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Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS)

Long Islands most experienced networking firm

 

  Some problems with SBS...

  For most small business SBS is  overly complex with a poor ROI. SBS bundles Exchange Server (an email system) and a Microsoft Active Directory (AD) “control system”; both of these are, for the average small business, hard to maintain, fragile, often very difficult to backup and restore, and provide little if any value that cannot be created in easier and cheaper ways. I constantly must educate my customers that MS often  ships half working, poorly documented, expensive products with little concern for the customer;  SBS is more of a marketing creation than a product in its own right, and suffers accordingly.

  You need to share files among your workers and you don’t need  AD to do it.  All you need is for us to choose one of your XP Professional computers and to make the drive and files on it shareable, and to map other computers to use this drive. You don’t need AD’s central store of network users and complex security controls – do you ? Well, perhaps you’re a bank or a branch of the CIA – then you do.

  MS designed SBS to allow for ONE and ONE ONLY SBS domain controller on the network; this means that if the SBS computer fails your network fails until someone fixes it . SBS computers can’t be clustered (mirrored) so no failover redundancy in this way is possible  For some businesses a day or two of downtime is of no great concern ; for others we can help you create backup systems that are rapidly deployable, but SBS does not make it easy or cheap.

  As for email; you can allow for your employees to have their own email (someone@yourcompany.com)  without  Exchange Server. All you need is to work with your ISP to set up mailboxes on their server, and then to set up local email clients on your computers to use these mailboxes. If you want a central repository for mail that you can manage , consider offsite Exchange hosting.

   If you insist on a MS AD LAN and Exchange, then you are better off buying the products separately. Buy an enterprise version of the server product and plan on having at least two domain controllers. In my experience any company small enough to consider SBS is too small to need any of  the advantages that MS touts,  and too small to deal with the burdens.

 

 
 

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