[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Michael Leworthy from Windows Server Marketing]

Today, the Small Business Server (SBS) engineering team signed off the release version of SBS 2011 Essentials—an exciting milestone for the product, and for the entire SBS family. This now starts a process to make the product available for purchase and evaluation.

Ideal as a first server for small businesses with up to 25 users, Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials provides a cost-effective and easy-to-use solution to help protect data, organize and access business information from virtually anywhere, support the applications needed to run a business, and quickly connect to online services for e-mail, collaboration and line-of-business applications.

To help with questions we hear during this time of the product release cycle, I have provided further guidance below. If you have a specific question, please feel free to post in comments, on our SBS forums, or on our SBS Facebook site.

• When can I purchase SBS 2011 Essentials?
  We expect SBS 2011 Essentials to be made available via all channels including VL starting May 1.
• What languages is SBS 2011 Essentials available in?
  SBS 2011 Essentials will be released in 19 languages including Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan), Chinese (Hong Kong), Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.
• When will OEMs offer SBS 2011 Essentials?
  Many OEMs and System Builders have already started building specific form factors and solutions based on SBS 2011 Essentials. We expect to start seeing them in the market starting May.
• When will the Evaluation for SBS 2011 Essentials be made available?
  The evaluation for SBS 2011 Essentials will be released in early April.
• When will I be able to download SBS 2011 Essentials via my TechNet or MSDN subscription?
  SBS 2011 Essentials will be made available on MSDN and TechNet also in early April.
• When will I be able to download SBS 2011 Essentials via MAPs or MPN?
  Further information about MPN and MAPs availability will be released early April.
• What is the difference between SBS2011 Standard and SBS 2011 Essentials?
  You can learn more about this at the official SBS 2011 website, and on the SBS 2011 TechNet site.

I would also like to thank all our MVPs, partners and customers that have helped us get to this point. I look forward to sharing more information with you in early April.