THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA

http://community.spiceworks.com/pages/microsoft?tab=5893

I saw this article today and it kinda made me sad.  It reminded me that back in 1999 a Microsoft Gold Partner said to me "We find SBS too limiting, you'll outgrow it". That was 1999. I'm still running SBS in my business today. The Microsoft Gold Partner who said that to me is now out of business.

No trusts. Never had a need for them. FSMO roles on the DC. In the era of image based backups, I found the single DC/restore it back to be the best DR plan. 75 user max. Never outgrew that.

SBS for my firm was not then, nor is it now synonymous with limits. What I am finding however is that I'm not wanting to trade cost effective solutions with locked into cash outflow solutions. I'm trying to strike a balance to ensure that I find a solution where the consultants and resources are there, are understandable, and are talking to each other. I'm not comfortable yet with remote PowerShell, nor do I feel are the vast majority of consultant that I can afford and are willing to work on SMB solutions (no disrespect intended to anyone in the SMB consultant space, but I think I can be forgiven, and you guys can admit that the knowledge of PowerShell to manage Office 365 is still in it's infancy in this space). There are still adjustments to be made to email limits, disclaimers to be placed on email and just the odd "can you see if X person actually sent me an email" searches that while can be done in hosted platforms, are either not as well exposed or sometimes needs the odd PowerShell to dig out.

There's a reason those SBS 2003 boxes are being ridden into the grave. Economy has been horrific and Microsoft hasn't given them a compelling reason to upgrade from the solution stack they got back in 2003.

Now there is Essentials, which has some interesting traits indeed, but make no mistake, there's still wizards under the hood that if not followed means you'll have to go back and fix things up (hint - adding a user manually to the ADUC won't populate the users into the Essentials console, you'll need to use PowerShell, so don't just go adding users via ADUC for just one example).

I do not want another SBS 2011 standard.  Let me say that again - we can no longer put all of the parts on the same operating system.  But I would like everyone saying that they are glad SBS is dead to step back and realize that if you thought it was limiting, you didn't take the time to understand it. If you complained about how hard it was to monitor/patch/maintain and it wasn't built for small businesses to just work, and psconfig on SharePoint should have just automatically psconfig'd - as a consultant that was your job to learn how to maintain this box.

If IT truly just worked, you'd be out of a job.

And now I challenge you to grab a blog or a forum or a web site and start learning. You no longer have a finished house to sell. You have to build one. There is no longer the one sized fits all of SBS 2003 era. SBS was "dead" actually back in SBS 2008 in some respects when it no longer was a low powered server/with a firewall/all in one.

As the IT decision maker for my firm, I am now trying to ensure that I provide the right balance of a good supported solution combined with a reasonable price tag and trying to minimize the annual cash outflow that is increasing for all of these cloud services. I'm actually looking at a price increase, not a price decrease and more annual cash outflow, not less. So please forgive me when I get a bit hot and bothered under the collar when people say that things are cheaper now and my options are more flexible and affordable.

P.S. for the record SBS 2003 doesn't randomly shut down.  It's 21 days after the SBS's fsmo roles get moved.  And with "no clear inplace upgrade path" ever available makes it sound like the folks asking for an inplace upgrade path from a 32 bit Windows operating system to a 64 bit Windows operating system.  Knock yourself trying to do that one on any Windows server.

RAM memory arrived today.  HP Server still in route. 

If you believe twitter and various web sites (http://winunleaked.info/threads/16-Windows-8-Builds-List ) Win8 may be RTM'ing on August 1st with possibly a build number of 9200.16384.win8_rtm.120725-1247 (RTM Candidate ~ Signed off ~ Windows 8 RTM) and thusly Windows Server 2012 at the same time or very very nearby.

In looking over the HyperV resources I'm a bit overwhelmed... and I've got three servers running in HyperV.

For this proof of concept I'm not going to do any sort of fallover/clustering/teaming thing, just a plain simple server.

Today was official the last day where you could sell software assurance with SBS 2011 standard and to be honest I'm still not 100% sure what my SA rights will give me and where I'm to go to request them.  I'm assuming/hoping that when Windows Server 2012 RTMs whatever I am supposed to get will just find it's way into the VLSC web site.  But I'm still not sure.

