I ran across this review of The Borg's latest offering:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winserver2003_sbs.asp
The snippets that caught my eye were these:
Like previous SBS versions, SBS 2003 includes everything a
small business needs to get connected to the Internet,
establish email, share files and printers, send and receive
faxes, and so on. This time around, the product has been
polished with better installation and deployment tools,
simpler and more elegant management capabilities, and new
features suggested by users, such as better backup and
restore tools, and security-related functionality.
[...]
"With Windows Small Business Server 2003, you get access to
all of the raw capabilities of Windows Server 2003, as well
as SharePoint, Exchange, SQL, ISA, and Outlook," [Guy] Haycock
[Technical Product Manager for the Windows Server PMG] told
me. "We don't just bundle them; instead we examined what you
need to do to be successful. For example, how do you get all
of that technology installed without requiring 25 CDs and 17
hours of work? We've plugged in all the security best
practices we've learned, and worked to help small businesses
improve productivity out of the box."
[...]
In keeping with previous SBS versions, Windows Small Business
Server 2003 builds on the core capabilities of the underlying
products, adding simple management and end user tools that
drop all of the technical mumbo jumbo and replace it with
clear, English-language choices. SBS' biggest benefit has
always been across-the-board simplicity, and this version
delivers it in spades.
With a little glow of vicarious pride, I noted that Mandrake ship at
least two of every major app featured in SBS 2003 Premium Edition. (-:
NOw, the purpose of this message: yes, it's a bad idea to have a newbie
and/or complete incompetent administering a system, but given that it
will happen anyway, would it not be a good idea to make sure that it
happens well?
What they seem to have done here is added a setup wizard and drawn out a
few common tasks from their configuration tools into a nicer, simpler
set of the "most wanted" configuration options. Think of the first-time
wizard thingy that Mandrake throws at you when you log into a new
account (via *DM) for the first time, and roll MCC and the installer
into that.
The simplest way of offering the same functionality on Mandrake would be
to include a welcome page (and desktop icon) for root that included a
clear and obvious option (icon) labelled something like "Setup Guide"
which is a page in /usr/share/doc somewhere with very simple decision
tree in it, perhaps something like this (only with the terms even less
"jargonny"):
Start Here
Would you like to copy the installation media to disk?
Would you like to automatically fetch software updates?
Are you setting up a Server?
Is it to be an Internet gateway/firewall as well?
Will it masquerade/NAT for local machines?
Do any local services need to be visible from Internet?
[etc]
...a Web Server?
...a File Server?
...a Web Proxy?
...to host a complete Internet domain?
...to host a supercomputing cluster?
...[etc]
Are you setting up a Workstation?
Is it for home use?
...office use?
...to be an Internet kiosk?
...[etc]
Click here to read the latest version of this document from
Mandrake's web server.
This Setup Guide would need to be clearly and explicitly referenced by
the installer and documentation, for example:
+---------------------------
| Finished installation
|
| If you would like simple instructions to set everything up
| and get the best out of your new Mandrake system, login as
| the root user and click on the Setup Guide.
|
The basic idea is that Joe or Jane Random Schmuck should be able, armed
only with mouse and keyboard, to configure up a Mandrake machine OOTB
reasonably securely to be an effective server and/or workstation.
At each step, the consequences of each choice should be outlined (e.g.
"If you leave this setting at the default (off), your database will be
more secure but will not be accessible from other computers or even
from local programs which expect to talk to the database over a
network").
Is there a neat way of doing this (presumably in SGML) so that
translations of it all stay in sync?
Cheers; Leon
