Lots of news on Essential Business Server today!
After months of development, the release candidate (a very near feature complete version of the EBS software) is now available for download for anyone who would like to try it out (we call this a Public Preview). For those chomping at the bit, I'll put the link at the top of this post :-) Get EBS
There is a whole site dedicated to the Essential Business Server Solutions public preview as well: multiplyyourpower.com
Up until now, only a few thousand select people have been able to see Essential Business Server up close and personal running at their home or business test environment. If you are wondering if EBS could be right for you, or one of your clients (if you are a partner), give it a spin. It's a very stable product with customers already testing it, and a set of TAP (Technology Adoption Program) customers running this build in production across the US and Europe.
Essential Business Server is also unveiling pricing. It will be the best way to buy the software (Windows Server, Exchange, System Center Essentials, Forefront for Exchange, Threat Management Gateway (the new ISA)) you need for mid sized businesses. Buying EBS is a notable discount over buying the products individually - and you get all the EBS software (single setup, unified administration console, remote access software, license management) included as well.
Here's some of the details from the press release:
Windows Essential Server Solutions pricing* is as follows:
· Windows Essential Business Server 2008 Standard Edition software, including five CALs, $5,472 (U.S.); additional CALs $81 each (U.S.)
· Windows Essential Business Server 2008 Premium Edition software, including five CALs, $7,163 (U.S.); additional CALs $195 each (U.S.)
If you want to read the full article, you can find it up on Microsoft presspass.
- Eric
Eric Watson, EBS Group Program Manager
Hi all, Joel Sider here, PR manager for Home Server, SBS and EBS. I saw this today in SMB Nation and thought I'd share: The world's first EBS-branded car, courtesy of Trinity Computer in Germany.
![clip_image002[9]](http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/essentialbusinessserver/WindowsLiveWriter/EBS...asmoothride_D2EA/clip_image002%5B9%5D_thumb.gif)
[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Björn Levidow]
SMB Summit 2008 is the first time EBS has been part of SMB Summit and my first time attending. The first thing that impressed me was the technical depth of our partners here. They had great questions about EBS, many of them about how to migrate from an existing SBS 2003/2003R2 environment into a new EBS installation. The second thing that impressed me was how excited they were about creating an EBS offering into their practices. A couple of partners came up to me and pressed me for release date details so that they could sell it to customers next week!
By far, the part of EBS that generated the most excitement was the EBS Planning Wizard. Mark Stanfill and I described the types of pre-existing issues we saw in our TAP customer environments before doing the EBS Beta 2 install that would prevent a successful EBS install (e.g. broken AD replications, bad DNS entries, etc.). We got head nods of agreement from the audience. We then said we were taking all of that knowledge and making it an integral part of the setup process as the EBS Planning Wizard (A.K.A. Mark Stanfill 2.0) to insure a successful EBS deployment and many smiles broke out across the room. When we said that the EBS Planning Wizard would be available as a separate download so that partners could evaluate a customer’s environment to gather more information on how much to charge for their engagement, the room erupted into applause. As the guy who helped create and drive the EBS Planning Wizard, there are few better feelings in the world. J
-- Björn Levidow
Hello from SMB Summit, Day 2 in Dallas, TX! If you couldn't make it to this event, here's a few highlights from this yesterday:
Again, another packed room all day! Mark Stanfill, from our support escalation team, polled the audience "How many of you have an SBS customer today that would be a good fit for EBS?" Guess what, approx. 80% of the hands in the room went up! overall everyone enjoyed the 2 days, with the highlight for the EBS day being the really COOL setup, and some of the health and environment check wizards that will be included! this is inspite of us even forgetting to tell partners that if an IT Pro were to run these wizards & is stumped by the steps provided, there will be a message in the product, on that wizard screen, for him to find a local Microsoft Certified Partner or Small Business Specialist!
The removal of next-gen ISA, now called Forefront Threat Management Gateway, from SBS 2008 and inclusion in EBS 2008, certainly was a topic of lots of lively discussion.