Stay tuned, as I find out more, you'll find out more.

I was always taught -- more like beaten into my brain that one should not enable the time integration in HyperV when you are virtualizing a DC.

But Microsoft appears to be shifting the rules a bit.  As pointed out by Jeremy Anderson of www.thirdtier.net

Microsoft is now saying --

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/robertvi/archive/2011/05/11/time-synchronization-and-domain-controller-vm-s.aspx and

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/virtual_active_directory_domain_controller_virtualization_hyperv(WS.10).aspx

Here's Jeremy's guide (which I'll link off to in my HyperV for SMB wiki(

Time Services for a Domain Controller on Hyper-V - TechNet Articles - United States (English) - TechNet Wiki:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12709.time-services-for-a-domain-controller-on-hyper-v.aspx

How are you doing it these days?

I think for purposes of the proof of concept we'll do it Jeremy's way.

Sharing this post from Boon

Fixing the Black Screen of Death (KSOD) on SBS 2011 « PowerBiz Solutions:
http://blog.powerbiz.net.au/fixes/fixing-the-black-screen-of-death-ksod-on-sbs-2011/

Key google words

KSOD after restore

KSOD after bare metal recovery

My HP box is in route and should arrive by Thursday.  One of the things I didn't order, that one SHOULD get these days for any server is a way to get into the server remotely undernead the OS.

For even the Microserver they offer a remote access card at the unbelievely low price of $79 - http://www.amazon.com/Micro-Server-Remote-Access-Car/dp/B0042AL4R2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343546357&sr=8-1&keywords=microserver+remote+access+card

And if you only have one static IP at the location you are deploying this into, you can get it to respond on a port... so http://youripaddress:someportnumber and then in your firewall rerroute that port to the IP address of the Remote Access card (which would be a private IP address on the router).

http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2011/04/hp-proliant-microserver-remote-access.html

As we start to move servers more and more to data centers where you can't just walk over to the server and push the button and do stuff, plan on remote control of a server BELOW the operating system.

HP has iLO cards, Dell's have DRACs, and even the MicroServer has a remote access card.

Did you catch the MINI in the Olympics opening?

Obviously I did ;-)

Memory - HP MicroServer N40L Wiki:
http://n40l.wikia.com/wiki/Memory

The MicroServer can handle 16 gigs?  Really?

(link courtesy of Jeremy Anderson at www.thirdtier.net )

And it has a wiki?  http://n40l.wikia.com/wiki/HP_MicroServer_N40L_Wiki

Watching/Listening to Karmin on Youtube, planning the fall garden by figuring out how many Pink Impression Tulips I'll need.

So in anticipation of the soon to be here RTM of Windows Server 2012 I'm going to see if I, Susan Bradley, PowerShell un-lover, Command line not so sure of-er, can see if I can do a proof of concept of a HyperV 2012 (yes the command line only thing) server.  But as first and foremost as a penny pinching geek, I am going to do this on a proof of concept hardware not one that I'd necessarily recommend as a HyperV base.. but it's a cute box nonetheless and I plan to repurpose it into a Home Server 2011+DriveBender box after I do this.  So step one buy a HP Microserver... so far the cheapest (and on a site that I don't think is a scam) is from Amazon.   Adding on the ram memory keeping in mind that the intended virtualized server I plan to put on here is only the SBS Essentials or Windows Server 2012 Essentials that needs a minimum of only 2 gigs of ram (aka no Exchange on the server), and the base ram you need for hyperV is only 1 gig or less.

I want to build a HyperV wiki for the SMB... translation single box, no private cloud system center, no fallover clustering thing, just a HyperV solution you might want to consider for a client (granted probably not on THIS HP Microserver but a HP server of a different vintage).  I'm going to tag this entry and all future entries as HyperVServer.

..and ... done.  ordered the Server and RAM from Amazon.

Delivery Estimate: Wednesday August 1, 2012 - Monday August 6, 2012

So in the meantime I'll start finding SMB resources and organizing items on this wiki page -- http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12636.hyperv-server-for-smbs-how-to.aspx

Had a great presentation from him tonight at SMBTN Fresno - http://www.vembu.com/ Download the trial there!

