It’s been a crazy few weeks but as of yesterday I’ll now be blogging on the official EBS blog for EBS.  This blog will still have my other techie thoughts, and the occasional EBS post that isn't so suitable for the official blog.  :)

Why you might be asking?  Well, I’m now the Product Manager for EBS.   A little different from being the technical product manager and one more step towards working on the crayons full time.

As always email me using the link to the right if you want to share your thoughts on something.  Otherwise, please check us out on

Twitter:  http://twitter.com/windowsebs

Facebook: www.facebook.com/windowsebs

Or the blog http://blogs.technet.com/essentialbusinessserver 

Talk soon.

Recently I received the feedback that we needed a better way of representing all of the tasks during the SBS 2008 migration process.  We spent some time looking at what could be done to support a smoother migration, and came up with this document for partners and IT Pro’s.

Migrating from Windows SBS 2003 to Windows SBS 2008, guidelines and checklist

This guide is designed to be your step by step companion during SBS migrations and includes feedback and insight from our Support teams, MVPs (Susan Brady, Wayne Small and Eriq Neale)

While you’re migrating you should also check out these great resources;

Technet SBS migration docs

Practice you migration with this click through demo

Or check out Jeff Middletons third party swing migration

Own Microsoft CRM and EBS?  Looking for a way to manage multiple CRM orgs, or handle day to day tasks from the EBS administration console?

Last week I came across this EBS addin developed by a local (Seattle) ISV and had a chance to put it’s trial version into our lab.  Very cool stuff, and especially interesting for those IT admins out there that are stretched having to manage their CRM deployment and all of their core infrastructure.

Akvelon are offer a trial for those interested all you have to do is sign up here http://akvelon.com/EBSConsoleAddin.aspx

Here’s some demos on Demo Showcase that you should check out.  There setup, post setup config and configuring management.  Links below.

TechNet Video: Setting Up Windows Essential Business Server

TechNet Video: Setting Up Windows Essential Business Server

In this demonstration, we will start to install and configure Windows Essential Server 2008. We'll begin with the Preparation and Planning Wizards and then walk through the configuration steps in the Management Server Installation Wizard.

TechNet Video: Completing Windows Essential Business Server Co...

TechNet Video: Completing Windows Essential Business Server Configuration

For this demonstration, we've completed the Installation Wizards for the Security and Messaging Servers. We'll continue the configuration process by running the configuration and migration tasks in the Administration Console.

TechNet Video: Enabling Proactive Management

TechNet Video: Enabling Proactive Management

In this demonstration, we'll explore some of the tools provided with Windows Essential Business Server and System Center Essentials 2007 that provide the ability to proactively manage your network and the devices on the network.

Microsoft Learning today announced on their born to learn blog the SBS 2008 and EBS 2008 official courseware.  This is long awaited news with these directly enabling trainees to get certified following these courses!

http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/2009/05/msl-news-sbs-and-ebs-2008-courses-now-available

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This is our first official MSL News post and it’s for those of you seeking training for Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2008 or Essential Business Server 2008. We’re happy to announce the availability of two new courses:

Implementing and Administering Windows® Small Business Server 2008 (course number 6445):
This five-day instructor-led course provides you with the knowledge and skills to plan, implement, and manage Windows Small Business Server 2008. The course helps prepare you for the MCTS: Small Business Server 2008 Configuration (exam 70-653) certification.

Implementing and Administering Windows® Essential Business Server 2008 (course number 6446):
This five-day instructor-led course provides you with the knowledge and skills to implement and administer Windows Essential Business Server 2008. The course helps prepare you for the MCTS: Essential Business Server 2008 Configuration (exam 70-654) certification.

If you’re an MCT or CPLS and interested in giving these courses, you can find them for now on Microsoft Learning’s Courseware Library. If you’re not currently registered to access Courseware Library, the User’s Guide is a great place to start.

