4 ms·

Even as someone who formerly worked at Microsoft, it was never easy to really understand the full Microsoft enterprise product suite without spending years of m

by wayne 5y ago

Even as someone who formerly worked at Microsoft, it was never easy to really understand the full Microsoft enterprise product suite without spending years of my life becoming an IT expert. I always thought this Small Business Suite product was ingenious... it included everything and integrated them in a simple way that you could get them all going. And the pricing was relatively inexpensive, just enough to hook you and jack you on pricing if by chance you ended up growing.

bombcar 5y ago
Yeah, if I remember it was amazingly cheap if you were below 25 users but that 26th would force you to upgrade everything to the big boy versions.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  original author here. It's funny you can get completely silo'd in your career, thinking you've seen it all. SBS 2008 is a really surprising little offering, lots of the admin tools seem streets ahead of anything I'd seen out of Microsoft on the enterprise editions, even if only that they point out problems and have actual links that work to send you in the right direction to solve them. In some ways it reminds me a lot of the problems I used to have with some small customers when I first started my career and was dealing with small business owners who didn't want to learn how to be system administrators. It might not be cool, but it's still fascinating. edit: It is also surprisingly snappy on some fairly average hardware and running in a VM. Not sure what Microsoft have done between 2008 and 2019 but none of it was adding to the performance.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    I remember using SBS 2003 I think it was, turning five different servers into one box, including migrating a database to SQL server from some older version for an Epicor backend. Worked great and did everything we needed; totally worth the price. That and Windows NAS were some interesting versions and ways to get around CAL pricing.

by wayne 5y ago

bombcar 5y ago

Yeah, if I remember it was amazingly cheap if you were below 25 users but that 26th would force you to upgrade everything to the big boy versions.

smackeyacky 5y ago
original author here. It's funny you can get completely silo'd in your career, thinking you've seen it all. SBS 2008 is a really surprising little offering, lots of the admin tools seem streets ahead of anything I'd seen out of Microsoft on the enterprise editions, even if only that they point out problems and have actual links that work to send you in the right direction to solve them. In some ways it reminds me a lot of the problems I used to have with some small customers when I first started my career and was dealing with small business owners who didn't want to learn how to be system administrators. It might not be cool, but it's still fascinating. edit: It is also surprisingly snappy on some fairly average hardware and running in a VM. Not sure what Microsoft have done between 2008 and 2019 but none of it was adding to the performance.
- bombcar 5y ago
  I remember using SBS 2003 I think it was, turning five different servers into one box, including migrating a database to SQL server from some older version for an Epicor backend. Worked great and did everything we needed; totally worth the price. That and Windows NAS were some interesting versions and ways to get around CAL pricing.