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/jj200132

Supported clients at this time are Windows 8 Release Preview, Windows 7, Mac OS X version 10.5 to 10.8.  Note it does not include XP or Vista.

Do you think this is a good idea?  Yes or no?

Post your comments in the Essentials forum here:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserveressentials/thread/63296ee8-43c5-4551-ac69-c15e381578a1

Security Advisory 2737111 released - MSRC - Site Home - TechNet Blogs:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/msrc/archive/2012/07/24/security-advisory-2737111-released.aspx

More information on Security Advisory 2737111 - Security Research & Defense - Site Home - TechNet Blogs:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/srd/archive/2012/07/24/more-information-on-security-advisory-2737111.aspx


Overview of Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access WebReady Document Viewing - Exchange Team Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2007/03/23/3401668.aspx <<<< vulnerable thing

While we don't have the advanced search in SharePoint, we do have the Outlook Web Access WebReady Document Viewing thing enabled on Exchange 2007 and above (it's not there in 2003 so no need to panic or take action).

If you want to adjust this using GUI rather than Powershell just untick the box on the Exchange console under Server organization/Client Access, OWA, then Private computer file access, uncheck Enable WebReady Document Viewing.

Subject:     To whom it may concern in regards to recent changes of the technet subscription
Date:     Tue, 24 Jul 2012 08:52:43 -0700
From:     Susan Bradley <sbradcpa@pacbell.net>
To:     tsubserv@microsoft.com, >


Effective 7/16/2012 you removed Windows 7 Ultimate from the products
available with a technet plus subscription indicating that this is a
product removed because it's "not intended for use in an IT professional
managed business environment. For instance: Windows XP Home Edition."

I note that per
http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/7/8/C78DB720-88CB-455E-AA0E-A087CB332A23/TechNet_Product_List.xlsx
Windows 7 ultimate is no longer listed.

I strongly object to the removal of Windows 7 Ultimate from the technet
subscription.  In my practice and in my SMB world, Windows 7 ultimate,
and not Windows 7 enterprise is the sku that I upgrade to when I need
bitlocker and thus it is indeed part of the managed IT environment in my
firm and in the firms that I see.

When I beta test, Windows 7 ultimate IS the sku I use to test with for
purposes of beta testing with Microsoft's server products and for patch
management deployment testing.  The removal of this license hampers my
ability to test Microsoft products, to support the small business
community and to better support your products.

I respectfully ask you reconsider this decision and put back in Windows
7 ultimate as an available sku for the use of testing in my
environment.  You are hampering my ability to support Microsoft's products.

Thank you for your reconsideration to this decision.

Susan Bradley
Moderator www.patchmanagement.org
Writer at www.windowssecrets.com
Blogger at http://www.msmvps.com/blogs/bradley
SBS MVP

I'm turning into the crabby office lady, I tell ya.

WHO'S BRILLIANT IDEA WAS IT TO PUT THE TABS IN OFFICE VNEXT IN ALL CAPS?  YOU GUYS DO REALIZE THAT'S CONSIDERED SHOUTING...RIGHT?  THAT IN ONLINE COMMUNICATION IT'S ACTUALLY CONSIDERED RUDE?  YOU MAY SAY THAT IT'S METRO FONT, BUT GIVEN THAT SOME PARTS OF THE INTERFACE ARE ALL CAPS whereas others have the more normal formatting, all that it ends up being is jarring.

Not to mention, in your forums where Metro font is used you don't use all caps... so I don't get with the all caps stuff?  ( http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/officeitpropreview)

in other locations, metro can mean the use of all lowercase and no capitalization at all, so I don't quite understand the inconsistency going on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps

With the advent of the Bulletin board system, or BBS, and later the Internet, typing messages in all caps became closely identified with "shouting" or attention-seeking behavior, and is considered very rude. As a result, netiquette generally discourages the use of all caps when posting messages online. While all caps can be used as an alternative to rich-text "bolding" for a single word or phrase, to express emphasis, repeated use of all caps can be considered "shouting" or irritating

Of course I should talk, my blog title is in all caps as I did that eons ago and never changed it.  So maybe Microsoft is just trying to be Diva like?