</snip>

You might recall a few weeks ago I talked about how EBS leverages the Core Infrastructure Optimization model.  This week I want to highlight where you can go to get all of the details and training and meet Core IO University, your one stop shop for learning how to use Core Infrastructure Optimization and getting familiar with how Core IO can drive your platform capability and allow you to benchmark and show results.

This week you’ll also see that EBS is the featured video you’ll be able to hear one take on how EBS can support partners and customers using Core IO.   It’s definitely something to check out, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you think Core IO can make sense in a midsized business.

Click here to view it. You will need to sign in with you partner ID to view it. 

BTW you’ll also find a whole lot of other readiness training for SBS and EBS on this site.  Titles include;

• How to sell Windows EBS
• Classroom based training for EBS
• Windows EBS Academy Live Sessions
• EBS on boarding sessions
• Which to choose?  SBS, EBS, Windows Server

As you’ve probably guessed I spend a lot of time traveling meeting partners, customers, and potential future customers (more on that in a later post).  One of the tricks that I’ve used for some time (Windows 5.0 had this feature first I believe?) is to use a feature called internet sharing, which is just as it sounds;

Internet Sharing allows you to setup a connection from your laptop to your  mobile phones data connection.  I think the term we use in the US is ‘tethering’.  Anyhow, one of the tricks I use is setting up what’s known as a Bluetooth PAN, or Personal Area Network.

To set this up you need to go to your mobile phone and find the application Internet Sharing (some phones don’t have this on their main menus, but you can usually find it using explorer.  From here the instructions are simple;

1. Start the application on you mobile phone.  It will probably remind you that you’re starting the bluetooth radio and ask you to confirm
2. Next go to your laptop bluetooth devices and add the mobile device.  In most cases you should create a pin when prompted, I usually use 1234.
3. Once you’ve connected the bluetooth device you need to go to the network and sharing center and click setup a new connection
4. 
5. Select setup a new connection, and all going well you should see ‘Connect to a Bluetooth PAN
6. Hit connect and you should now be connected to the internet via your mobile – nice!

P.S.  Sorry for the lack of screenshots I wrote this while flying back to Seattle.

A few weeks ago we released this whitepaper on how to remove Exchange from SBS and connect up to BPOS.  BPOS or the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (now you know why we use acronyms so often ;)) is an online solution from Microsoft that allows customers to move their email and some collaboration services into the cloud, or in other words hosted in Microsoft’s data centers.  You might be screaming right now - “Why remove Exchange from SBS?  Are you guys crazy?”  Well we actually found we had five distinct requests we were hoping to support here.  Let me take some time to walk you through them.

Branch Office email Cloud Centralization:  This came from a company who has offices in multiple remote locations (think mining/exploration company), they send large files using email between each site and the response time between BPOS and each site optimized the expensive high latency high bandwidth network.  Apart from email each site runs autonomously, with their own local SharePoint, and remote access requirements.  By moving the email from on-premise to BPOS they are able to achieve this.

Auditable Compliance: Originally from a financial services company, we received feedback that customers needed a way of achieving compliance – SOX, HIPPA, both have components required that are part of BPOS’ feature set.  Something that is difficult to replicate on a single box.  Following this feedback, relocating email to the cloud, enabled customers to solve this issues.  Health, and Financial services are both great industries that need to ensure compliance audit-ability.  SBS plus BPOS is an easy way of achieving this.

Archiving and Encryption:  There are some transactions that need to be both archived and encrypted, purchase orders, buy orders, health records.  BPOS enables this scenario. You can read more details here

High Availability: This scenario we received feedback from a number of sources. Email continually rates in the top 3 LOB applications in all research we do.  BPOS builds a SLA around it’s high availability scenario.  Feedback from customers asked that we could build more HA into our mail scenario, whilst optimizing on premise for other workloads – identity, access, information worker.  By moving email on to BPOS you’re able to achieve HA without having to outlay capital into new hardware.

Scale greater than 75 email accounts: Again we’ve received this from many customers. In certain scenarios customers may have more than 75 email accounts but only have 30-40 on-site users. BPOS allows customer to scale the email off of the box, and meet this scenario.

