Many of you may be familiar with the concept of a capability and maturity model.  EBS is designed to deliver a platform for Core Infrastructure with a level of capability and maturity that many midsized would need to pay significantly more should they have deployed that in a traditional sense. ...

Tonight Chris Rue will be delivering a webcast to the EBSUserGroup titled “Using System Center Essentials With Windows Essential Business Server.” Chris has made the bold statement that, in his opinion, SCE is THE make-or-break feature of EBS for anyone who wants to use, support, or otherwise make EBS...

This week I’ve been over in the UK, meeting with SMB customers and partners for researching future versions of our products and spending two days with the UK subsidiary. Research You might be wondering what goes on when we research products?  Well, we start by identifying our customers and partners...

Have an Exchange environment that you want to test?  Check out the Remote Connectivity Analyzer.  Checking everything from Exchange ActiveSync, Autodiscovery, Outlook Autodiscovery, Exchange 2003 and 2007 and inbound email.  Sound cool?  In beta and free to use. https://www.testexchangeconnectivity...

Every so often the research teams put together a vision for the future to showcase just where technology could take us in 10 years time.  There are several but this one from the Office team is my favorite.  

Steve Holland from our UA team (User Assistance) pointed me to some information on Windows Server 2008 Foundation on TechNet.  Including info on locks and limits and some additional information about language packs and a licensing manger string that you’ll need to be across.  See below. http...

This one snuck past my radar :)  Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Beta is the downloadable Hypervisor that offers virtualization.  Why this is especially interesting is when you look at the features this supports. Microsoft® Hyper-V™ Server 2008 R2 is a stand-alone product that provides a reliable and...

Today we entered a new product into market for small businesses and those customers that only have a need for a server that supports 15 users with Windows Server 2008 Foundation.  Foundation has some unique benefits to the other members of the Windows Server family. Price – WSF is priced for those...

As you know here at Microsoft we run a lot of Live Meetings.  Now should you also use Live Meeting you might be wondering how to convert your recording into a video.  Typically if you’re saving your recording offline you can only record as an HFP (High fidelity presentation).  Which doesn...

Ever wanted a way to give anonymous access to information using a technology like SharePoint? Earlier today I was discussing how Windows Web Server 2008 enables you to do just that. The scenario is you have a bunch of information that you want to share and you don’t have the requirement to authenticate...

Yesterday we released a report that investigated what are the trends in SMB IT.  The crux of the research pointed out some interesting factors – especially when considered in today’s more complex economy. Spend your IT money wisely <snip> http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/mar09...

You may have noticed I’ve been a little slack blogging lately.  Over the last two weeks I’ve been touring Australia and New Zealand – talking to SBSers and EBSers all over  the countries, listening, answering questions, and taking notes on what we can do to improve things downunder.  Being...

Meet TBOT – a translating robot that is part of Windows Live.  Over the last few weeks I’ve been working with some colleagues in Germany, and found this great set of tools to translate.  Tbot is a robot translator that works on the web by simply translating text from one text box to another...

So Roland’s business is growing and he really needs a way to share documents he’s working on with several consultants.  The consultants are located in a neighboring state, but also in Europe and South Pacific.  How to share content in this scenario you might ask?  Enter SharedView a free...

It’s great to see SBS getting accolade already!!  InfoWorld just named Windows Small Business Server 2008, SMB server of 2009. They’ve accompanied it with a review they did just before launch too. You can check it out here and for just the SBS page go here Go SBS!!!!

Chris posted today about the use of Microsoft finance and some of the great offers they have in the market today.  Finance offers include the ability to finance EBS, Hardware, Services and other Microsoft Software – unfortunately they don’t offer mortgage finance.  Check Chris’ post here

I’ve had this idea for sometime and now that I have a little extra time I thought I’d kick off an experiment I dubbed the HazardWorks Inc experiment.  It started a few months back when I was trying to understand how does a new business grow through all of the different technologies and what other...

You may have noticed we no longer call out port 3389 when we talk about the ports for EBS and SBS.  Why, you might ask?  Well, since both Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008 are based off of Windows Server 2008, we leverage a role known as Terminal Services Gateway...

Being on vacation this week I've had a chance to catch up on some of my home network maintenance I've been putting off for a while.  One of the items on my list was to implement Hyper-V in my lab at home.  Now before I get into some of my practices I thought I would spend a little bit of time...

Since it's inclusion in Windows Server 2008 I've been tinkering a lot with Windows Powershell.  I rapidly growing to be a convert.  Sorry cmd.exe Anyway, one of the features is that you can use PS to call WMI.  Which got me thinking on how to solve a problem I had not so long ago; How...

One of the things I noticed about RSAT was that Hyper-V management was missing.  After a bit of digging I found out the today the Hyper-V team also released their remote management tools. Read the blog post here Vista x64 Edition: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=450931F5...

If you've recently moved to Vista SP1 you may have noticed that some of the management tools were removed.  Specifically the Group Policy management tool. Today the RSAT went RTW (Release to Web) You can download from here; · Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows Vista with...

I'm running a Webcast this week on SBS 2008 as part of the 5w/50 Webcast series in the US.  I've planned it to be a good look at SBS 2008, what's changed, why we changed things, and how SBS 2008 will change the way Small Businesses operate today. Make sure you check out the 5w/50 site here http...

So it seems that every three years or so I go through some form of online identity metamorphosis.  So far I can count my gmail conversion once I joined Microsoft, and more recently the transition to my Small Business Server 2008 identity. This lead me to consider how to merge these identities into...

A good friend of mine NickMac from NZ blogged about this a while a go and I thought I would do my own post talking about some of the applicability to this type of management to the SMB. The slide below comes from Microsoft's own IT team.  Now this is clearly designed for a large org but I think...