The best part of Day 2 for me personally, was the Practice-building session towards the end of the day - Arlin Sorenson and his team did a skit that was both really funny and educational...it got a lot of cheers and laughs from the partners...well, you'll just have to wait to see the video once we post the sessions of the first 2 days on Partner Portal (if you missed the event and are chomping at the bits to see this, it'll take us a few weeks to get this done - we'll post on this blog and the SBS blog once they're available so you can check them out)
We hosted a party in the evening to thank everyone for their loyalty to SBS and for the early investment in 2 days of readiness...here are some top quotes from partners:
"Very Informative", "You have hit a home run with SBS 2008", "Though SBS 2008 is a great product, SBS 2008 is really heads and shoulders above it", "I finally have something to sell to my midsize customers with EBS", "The 2 days have been phenomenal", "Its amazing to have so much direct access to the Microsoft folks, given we're really small partners", "Awesome to be able to interact with the Dev team directly"...and so on & so forth...
Meanwhile, Wayne & Dean are just unstoppable: http://blog.sbsfacom/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=161 What's up with that? ;) well, we decided to have some fun with the attendees today & showed some of the videos...
Things continue to ramp up as the team is getting the product ready for launch:
- More people testing the product in production (Technical Adoption Program (TAP))
- More people testing the product in their labs/non production (Techbeta - see my other blog on how to get on that)
- More conferences and event the product team is speaking at
- and more blogs popping up on the web!
Here are two blogs I've been reading
Oliver's has a number of other EBS blogs listed as well - if you're collecting ;-)
- Eric Watson
Ever wanted to work for one of Microsoft’s premium partners? Last week IBM announced the Essential Business Server 2008 residency. This IBM residency would be an intensive, multi-week work effort where you would explore and document product implementation, integration and operations, often in the context of marketplace solutions.
This residency is all about pairing the IBM BladeCenter S and Windows Essential Business Server 2008 into solutions for SMB. Taking a snip from the IBM website here
<snip>
Windows Essential Business Server (previously known as "Centro") is a new integrated solution designed for midsize businesses. It combines software for management, messaging and security features into one integrated server solution that reduces IT complexity and improves efficiency across the business.
IBM BladeCenter S is the latest in the family of BladeCenter chassis and is designed specifically for small and midsized businesses. With space for up to six blade servers and up to 12 high capacity disk drives, the chassis is designed to provide significant server resources without the need for an expensive server room. The BladeCenter S with the Office Enablement Kit is small enough and quiet enough to fit under your desk and plugs into an average wall socket.
This project will evaluate these two new products from Microsoft and IBM and will describe how to best integrate them to make the most out of your investment.
</snip>
Nicholas King – Technical Product Manager – Windows Server Solutions Group
Yesterday Windows Essential Business Server was included in the Intel Keynote at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Tom Kilroy the Vice President, General Manager for Digital Enterprise Group presented on solutions that enable Intel channel partners to better support SMB. Windows Essential Business Server and the Intel Modular Server were showcased as the ideal 'business in a box' solution for SMB.
This is yet another exciting endorsement by our partners!
So why is this so exciting?
Well first up, Intel has a fantastic product in the Intel Modular Server. Specifically designed for SMB, it boasts scalability, virtual environmental presence (great for remote administration), and a pooled storage model. You can check more out on the Intel Modular Server here. For our channel partners this solution enables them a flexible platform to deliver to the broad range of customer needs today. Pairing the Intel Modular Server with EBS creates a cost-effective, easily managed core infrastructure environment. EBS taking only 3 blade spaces (or 4 if you buy Premium) out of the possible 6, means the IMS gives you the headroom to consolidate existing servers or grow your environment.
During the keynote we demonstrated several of the core features of EBS, from the unique System Health page to the context-sensitive console. All of this allowing the administrator the flexibility to connect to the right full featured admin console at the right time should an alert require solution.
Also announced yesterday, an extensible plug-in designed by Intel that reports on the health IMS hardware, ensuring that admins have complete control and visibility.
Watch this space!
