzer (BPA)

So it’ll be a few short weeks more before you can get your hands on this baby, just keep in mind the system requirements if you’re already procuring a machine for it.  Exchange needs more RAM than you’d probably think about it.

And coming the first half of this year, is the highly anticipated Windows Small Business Server 2011, which ties to Office 365, a true hybrid in the server market.  You can obtain the public beta for SBS 2011 Essentials here (with a new public preview coming soon!).

Also coming this year is Windows Storage server codename “Breckenridge”, which provides a client backup engine for your SBS 2011 Standard or SBS 2008 installs.  It’s like a win-win situation in 2011.

Finally, for media hounds, Windows Home Server “Vail” is coming as well, which uses Silverlight to stream videos and pictures out to the web, or DLNA 2.0 to stream it inside your home, backup your home PCs, your server.

All three of the above will also leverage an ecosystem of add-ins to extend the functionality of the server of your choice.  As I said, an exciting 2011.

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Presentation Material from SMBNation

Did you manage to make it to SMBNation 2010?  Were you in the jammed packed rooms for “Aurora” or “SBS7”.  Now that we have full product names, pricing and estimated release dates, it’s time to start talking about these great products.

While the names in the decks are unchanged, I am now making the SMBNation decks available to you for both sessions:

Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials (known at SMBNation as “Aurora”), and

Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard (known at SMBNation as “SBS7”).

Click on the above links to download the decks presented.

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Announcing Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials

Now that Kinect has stopped stealing all of our thunder around announcements (although I have to admit I can’t wait for mine, it looks awesome!), we can continue rolling out announcements in the Small Business space. This morning, building on the Windows Small Business Server 2011 Announcement, we are announcing a new edition targeted at Small Business called Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials.

What is this Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials? It’s an answer to what the community have been begging for. Today we see a lot of partners put WHS v1 into small business for the PC Backup integration. WHS v1 only backs up 10 of those computers, and is a stand-alone machine you have to manage on it’s own. Breckenridge fills this gap for businesses allowing you to Domain Join Breckenridge to your SBS 2008/SBS 2011 Standard domains to allow backup for up to 25 computers, and additional storage for up to 25 users.

As you can see, it looks a lot like the Windows Home Server Codename “Vail” Edition and the Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials Edition. That’s because it is! It shares the same underlying architecture, which means all the same add-ins work on WSS 2008 R2 Essentials, as they do on the other products.

So what is the differences?

Home Server “Vail”	WSS 2008 R2 Essentials	SBS 2011 Essentials
10 user limit	25 users limit	25 users limit
10 computer limit	25 computer limit	25 computer limit
1 CPU Socket	1 CPU socket	2 CPU sockets
8GB RAM Maximum	8GB RAM Maximum	32GB RAM Maximum
No Domain Join	Domain Join	Domain Controller

Aside from the ability to Domain Join, and the user limit increase, there are some subtle differences you’ll notice throughout the product that have more of a business “tint”, like if you choose to use WSS 2008 R2 Essentials for Remote Web Access, you’ll notice the same defaults you see in SBS 2011 Essentials, instead of what you see in Home Server. There are also some changes to HomeGroup defaults as well. The last thing to note is while you can install WSS 2008 R2 into an SBS 2011 Essentials, or WHS Vail environment, the client connector from each of these products cannot be installed on the same PC.

So why should you consider WSS 2008 R2 Essentials for your small business or customer?

• PC Backup for up to 25 PCs in your SBS 2008, 2011 Standard network. And yes, you can run multiple devices in the same network, and choose who has access via a domain group
• Server backup – backup those PC Backups and other critical data on the WSS 2008 R2 Essentials server. (no, you can’t include the backup of this into your SBS backup)
• Similar console management as our other products. But if you domain join, you don’t manage users from this console, and the password policy is inherited from the domain (even for local users left on the WSS 2008 R2 Essentials box)
• If you are installing it into a standard server environment, enjoy the Remote Web Access functionality
• Additionally, monitor the health of computers in your network
• Media streaming in the business (training videos, etc)

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 essentials should be released in the first half (H1) of next year (2011). While it can work as a stand alone NAS device, it’s primarily targeted at Small Businesses with an Active Directory in place and the need for PC Backup and media streaming functionality. When it’s released, it will be available through multiple OEM channels with multiple form factors.

To see the official announcement on the SBS Blog, navigate here.

To learn more about Windows Storage Server, and the new addition, navigate to their blog.

Specifically if you want to read more from the Storage Server Family on WSS 2008 R2 Essentials, they have published a post here.

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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.

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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:

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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!

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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