Thursday 5 July 2012

It's Official: SBS Standard Is No More

It looks as though we will not be seeing a Standard version of SBS or the SBS product moniker anymore:

image

That document is available here:

We have a copy of the current PDF that contains the above information on our own site as well.

More to come on this subject! ;)

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

4 comments:

Doug H. said...

I just read this and the MS Official SBS Blog post. At first a bit shocking, but not that surprising really. I see some positives:
- They say you will have the choice of O365 for email, a Hosted Exchange provider or to run on-premise Exchange beside it. This gives good flexibility out of one product, and with VMs being standard these days, the hardware requirements don't change to do on-premise, just some licensing costs.
- The hard user cap kept a lot of people away from the current version of SBS Essentials, and some from SBS Standard too. Built in migration to Server Standard will remove that as a worry or objection.

The impression is given that Server 2012 Essentials will be out not too long after Server 2012. Since they no longer have to shoe-horn Exchange and SharePoint to run on a DC, I would expect it should be able to be released much faster than before. That's a positive because it will get the many improvements that Server 2012 will have into small businesses sooner.

Questions:
1. What is the SBS Standard 2011 to Server 2012 Essentials migration guide going to look like?!
2. What will SBS Standard Software Assurance be redeemable for?

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Doug,

The licensing questions are answered further down in the PDF linked.

As far as migrations go we will probably be following the various product group's guides for From-To methodology.

Once Exchange and SharePoint have been migrated we DCPromo the old SBS out and decomission the box.

Thanks,

Philip

Victor C said...

Thanks for the information Philip.
I am not against change but I do like choice.
- Talking to a potential client the other day and he tells me that he is required to keep client files on premise.
- Pricing looks like it is dropping but what is Exchange, Server CALs and Sharepoint going to cost?
- Dropping Web server. I liked Web server because it was an inexpensive alternative to run the small SQL server to interface with the copier counting software.

In the end, I do have a lot of choices to solve my customers problems. I have mentioned before, that Novell is doing some interesting things with their Small Business software. And clients are more sophisticated and are willing to use MS or Google or Linux.
I will miss the easy install of SBS but I also prefer to separate and virtualize machines for different functions. So, I would prefer to run big applications in their own VM, but is the pricing going to allow this?
I guess my main thought is, did MS do this because EVERYBODY is saying they do not want SBS or are they doing this to push them to their cloud services.
Just saw where Windows Home Server is dead.
Interesting times.
Keep up the good work Philip.

PaulG said...

Interesting times ahead. As a SBS shop I was dissapointed to hear that SBS std is being dropped. time to embrace what our options are and move with it.