The Sikh Geek

I’ve been running SBS 2008 for many months now from the Beta programme and over the weekend I installed the RTM version of SBS 2008. There is no in place upgrade from Beta versions to the RTM version, so it meant a reinstall. The first thing to say about the installation is how easy it is and how much quicker it is compared to SBS 2003. I am a big fan of the easiness of SBS 2008 and I know that might make me a bad consultant to some who think it’s been made too easy. I like the wizard driven approach and that’s been refined in SBS 2008 from 2003 just enough to make things easier to access, such as surfacing the Smarthost option (for sending outbound emails) rather than having to dig into the depths of the SMTP Virtual Server to do it.  The SBS Self-signed Certificate is conveniently placed on the Sharepoint Company Web and I was able to download it and install it on my Windows Smartphone (I have previously done this with the Orange E650 and HP iPaq Voice Messenger with a problem). The only slight problem I had was setting up the Internet Connection which failed and was told to go to Fix Network, which I did and it did fix it by installing IPv6. I could then rerun the Internet wizard and Exchange was configured and ready to go. I let SBS 2008 install Forefront and Live One Care for Server which came on a limited time trial basis and they’ve obviously tuned Forefront to be slightly less aggressive on the filtering as in the Beta it was rejecting left, right and centre. I really like the "Network Essentials Summary" on the SBS Console Homepage which gives a quick overview of the state of the server and in Network -> Computers you see the state of the client computers as well.

In terms of resource usage the early indications are that memory usage is up from SBS 2003 and with 4 GB on my machine, it is using 97% of that. Therefore, the 4 GB recommendation is only really a minimum you should have and more likely 8 GB would be a working average in my opinion.

Whilst the installation is a breeze, there’s lots to learn such as Exchange Server 2007, Server 2008, WSS 3.0, Forefront (if you decide to use it although I’m not sure what other options are available for SBS 2008?).

The SBS Team have done a great job on this and I don’t think they are given enough credit. Remember that is one of the products from Microsoft that is completely 64 bit! Anyone who writes software knows that integrating various different products from different product teams is not an easy task.

I’m still learning but I’m enjoying learning about SBS 2008! Next step is Virtualisation …

I forgot to add that I’ve had 2 BSODs (Blue Screen of Death) related to nvstor which is the driver Microsoft uses to manage storage for the NVidia nForce SATA Controller. From my searching around some other people have reported this but with Vista. I am currently running SBS 2008 on a Dell Dimension C521 which is actually a desktop machine until I virtualise SBS 2008 and put onto proper server hardware (once I’ve worked out how to do a Physical to Virtual Conversion of SBS 2008?). However, I have noticed my test server which is a HP ML115 uses the NVidia chipset as well! The Beta2 version of SBS 2008 was rock solid, it never crashed once in the 6 months I was running it.

I’ve been seeing "reset to /device/raid0" in the event log but there is no Raid on the machine??

I had to read Emily’s post twice! An article about SBS 2008 in The Guardian?? Really??

Interesting article by Kate Bevan who is a technology journalist and was writing about setting up SBS 2008.

She writes a blog at http://stuffandthoughts.wordpress.com which has some posts on SBS 2008. She’s also on Twitter so I’ll see if I can connect with her on there!

Nice highlight by Emily

P.S. Why not consider Digging the article at http://digg.com/software/Servers_with_a_smile

I’m just watching the second PDC 2008 keynote and Steven Sinofsky is talking about and demoing Windows 7. He’s highlighted the E7 Blog which is the engineering blog giving a behind the scenes look at Windows 7. It’s developer focused and very geeky!

You’re invited to attend the worldwide launch event for Windows Essential Server Solutions, which includes Windows Essential Business Server (EBS) 2008.

Please join us for the Windows Essential Server Solutions Virtual Launch Event, held November 12^th, 2008, at 8-9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time at http://www.thedreamserver.com.

Microsoft and its partners are launching Windows Essential Server Solutions, a new family of integrated server solutions that address the unique needs of small and midsize businesses (SMBs). During times of stationary or shrinking budgets and economic uncertainty, minimizing the redundancies and optimizing parts in your IT infrastructure can help control costs and raise productivity. With the unique challenges firms face upgrading and maintaining their IT infrastructure, smart organizations are re-evaluating their plans and expenditures and investing wisely.

This live, one-day, virtual tradeshow is to launch Windows Essential Server Solutions, which includes Windows Small Business Server 2008 and Windows Essential Business Server 2008. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and other Microsoft executives will introduce these new products and will be joined by Mark Minasi, an independent expert and best-selling author.

