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Some problems with SBS...
For most small business SBS
is overly complex with a poor ROI. SBS bundles Exchange Server (an email
system) and a Microsoft Active Directory (AD) “control system”; both of
these are, for the average small business, hard to maintain, fragile, often
very difficult to backup and restore, and provide little if any value that
cannot be created in easier and cheaper ways. I constantly must educate my
customers that MS often ships half working, poorly documented, expensive
products with little concern for the customer; SBS is more of a marketing
creation than a product in its own right, and suffers accordingly.
You need to share files among
your workers and you don’t need AD to do it. All you need is for us
to choose one of your XP Professional computers and to make the drive and
files on it shareable, and to map other computers to use this drive. You
don’t need AD’s central store of network users and complex security controls
– do you ? Well, perhaps you’re a bank or a branch of the CIA – then you do.
MS designed SBS to allow for ONE
and ONE ONLY SBS domain controller on the network; this means that if the
SBS computer fails your network fails until someone fixes it . SBS computers can’t be clustered
(mirrored) so no failover redundancy in this way is possible For some
businesses a day or two of downtime is of no great concern ; for others we
can help you create backup systems that are rapidly deployable, but SBS does
not make it easy or cheap.
As for email; you can allow for
your employees to have their own email (someone@yourcompany.com)
without Exchange Server. All you need is to work with your ISP to set up
mailboxes on their server, and then to set up local email clients on your
computers to use these mailboxes. If you want a central repository for mail
that you can manage , consider offsite Exchange hosting.
If you insist on a MS AD LAN and
Exchange, then you are better off buying the products separately. Buy an
enterprise version of the server product and plan on having at least two
domain controllers. In my experience any company small enough to consider
SBS is too small to need any of the advantages that MS touts, and too
small to deal with the burdens.
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