Lastly this is another great example of the commitment WSSG (SBS/EBS) has in developing a solutions platform for SMB.  We’re constantly looking for new ways of providing opportunity on top of SBS.  Of course you could also you this whitepaper to connect to other Microsoft Hosters to achieve these results.  We’re still very much in the early days of this wave of online services.  If you have any other ideas on what we can do to better integrate with other online technologies you can get in contact using the contact link on the right.

Eric, and Chuck were in LA this week talking about Windows Essential Business Server 2008.

Check out their video interview here http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=5e6fb399-fdaa-4ef1-ba30-77df2e1b2ded

Microsoft has just released a new product suite for midsized companies (under 300 PCs). Essential Business Server is a suite of server products and new integrated admin software designed exclusively for midsized businesses. Hear about how to reduce server count, quickly get to security best practices, and integrate Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies reducing ongoing management time with this new software.

Something that had been annoying my while I’ve been on Win7 was that messenger had an abnormal docking behavior.  You can see that it shows both my profile pic and the WLM window.

Anyway I did some digging and found out the way to solve this is run WLM in XP compatibility mode.  To do this;

• Right click the Messenger icon on your start tab and hit properties

• Set the compatibility mode to be WinXP

• Hit OK and restart WLM – You’ll get an admin pop-up and no more annoying double Window.

Many of you received these through the partner program or MVP program, but as we clean house for this financial year we noticed that we hadn’t posted the updated reviewers guides for SBS and EBS. So here you go!

SBS RTM Reviewers Guide

EBS RTM Reviewers Guide

These are awesome docs, not only if you’re a reviewer but also if you’re looking for ways of helping write business proposals or technology descriptions for customers or your manager.

Last week we released a Community supported document on how to migrate from SBS 2000 to SBS 2008.  When I say ‘community’ I really mean one of our talented support engineers Edwin Joseph, who is a tech writer in his spare time.  This is a great walk through and solves the migration question for many of you migrating from older SBS 2000 deployments.

You can get the doc from here

Overview: This document written by Microsoft Support Engineer Edwin Joseph describes the process that you should follow to successfully migrate settings and data from an existing server running Microsoft Small Business Server 2000 to a new computer running Windows SBS 2008.

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.  EBS  has many ways which it can accelerate and optimize this capability.

1. Standardized deployment to best practices
2. Optimized price to reflect midmarket budgets
3. Planning and Preparation Wizard to accelerate planning and remediation
4. Unified Administration Console to bring together all of the Core Infrastructure into an optimized dashboard

Today we released a document that covers EBS and compares it to the Core IO model.  You might be asking why this is important?

Well, Core IO already has a phenomenal number of tools and available information for comparing and evaluating on site infrastructure to first baseline the infrastructure technology and secondly using the maturity model decide which workload and level of capability best suits you business.

Let me give you an example;

First use this simple tool to start (there are more detailed tools available linked here).  Using one of my research customers data to profile them we come up with the following result.  You can see the tool also profiles you against other levels of capability in your industry.

Let’s see what happens when you compare this to EBS.

As you can see there’s a big jump simply by deploying EBS.  What does this mean for you?  Effectively you’ll be able to;

1. Benchmark you IT
2. Clearly call out where you want to be
3. Systematically make progress toward that known state of capability and maturity using EBS and the supporting tools.

Want to know more about how EBS does this for you?  Check out the document here

Ok this is definitely a little dorky but it kept me occupied for a good 20 minutes. Server Quest reminds me of Leisure Suit Larry without the need to hit ctrl+shift+s to skip the questions only my parents knew..

You should check this out. it does a good job of testing your knowledge on Server technology from Microsoft.

http://www.microsoft.com/click/serverquest/ 

The EBS engineering team are going to be at TechED USA this year.  They just blogged about their involvement.  Unfortunately I won’t be there this year, so have a beer for me. :)

http://blogs.technet.com/essentialbusinessserver/archive/2009/04/28/teched-cutting-costs-with-essential-business-server-featured-at-teched-may-11-15.aspx