Windows Essential Business Server Plays Well with Others
One area that I'm especially proud of in Essential Business Server is how the product accommodates and enhances other products from ISVs (independent software vendors) and other Microsoft product groups whose products are not in the box. "Extensibility" was was largely driven by the effort and passion of senior program manager extraordinaire, Israel Hilerio and developers Rafael Dowling (Lead), Ryan Elliot, and Olga Volgin who built it.
Embracing and enabling developers has always been a strength of Microsoft's and I think the extensibility of Essential Business Server is a great example of us helping empower Midsize companies' IT Administrators. Of course, extensibility wouldn't be worth much if there were no one developing add-ins to take advantage of the feature but fortunately, that is definitely not the case. When we announced Essential Business Server at the IT Forum in Barcelona, we listed (and demoed a few of) the ISVs that had built add-ins for the product but that news wasn't widely picked up by the various trade publications. The ISVs that we announced were Citrix, Symantec, McAfee, CA, Trend Micro, Full Armor and Quest. Our own product groups also stepped up. The products for SharePoint, Data Protection Manager and Dynamics also build Essential Business Server Administration Console add-ins. I love the fact that the list of products that can be administrated from within the Administration Console are largely the leading companies that Midsize companies are using. We are fortunate to be in a rare win-win-win (customer/Microsoft/ISV) situation!
One of the key tenants that we decided early on for the Administration Console was that the Administrator's day-to-day tasks would be mostly addressed in "our" console but we'd also intelligently "fall-through" to the native consoles for all of the included products. For example, the Administrator can see if a service in Exchange isn't performing as expected from within the Administration Console but if he/she wants to fix it he/she would click on the Messaging Server link and be taken directly to the Exchange Management Console. The same concept is being followed for extensibility. The extensibility add-ins enable let the Administrator do the day-to-day tasks like checking on whether an overnight backup was successful but if you needed to restore a server you'd be guided to the native console of the backup/restore product you were using.
There are lots of ISVs who are interested in or are already doing add-ins but we're keeping their names close to the vest. At some point, we'll have an SDK on MSDN so stayed tune.
If you'd like to see Israel explain Essential Business Server's extensibility click here. [Fast forward to 24:16]
The following screen shots illustrate the types of administrative tasks are possible. Thee screen captures below are only MOCK-UPs. The add-ins that will eventually ship will not necessarily have any resemblance or functionality that you see in the mock-ups.
[Click on the images below to see a larger version]