Webcasts:

In addition to the main launch keynote, there will be both business and technical sessions that will address concerns and questions that decision makers have in today’s tough economy.

1. Opening Keynote / Launch Webcast – Presenters: Steve Ballmer, Steve Guggenheimer, Michael Risse, Steven VanRoekel

2. Mark Minasi Session: 7 Tips that IT can use During the Economic Downturn, Includes interview with Chris Phillips

3. Turn Your IT Infrastructure into a Strategic Business Asset – Customer and Partner Perspective, Presenters: Michael Cocanower, CEO of itSynergy, and Steve Porter, CIO of Touchstone Behavioral Health

4. Windows Essential Business Server - A Real-World Customer Perspective, Featuring Sumeeth Evans, IT Director of Collegiate Housing Services

Channel Partners are invited to take part in a special session to find out what opportunities Windows Essential Server Solutions provides for their practice

5. Windows Essential Server Solutions for Channel Partners - Hear directly from  two Microsoft partners, Richard Opal, and Lyf Wildenberg, who are making deep investments in Windows Essential Server Solutions,

Exhibit Hall

Visit the exhibit hall and discover how integrated hardware and software solutions provide enterprise-class infrastructure without the complexity or cost. Learn how affordable blade servers can help make the goal of an infrastructure- in-a-box a reality. And find out how software for backup, security, line-of-business (LOB), and management work together seamlessly to help ensure SMBs are more secure and productive.

14 Booths:  You will be able to get information and interact with representatives from:

• AMD
• CA
• Citrix Systems
• Dell
• HP
• IBM
• Intel
• Lenovo
• SUN Microsystems, Inc.
• Symantec
• Trend Micro
• Microsoft Windows Mobile
• Microsoft Windows Essential Server Solutions
• Microsoft Dynamics

So what I started to hear at Remix UK and at the recent Steve Ballmer S+S London event was officially announced by Ray Ozzie at PDC 2008 in LA, Microsoft’s new Cloud OS called ‘Azure’.

You can checkout the keynotes here.

Tim Long has a good post on this and also Steve Clayton.

The Azure Site and the PDC Site.

Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC News Technology Correspondent reports from PDC.

So, if you thought things weren’t changing here is the proof of Microsoft’s new strategy.

Look out for more new announcements at PDC!

Microsoft has just released its First Quarter Results and it’s been a record quarter. The thing that strikes me is that Microsoft has strong cashflows and is a cash rich business. I bet they are now breathing a sigh of relief that the $40 billion takeover of Yahoo didn’t happen! So, all the talk of Microsoft losing big time on Vista and customers increasingly looking for alternative solutions doesn’t seem to be borne out by the figures!

So, in the present economic climate who would you want to be a partner of? Hmm, let me think about that one for about a microsecond!

Microsoft Expected Revenue for Year End 2009 is approx $65 billion.

How many businesses including the banks would love figures like this at the moment. No one can be certain of future revenue and profit figures but Microsoft is one of those companies strong enough to withstand the economic uncertainty in the coming years.

Yesterday evening was the first in a series of SBS/EBS launch events by Microsoft. It was run through the London SBS Group which is run by Ian Watkins of Oxbridge Technology. I made my way down to London as I’m going to miss our own Midlands SBS Launch Event on 12th November as I’ll be off to India on that day. It was a good event and very well attended and great to catch up with some familiar faces as well as some new ones as well.

James Senior and James Burgess presented an overview of SBS/EBS and highlighted some of the Partner opportunities and did some demo as well. There were some questions asked by the attendees which were (the blue bits are my own thoughts):-

Can you have the same server name after a migration?

The migration process is a domain join method where you have the servers on the same domain at the same time, so you cannot have the same name. Although Ian Watkins did say something about DNS aliases, whether the migration adds something to DNS to resolve the new server name to the old server name?

What’s the value/difference to an end user for WSS 3.0?

Microsoft made some great changes from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 around the architecture of Sharepoint. It is now built on ASP.NET 2.0 and .NET 3.0 framework, which from a customisation and application development viewpoint is hugely significant. Whilst this is not all directly apparent to an end user (depending on how they are using Sharepoint) the overall experience is much better and easier to manage.

What’s the price of SBS 2008?

Unfortunately, I’ve still not seen any UK Pricing!!

