News

Last week, Microsoft made some announcements about the upcoming Small Business Server 2008 which is due for release in the second half of this year.

Microsoft confirmed that SBS 2008 will ship in two versions, SBS 2008 Standard and SBS 2008 Premium.  We could go on to tell you the technical names of the products in each version, but instead let's look at what each version can do for you.

SBS 2008 Standard includes:

The ability to centrally manage the security of who accesses your network
The ability to store all your company data on the server's hard drives
The ability to share printers amongst your users.

It also gives you an email system with an unlimited number of email addresses existing in your own domain (ie;@yourcompany.com.au).  Within the email system you can also have users with their own tasks list, and calendars. 

You can elect to share calendars with other users, to make it easier to manage appointments with multiple people.  SBS 2008 Standard also has a central Intranet which is a web based system that you can use to more easily communicate loads of different information to your staff all with nothing more than a web browser. 

The ability to keep all your computers up to date with patches thereby removing the risk of having a computer exploited by some malicious website.

The creme dela creme of SBS 2008 would have to be the improvements to the remote access capabilities where user can access their files, the company intranet and their desktop computer from anywhere in the world with nothing more than a web browser.  That is real remote worker power right there!
SBS 2008 Premium includes all of the above features, plus the license to run a 2nd Windows Server 2008 server in the network and a large scale database (SQL 2008) that many accounting and business applications use.

SBS 2008 Premium also allows more flexibility for larger organisations, with the ability to run additional servers without the need for additional client licenses.  The use of the Premium features will require licenses for just those users who need to use the SQL 2008 platform.

Finally - SBS 2008 supports up to 75 users and allows you to add users in single user increments rather than the previous 5 user increments that were standard with SBS 2003.

Pricing has been announced in the US only at this time, with Australian pricing coming soon.

Talk to us about how SBS 2008 may be right for you and we can help plan how to get the best out of it now and into the future.