BYOD apocalypse deniers suffer from post-PC depression:
http://betanews.com/2012/07/20/byod-apocalypse-deniers-suffer-from-post-pc-depression/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed+-+bn+-+Betanews+Full+Content+Feed+-+BN

As an admin for a firm where I am deploying iPhones, iPads and the like, I think Randall needs to realize that where are business applications are, how they currently are coded up, and how we're in this awkward world of touch but not quite touch world means that supporting iPads in business is awkward right now.

Seeing my Sister love hers and really use it points out where it's really good at - email.  The iPhone is a smaller device and the iPad has a much better larger interface for email.  One does not need a keyboard, but can merely hunt and peck to do reasonable and efficient correspondence.  She can keep the emails flowing and keep people tasked to do what they need to with an iPad with Internet access.

But when it comes to her blogging on www.midcalminis.org on the road while we were down in Los Angeles for MINI Takes the States, she took her iPad AND a small laptop.  When I pointed out that there's a wordpress app on the iPad, she said that she found that blogging on the iPad wasn't efficient.  She needed access to photos and a keyboard.  Mind you this is from a hard core iPad user.

So in my office I even have embraced the iTap RDP app (we have RDP/TS cals to make it legal) and while one can indeed rdp to the desktop, unless you have a bluetooth enabled keyboard, when you remote into ..say Word or Excel, half of the iPad window is taken over by the onscreen keyboard.  For the time and billing program it's doable - but a bit painful.  I fully anticipate that as more Partners get iPads that we'll be rolling out "an app for that" as it's clunky to do so over a RDP window. 

We're still not in a post PC era because we're still running key line of business applications that need PCs.  So anyone saying that us IT admins are just not in touch, are not in touch with the reality of the fact that firms have not invested in new touch enabled apps (as we're keeping our purse strings tight in light of the economy).   Not everyone in the world lives in nothing but email.  Even my Sister has to use a PC and get back to desktop based applications in her work. 

Microsoft's surface won't solve this.  It's our applications that need touch enablement or more "apps for that" recoding.  And that means buying and deploying updates that will take investment. 

Planted Agastache Blue Fortune - as you can tell I'm trying to get more butterflies, bees and hummingbirds in the garden.

So something to stick in the back of your head and food for thought.  Do you know what your clients really think about all this cloud stuff?  The cloud marketing is doing a job on folks so that you think you should want to put stuff in the cloud even if you don't know exactly what it is. 

I keep feeling like there's a problem in the data that keeps getting thrown around.  Some vendors make statements like 90% of the customers have adequate bandwidth to support cloud deployments.  And then I look around and people say their clients don't have bandwidth.

It's getting to the point that I no longer trust any marketing blurb that cites surveys and statistics as invaribly when you peel back the raw numbers and look at the rounding errors of the study, some of them have huge errors of margin. 

Are we reacting to this change because it's really bad for our clients or bad for being a consultant?

Honestly it's probably a little bit of both isn't it?

On a listserve I'm on there's an interesting conversation going on with a person needing to set up remote access for seven users in their firm.  They have traditional desktops to remote back to, but they do not have SBS.  So there's a couple of ways to skin this cat.  Way one is to plop down a Backup box from www.smallbizserver.com running Windows Server 2008 R2 Essentials.

Pro:  Flat price tag.
Backs up the workstations as well.

Con:  You have to patch it.
You have to maintain the server.

Way two is to purchase 7 licenses of Logmein (or Gotopc or whatever).  Or you can decide who really needs remote printing and just purchase licenses for those that need remote printing.

Pro:  Supports remoting in from a Mac (unlike the Storage server solution).
Pro:  No patching of a server.

Con:  Annual cash outlay for those needing remote printing.
Potential for price increases.

I stumbled upon this quote this evening and found it insightful:

"Moving it all to the cloud – I’ve talked a lot on this blog about the value of moving software solutions to the cloud, but that doesn’t mean every business should move every program skyward. Carefully consider the short and long-term savings a cloud solution will bring to your business. In some instances it makes more long-term financial sense to leave some programs on-premise."

