THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"

Yeah me too not sure who they focus grouped that name with?

Sadly it is probably based on System Ceter Essentials "not quite SCOM 2007" so EBS = Not quite the whole W2K8 Enterprise Domain??

Not whacky, that's the first thing I thought. A bit of a downer when that was anounced, I'd prefer keeping it Cougar, or even just MBS for Mid-size Business Server.

Not whacky, that's the first thing I thought. A bit of a downer when that was anounced, I'd prefer keeping it Cougar, or even just MBS for Mid-size Business Server.

Personally, I think the name fits perfectly with the market and the objective/problem.

(if you disagree, you're probably an SBSer working with smallbiz firms and are not familiar with the challenges in midmarket IT)

I think the reason Microsoft chose Essentials for the name because thats what they are. Mail infrastructure. Management/monitoring infrastructure. SQL, Domain controllers, firewall. These are network essentials.

In small business, the above is a complete business! Thats all they need. Why? Because there are between 5-50 people there and they are all pretty much on the ball.

Now, what if you had 200 people, in four offices, and each one had its own applications, own file servers, own LOBs? Would Centro be the essentials or the complete solution? From experience, it would fall far short of complete.

You see, in midmarket you don't have cozy little "We'll just drop a box and solve all your problems" way of dealing with things. You have an IT department or someone "in charge of computers" along with aging infrastructure, legacy applications, set way of doing things. You can't waltz in with SBS and just "fix it" like many SBSers do today, it is a far more convoluted situation where you spend more time trying to analyze the problem than actually "fix it"

Ergo, the essentials.

-Vlad

It does have an egotistical ring to it. However, I'm excited to see it. Now I'm anxiously waiting to see what the upgrade path is going to be for my clients that already have 3 servers. I need a nice small price to migrate them over and gain the benefits of central management.

Here is my more detailed response:

www.vladville.com/.../where-is-essential-business-server-essential-the-overview-of-the-midmarket-opportunity.html