Nicholas King - Technical Product Manager - Windows Server Solutions Group
EBS is a great product for IT admins in mid sized companies, but it also will have a huge impact on the way partners help mid sized companies. Both infrastructure partners and Line of Business partners (who need to get the right infrastructure underneath their apps) will want to think about their business and opportunities different with EBS.
SMB Summit is a great opportunity to find out more about this and meet the team. We will have program managers from my team there that have designed the setup/migration/configuration experience and the masterminds behind the unified administration console. There will also be developers there that actually wrote parts of the product and our CSS people who have been helping our TAP (Technology Adoption Program - customers who run early bits in production and give feedback) customers. We'll also have members of our marketing and partner team as well as VAPs already working with the product (our TAP customers) to talk about how to optimize your business around EBS.
The event is April 18-20 at the 4th Annual SMB Summit in Dallas.
Topics will include:
- Skill set needed for success
- What’s in and not in the box (products, technologies, license rights)
- Hardware requirements
- Client and Server technology compatibility
- Migration support
- Training and certification plans
For more information, visit http://www.smbsummit.com/.
We'd love to see you there.
- Eric Watson, EBS Group Program Manager
Essential Business Server will change the way people think about and manage technology at mid size companies. So it's not suprising that we've grown to several thousand readers over the last few weeks.
I'd like to give you a quick view of what I'll be blogging about coming up and give you a chance to hear on your favorite topics. In coming posts, I'll talk more about common topics people ask me about when I'm out at events (which is not that often, because we're hard at work here getting this product to you as quickly as possible :-)). I'll discuss: How to choose between EBS and the next version of Small Business Server, some interesting technology design points of EBS like how AD is leveraged in a lot of what we do, and what we've learned about mid sized companies from having customers install and run EBS in production for the last four months.
But I'm also interested in what you'd like to hear about. If you've got a question about EBS - technology implementation, migration, selling and supporting it as part of a VAP/consulting business, or any other topics - I'm happy to discuss them as well. You can email myself and the team at ebsb@microsoft.com. And you can always post comments here, of course.
- Eric Watson
Group Program Manager, EBS
The short answer is - both! But if you’ve bought software suites at a discount before, you may be skeptical. Often suites come with lesser products in them and restrictive wizards to accomplish a lower price or ease of use of one task.
The EBS design team knew that midsized businesses and their IT administrators needed both. So in EBS, we took a unique approach to provide both ease of use for midsized companies, and to provide full access to the full featured enterprise level products of Windows Server, Exchange and the other EBS components. One of the hardest parts of being an IT admin is making things work together, so we focused the EBS-unique code on making that experience easier – with a unified setup and configuration experience, and a single all up admin console across all the products and servers. Being able to see everything you need in one place is a huge time saver – especially in troubleshooting.
We chose not to pull features out of any of the included products. It’s true we don’t pre-configure all the features (we don’t configure, or “light up”, features most mid size company don’t use: e.g. ISA arrays, …). But the products are there and installed for customers to go configure if they want to. While most of what you need is pre-configured to best practices defaults for you out of the box, we let customers also change many of those settings directly from the admin console or the included product UI as needed.
We call this, contextual fall-through. From the unified EBS admin console, we provide links to common tasks or things people might want to change over time – like tweaking the exchange anti-spam threshold from the defaults. These links launch a Terminal Services session to the application needed and launch that Admin console taking you right to the place you need to configure that task (the “contextual” part). When done, you can just close that admin console and return to the EBS unified admin experience.
With all up information included in that EBS admin experience, and an easy way to “fall-through” to the included products directly, EBS aims to provide easier and full featured.
- Eric Watson
Windows Essential Business Server is a new product and information is just becoming available. Many people have heard about it from a friend, a recent conference, or an article in the press, and ask me where to go to read up more about it. Over the last couple months as we have gone public with the product, a lot of Microsoft ‘official’ sources have popped onto the web, as well as a number of press, blogs and other discussions from other sources.
Over time, this blog will be one of the great sources, but as we’re just getting started, I thought I’d take a minute to list out some of your other options to learn more today.