Can you guess who may have said that?  Guess?  Nope, keep trying... guess?

Cindy Bates.

Who?! You ask?  Non other than the "Vice President of Microsoft’s US SMB Organization where she is responsible for the company’s end-to-end SMB sales and marketing efforts, including SMB strategy, business development, regional field sales and national distribution sales, channel marketing, and customer marketing. "  Yes, she's the evil empire trying to shove your client to the cloud.  And even she says you can't just knee jerk one is better than the other.  Look at the pros and cons of both solutions.

It is a lot harder to make a decision of what is the right decision these days.  A lot of choices.  A lot of marketing.  It feels like there's still more questions I should be asking and making sure I know the answers before signing on that dotted line.

Exchange 2013 public folders will be implemented as special mailboxes in the organization. Although public folder content isn't replicated as it was in the old model, because it's based in a mailbox, you can give this content the full availability and protection afforded by database availability groups (DAGs).

http://www.windowsitpro.com/blog/exchange-and-outlook-blog-8/exchange-2013/exchange-2013-preview-launch-143763

Now what have they done with Exchange?

So let me throw out a dumb question.  If the Exchange folks actually wanted to code an on premise box that was geared towards small businesses ... an Exchange express version similar to how SQL express is coded up...what would you think is reasonable to do to have a "small enterprise" version of Exchange?

If you could do anything you wanted to, how would you code up Exchange?  With the assumption that you could not have it all, and had to make compromises, what would you say is a reasonable list of items that you'd consider must haves and then like to have but don't have to have in terms of Exchange?

Planted Talinum paniculatum verde "Jewels of Opar" , Melampodium Million Gold,  Superbena Royale Silverdust,  Intensia Blueberry Phlox hybrid,  Surdiva Scaevola Blue,  and Supertunia Pink Charm Petunia tonight.  Need to order bulbs for the fall planting season soon.  And thinking about fall planting means that everyone should be thinking about what education and training you might need to face the new world order we now live in.  Keep an eye on www.thirdtier.net as they will be coming out with training.

Also did you catch the two HP/Microsoft Lync meetings today?  It's pretty apparent that the transmorg (aka the Porcupine) to go from Essentials to normal server we will need to purchase the proper number of normal server cals and start over on our server investment.

But as was said in the lync meeting.. this is still a beta product and not yet locked down.

In the meantime it's time to learn more about Exchange.  I can't remember if I blogged this or not?

Hi Susan,

Just spotted your post where you mentioned downloading Exchange 2010 "just to see how easy or hard it is to install".

I wanted to let you know that on my site I offer a free Exchange 2010 Boot Camp that runs through a single server deployment scenario and covers what is probably a good portion of what a small business setup would need.

It seemed to go down pretty well with a local SMB IT pro group I spoke at recently so perhaps your readers would also like to take a look:

http://exchangeserverpro.com/training/

(there is a paid option that is going into more complex multi-server scenarios, but for SBS folks the free version is probably more relevant)

If there's anything I can do to help out your readers with Exchange 2010 questions (eg "how do I do this thing I used to do in SBS?") please feel free to let me know.


Best regards,

Paul Cunningham

Exchange Server MVP

http://exchangeserverpro.com  

And check out Robert Pearman's excellent series on Essentials -- http://titlerequired.com/2012/07/11/on-premises-exchange-integration-windows-server-essentials/

To whom it may concern who decided to change the SBSC at the same time you rearranged the SBS pieces and renamed the server sku.

Lousy timing.  The one two punch of both at the same time is making partners reevaluate what they sell.

Karl did a community survey and the results are interesting.

Guest Blog: After a Little Shock, SMB Consultants Plan for a World 
Without Small Business Server - SMB Nation Blogs:
http://smbnation.com/index.php/news/news/entry/guest-blog-after-a-little-shock-smb-consultants-plan-for-a-world-without-small-business-server


http://blog.smallbizthoughts.com/2012/07/smb-community-survey-results-part-1.html