It's quite late here in Washington, but as promised, here is some information based on conversations with Michael Leworthy,  at WPC 2010 yesterday, and further discussions with Nick King and Guy Haycock today.

SBS "7" is a natural successor to the SBS products we have grown to know since its release. Aurora differentiates itself while being limited to 25 users, and a move towards cloud provided services, such as BPOS and other offerings from ISVs, and will be the primary focus of this article. This means that customers can have local services being provided as needed, while also looking at cloud offerings for specific features. For those of you looking to test out some new ways of delivering services to your customers, Aurora is definitely worth investigating, but it can work as a pure on premise solution while running line of business applications locally as well, so don't think it's only about the cloud.

Those of you who attended Adrian's sessions on Vail last month in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne will recognise many of the technologies that are included, as Aurora and Vail come from the same team. While he couldn't blatantly say this prior to the announcements, I think more than a couple of you realised the implications of the technologies he focused on. While there are some differences in the target audience and some of the features, which I will drill down on in the future, anyone who has started with Vail has a head start prior to the public beta of Aurora.

During today's SMB Server session, Aurora was demonstrated, with a focus on the client management, backup and remote access capabilities, giving an indication of what the product can do out of the box. There were a few questions on the audience, around further clarification on where you would choose Vail versus Aurora, which will be covered in one of tomorrow's sessions.

There's much more to come, as much is still under NDA, but as I get the thumbs up to release more information i will do so. My previous post on setting up a Hyper-V solution in the home is probably making much more sense now that you know I've now got these three betas to get up and running. The server build will be completed in a few weeks when I get back to Australia, all the pieces are in place, and I will document more of the build process and the decisions that were made.

For those of you attending Australian Partner Conference 2010, Michael Leworthy and I will be delivering a pre-day on SMB Server solutions that will cover all of this and more, and I will work on getting one of our OEM partners to supply some equipment so we can have everything up and running onsite during the event. I know there is still much left unanswered, such as pricing and dates, at least we can now share some information with you, letting you know that we do have some great things planned!