Official Microsoft sites
· There is of course an official EBS site on Microsoft.com that has a great, but brief overview of the product, it’s versions.
· For press, there is also official press overviews of EBS and a “virtual press room” for the Windows Essential Server Solutions family of products (including EBS and Small Business Server)
· For Partners who plan to sell and install EBS, there is an EBS section on the MS partner site (note: you need to be a MS partner to get into this page/site)
What’s missing is a Microsoft Technnet techcenter site. That will come as the product approaches release and availability. For now, there are lots of pages popping up there talking about EBS across various blogs and articles.
Press Articles
There are many, many articles out there, but I’ll list a few that provide a good information or an interesting perspective on the product.
· Articles about Essential Business Server
o CRN, eWeek and TechTarget
· Articles about the Windows Essential Server Solutions product family
o InfoWorld, Echannel Line, Tech Republic
Blogs
For people who prefer to find information in the more casual, and personal form of Blogs, there are many to choose from other than this blog from the team designing the product.
· Microsoft Employees and official blogs
o Microsoft Windows Server Solutions community blog – Kevin Beares
o The Small Business Server blog
o Kent Compton’s blog (an EBS marketing & customer insider)
· VAPs & MVPs blogging their experience running the product
o Robert Adie (Digitial IP)
o Olliver Sommer (Trinity computing) (several of our other people running the beta bits live right now also write in here)
· Other Press and industry bloggers
o ZDNET- Mary Jo Foley
o Microsoft Watch – Joe Wilcox
o Bmighty – Benjamin Tonkins
Live and in person
In addition to the growing information available on the web, the Essential Business Server team will be at a number of conferences and industry events doing live talks and demoing the bits running live
· Microsoft Events
o We have recently been at IT Forum Spain (Nov 07) and Windows Server Launch (Feb 08) and there is good content on the web if you missed those events
§ IT Forum Essential Business Server video interview of Eric Watson
§ IT Forum Essential Buiness Server video interview of Steven VanRokel
o Upcoming events include: Convergence (March 13-17), Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (July)
§ Convergence 2008 – Orlando (multiple WEBS sessions & live demos)
§ Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2008 - Houston
Come to one of these events and talk to myself or one of our team members in person.
Well, that’s a pretty good list – and I tried to keep is short J There is starting to be a lot of people excited about the product and its upcoming availability. And if that doesn’t satisfy your curiosity about the inner workings of the product, stay tuned and we’ll discuss it here!
- Eric Watson
EBS Group Program Manager
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Essential Business Server will enhance the running and management of your line of business applications. We designed it that way. Sounds good, but how can that be true of a suite of infrastructure products? Let’s dive in and I’ll explain.
A significant part of the purchase of a significant line of business (LOB) application (e.g. CRM, ERP, financial apps, …) for your company is preparing the environment. Most LOBs require certain things of the IT environment (pre-requisites) – such as Active Directory, a current copy of SQL, the ability to open a certain type of access through the edge of the network, etc. I was talking recently to some Microsoft Dynamics people who said this can be months of work as part of the purchase & install process. Essential Business Server solves most of this for most applications – all current core IT infrastructure, configured to best practices. With the uniformity to best practices, we’re even seeing other Microsoft products and 3rd parties provide a much reduced set of instructions of how to install on top of Essential Business Server. Add to that EBS’s price advantages and faster install, and it’s the easiest way for a midsized company to get a LOB into its network.
This week the Microsoft Dynamics line of products will show off their new products and updates at the Convergence event in Orlando. Essential Business Server, as mentioned in Steve Ballmer's keynote, will be there in many sessions, demos, and interactive talks (stop by and say Hi if you’re at the show). Microsoft Dynamics and other software makers (see the logos), as well as hardware makers, have taken the next step to write their software to “add into” the EBS unified admin console so you can see everything in your environment in one place – from management to troubleshooting across workloads.
If you’re in Orlando come see the product running EBS and outside workloads in a single console. If you can’t make it to Orlando, stay tuned and in a future blog we’ll talk more about plugging into the EBS console.