Within the attendees only a few had actually played with SBS 2008 in anger and the impression I got was that people were waiting to get their hands on the RTM version through MAPS (which is due out in the next month). The RTM version is available on MSDN and Technet if you have access to that.

Emily did a great overview of Community stuff and what she had put in place and was intending to do and also setting the expectations of what Partners could reasonably expect. Check out her blog if you haven’t already which is being updated on a regular basis!

There was a presentation by Julie Simpson of ResourceIT which was an interesting discussion on Marketing/Sales for SBSC Partners. She has put together some special packages for SBSC Partners for business development which looked very interesting to me. Also her business works solely with Microsoft Partners of all types.

If you haven’t yet registered for an SBS Launch Event then check out Emily’s post on this.

The sessions for the Microsoft Remix UK conference are now online and I would highly recommend watching Bill Buxton’s keynote. The online content is great because I’ll be able to catch up on the sessions which I wasn’t able to attend and download the presentations.

Rory Cellan-Jones interviewed Steve Ballmer yesterday.

I think Google is an online business who seems to be making noises in business services. Microsoft provides business software who is going online. Which one are businesses going to trust? I don’t know the answer to that but it’s certainly going to be interesting. The things I know are that Google doesn’t have a visible business roadmap nor does it have a partner model. Google makes its money from search and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Thanks to Emily Lambert I was at the Microsoft Event entitled Software + Services: Are you ready to evolve? Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, was in town so it promised to be an important chance to hear Microsoft’s vision around S+S straight from the top.

Steve Clayton, who now heads up Microsoft’s S+S Strategy at Microsoft International, gave a clear and concise overview of S+S. Steve described the huge investment that Microsoft is making in its new Datacentres around the world and that 10,000 servers per month were being acquired and contrasted this with Facebook’s infrastructure which ran on a total 10,000 servers serving 25 million users. Steve highlighted that Microsoft had been in the Services business for a long time with things like Hotmail, Messenger and XBox Live.

For me the most valuable contribution was by David Mitchell (funnily, we follow each other on twitter!) Senior VP of IT Research at Ovum. David gave a great perspective as to how to position yourself in the emerging S+S era. It was perhaps not a surprise he said that the keys to growth and success were :

• Industry Specialisation (an area he said Microsoft needed to help Partners more on)
• Using finance to increase the average deal size and get paid quicker
• Having a mix of services in your business i.e. not putting all your eggs in one basket
• Making the investment now into Online services to be ready for the future (otherwise it will be too late)
• Having a repeatable solution which could be delivered with scale and low cost
• Outsourcing those parts of your business to those who could deliver it more cheaply
• Building Intellectual Property into your business

David said that despite the recent uncertainty in the global financial markets he still expected growth in the market albeit a slowing of growth but this might have to be revised as events unfolded. Even in sectors badly hit by the financial crisis such as the Construction Industry, large scale capital building projects were still going ahead and spending on IT to support this. Basically, he was saying look for the opportunities and the areas to focus on. What you were focusing on before might not be the right thing now.

He was asked if Microsoft had got it right with it’s S+S Strategy and he said that he believed they had the right building blocks but its success could not be measured yet as the services were not fully released and generating revenue, which would be ultimate test. He felt that nobody had got it right yet and couldn’t give more than about 2/3 out of 10 to anyone!

The highlight of the event was Steve Ballmer and boy does he have energy and passion! You couldn’t sleep through one of his presentations, not that you’d want to. Steve Ballmer announced that a new OS would be revealed at PDC and for now he would call it "Windows Cloud" (you can read The Register account of this as the reporter was at the event as well). It’s going to be intriguing what this is and it looks like PDC is going to be where a lot of new announcements are going to be made, so if you’re interested in Microsoft’s S+S Strategy then keep your eye on PDC. Steve Ballmer was keen to say that he understood that some Partners were not happy with Microsoft moving into this area but he said the business had to evolve to survive but that the Partner Ecosystem was still key to this.

I’ve changed my view of Steve Ballmer a lot over the years as I’ve seen him present live to Partners. I thought he provided a vision that I could plausibly buy into today. In a world where businesses are being badly let down by their leaders, then Steve Ballmer is actually a fresh of breath air. He said that he only gets 75 emails a day and if people wanted to email him then they should and he would get back to them, maybe not within 24 hours though!

So, if you’re interested in Microsoft’s Online Services you can sign-up for BPOS (Business Productivity Office Suite) at the Partner Portal but the services won’t come online in the UK until Spring 2009.