On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 1:24 AM, Jeremy Anderson <[email protected]> wrote: >> I'm really ambivalent about those things. > > Being the outside contractor, I love the Wizards.
As I said, ambivalent. (Not "opposed".) In the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, they can be a time-saver. And from I've seen, they've gotten better about not screwing things up for you if you step outside their assumptions, which is good. In the NT4 days, woe be the admin who tried to do something not foreseen by the SBS wizards. SBS 2000 was a lot better in that regard, and from what I've read, SBS 2003 continued the trend. > Time is money to a SBS customer. Time's money to the big guys, too, they just have more of it to waste. Just ask Bank of America. Oh, wait. Okay, so ask General Motors. Oh, um... ;-) > That would be an interesting challenge, I'd love to participate in on either > side. Set up SBS, > VS. Setting up Server2k3 / Exchange / OWA / NTBackup with FBA, WSUS, > SharePoint / > and All the group Policies for the firewall and such on the same box. Keep in mind that once you've done something once, the cost to reproduce is minimal. When I was doing the consulting/services thing as my main job, our shop had "standard configurations" for most things that were pretty trivial to deploy. I bet I can deploy a SYSPREP'ed disk image faster than you can install SBS from CD. ;-) > The thing to remember here, and to not to get off topic is SBS is MORE than > Exchange+Server2003. Well, it's more than just those two; it's also got SQL, and the fax server, and in some editions, ISA. Of those, I think only the fax server is not available as a stand-alone SKU. Well, that and the wizards. ;-) So I see SBS = Win Server + Exchange + SQL + ISA + fax server. Certainly, SBS has it's place. In a SOHO situation wanting to run a Windows server, it's a good fit, especially those 5-man shops who still want all the big boy toys. And the cost savings of the licensing bundle is undeniable. My main objection to SBS is deploying it in places which already have 40+ employees with growth expected. The inability to "unbundle" can mean buying things twice in a growth scenario. That's poor planning. (But not the fault of SBS; it's a mis-use of SBS.) (And I seem to recall some of the license terms have been loosened a bit in more recent releases. It's been a while.) But I don't see SBS as having a different underlying design than the unbundled products. I see it as a package deal, a "canned" configuration, a turn-key kit. That has value when appropriate, but it doesn't mean the component parts are different. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