- Eric Watson |
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Welcome to the Windows Essential Business Server Team Blog. That name is a mouthful for being Essential. But maybe that’s fitting. The product actually packs a lot of software and new features for an ‘essential’ product as well.
In this Blog, key people that design and develop the product will discuss all of those features, the software, tips and tricks, and yes, even shortfalls that we hear from customers. As engineers, we love details, and with 5 products and 15 workloads plus all the ‘can’t get it anywhere else’ software we added, there are plenty of details to talk about.
I’d like to introduce the product to anyone for whom Essential Business Server might be new .The product is a suite of software designed for companies between 25 and 250 computers – and there are around 1.2 Million of those businesses sandwiched between the ‘keep it small and simple’ of small businesses and the ‘we’ve got an army of tech people to do whatever we want’ of enterprises.
The product integrates the core IT infrastructure mid size company’s need to build their businesses upon – networking, email, security, management, remote access.
The products included in Essential Business Server (Exchange, Windows Server, System Center Essentials, ISA, Forefront Security for Exchange) are distributed and configured across three servers to meet best practices for security, manageability and performance. For instance, the Exchange Edge role that handles email message cleaning is integrated into the security server and ISA, while the main exchange roles are on their own server that is otherwise lightly loaded for exchange performance into the high end of the 250 user range of the product.
Some people ask, “Why a premium edition, since the main EBS product doesn’t need it to run?” We asked the same question to a lot of customers from different countries early on and about half of them said, “At the same time we make our infrastructure more reliable with EBS, we’d also like to clean up and get our Line of Business (LOB) applications running on a current version of SQL.” So we included it as an option with the premium edition.
In addition to all that software, which will be provided at suite pricing (pricing will be announced later), there is additional software you can only get with Essential Business Server:
1) An integrated setup across all workloads and servers – configured to best practices
2) A unified administration console and experience from your desktop (that covers not only EBS workload but your clients and other servers as well)
3) Integrated license management
4) An integrated security center that provides a single view of security from the edge all the way down to patching status on clients
In subsequent blog postings, we’ll talk more about each of these areas – why we built them, what the key features are, and what people that are running them now in our private production beta program are saying about them.
But I think the number one question I get now is, “Where can I go to find out more about Essential Business Server?” The answer is actually, a lot of places. Content is going up on Microsoft.com as well as a lot of press articles and sites. In my next blog posting I’ll give a quick overview of all the places to get more info today.
- Eric Watson
Group Program Manager
Windows Essential Business Server
I mentioned people running Essential Business Server live in my last post and want to answer a question I get often: How can I get the bits and play around with it?
EBS is in a testing phase of the product right now. Our near feature complete Beta 2 has been available to an invite only Techbeta group since December. While it’s invite only, there are over 1000 people testing out the product and I’ll let you in on how to apply for that beta here – just for being one of our first Blog readers J
If you are interested in joining the Windows®Essential Business Server Beta:
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Click on Invitations and sign in with your Windows Live ID (Passport ID).
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Enter the following invite ID: EBSE-VKDP-276Y.
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You will be asked to take a short survey.
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Once you complete the survey we will evaluate your application for participation in the Techbeta.
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In the next phase of our product development, our RC0 (first Release Candidate build of EBS), we will be opening up a Public Beta. It will be similar to our current Techbeta of Beta 2 bits, but with a fresh build and no nomination application/acceptance required. This will be coming in the next few months.
Considerations on running the bits
Essential Business Server is a 3 server solution of new 64 bit applications, so you’ll need 3 64-bit servers to test it on (most servers you’ve bought in the last year or two will all be 64 bit). Virtualization support for Microsoft’s Windows Server Virtualization is coming, but not available yet. We’ll let you know here when we do.
There are lots of new, never before seen features in EBS to play with, in addition to a great chance to see the new Windows Server 2008 wave of applications (WS08, Exchange, Forefront Server for Exchange, System Center Essentials, ISA) all working together.
Sound like time to take it for a spin?
- Eric Watson
Group Program Manager, Essential Business Server