Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tags 'SBS 2008' and 'Pontifications'

On Blogging

eriq — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 05:00:00 GMT

As part of the marketing for the upcoming Windows Small Business Server 2008 Unleashed book, I've been given the opportunity to have a blog space over at Network World for the next month. I'm excited about the opportunity to share my experiences with SBS 2008 with that audience, and hopefully the information will be well received.

The first post in that series went live today. You can read Small Business Server 2008 - Start Looking Now at your convenience. Enjoy!

On RTM

eriq — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Folks, in case you haven't heard by now (and if this is the first place you've seen/heard this, then I probably have a few other blog suggestions for you to follow), the SBS Development Team released SBS 2008 to Manufacturing today. This means that the product will be in the channel in some form in the next 6-8 weeks. This marks the end of several years of development by Microsoft, and nearly two years of testing that I've been involved with, along with a lot of other people.

I think the development group has done an amazing job with the product given the circumstances. Is the product solid? Based on what I've seen, I think so. Does it have some holes? Without a doubt. But given that the team was essentially developing against a deadline and not against a feature set, this is understandable.

What does this release mean to you? If you're a small business IT consultant (or at least play one on TV), it's time for you to get off your duff and work with the product so you get to know it and, therefore, develop your ability to support it for your clients. If you are a business owner, it's time to start thinking about if the upgrade makes good business sense to you.

I've already been seeing the arguments pro and con for the product out in the community, and for those that have asked about my take on it, my standard reply still stands - whether it makes sense to upgrade now or later depends entirely on the specifics of the client. Some people will need/want to move as soon as they can get their hands on the product. Others will wait until they have a clearer need for it. In my general conservative approach, I'm going to be taking a "wait and see" attitude for most of my clients. However, I have one that will be migrated pretty much as soon as we can get our hands on the software. It just depends.

Through this process, I've made some good friends on the Dev team, and I've been privileged to be involved in parts of the process that many people never get to see. I know they're all relieved to have finished this product, and they deserve whatever celebration is in store for them. The folks that have worked countless hours to bring you SBS 2008 definitely deserve major kudos - this was not an easy product to produce, and those of us on the testing team were not the easiest people to work with. But in the end, I think we're getting the best product that could be released at this time.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be talking more about my observations about SBS 2008 both here and on eOnCall. I'm also in the last stages of working on SBS 2008 Unleashed for Sams, due for release in November of 2008. But if you really want to know what the product is about, you have no choice but to get your hands on it and start working with it. No amount of reading blogs or sitting through web seminars or watching demonstration videos will give you the experience you need to run or support this product. Get out there and get after it!

On Migration

eriq — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 05:00:00 GMT

In the last few weeks, I've had an opportunity to give a presentation about the Migration options with SBS 2008 to a couple of different groups, one in Dallas and one in Detroit. As I went through the presentations, it became clear that the majority of folks in both rooms had not looked at the SBS 2008 migration document that's been produced by Microsoft, mostly because they didn't even know it was out there. So even though I will be giving the presentation at a few more groups over the next few months, I wanted to get my key point about Migration and SBS 2008 out there for those people who won't be able to hear about it from one of these presentations.

My talk focused on the MS Migration story for a variety of reasons. One, I know Jeff Middleton isn't ready with the Swing Migration process for SBS 2008 (but I also know he's working on it), and I really can't speak to a process I haven't seen. Plus, I'm not trying to take the thunder from Jeff about Swing when he does release the SBS 2008 edition. But I have gone through the MS migration process several times as part of the research for the SBS 2008 Unleashed book and the beta testing for the product, and doing the migrations uncovered for me what I believe is the most important thing you can do as a consultant to get ready for SBS 2008:

Learn the migration process. Period.

Whether you use the MS process or Jeff's Swing Migration, you will benefit greatly from starting to work with the migration process now. Don't wait until you get in front of your first migration for a client and try to review the white paper the night before. Don't download the Swing docs on the way to the client site. In fact, don't even schedule time with a client for migration until you've spent time learning how to do a migration.

There will be benefits and drawbacks to both migration processes. Learn what those are and understand why you are choosing one migration process over another. There will be times that a Swing will be the best migration method. There will be times when the MS process will be the best migration method. If you don't know both processes inside and out, you will not be able to make the correct decision for your client, which could end up being very costly for both of you.

We have what is supposed to be the final version of the Microsoft white paper on migration (in both web form and CHM (compiled help file) form) already available, so there is no reason you cannot start reading up on migration right now. You should, in fact. Then when Jeff releases the SBS 2008 version of the Swing Migration process, you can read through that and get familiar with it as well. Then you'll be well-versed in how to get your existing SBS 2003 customers onto SBS 2008 in the best way possible.

The other key reason I believe it's important to learn about migration is that it is the best way to learn about SBS 2008 in general. If you just join the beta and download and install the product, you'll get to see the surface of what's going on. But the migration process touches on every aspect of SBS 2008 - from Active Directory to Exchange to SharePoint to Group Policy and so on - so when you go through the migration process, you will learn about each of those apects of SBS 2008, and if you have not seen SBS 2008 yet, this will be a good way to get your hands dirty.

I will be up front, though. This will take time and effort on your part. The migration process is not easy, and not fast. If you try to skim through the docs or speed throgh a few trial runs,you WILL miss key aspects of the process and could run into problems down the road.

If you plan to be serious about supporting SBS 2008 as part of your business venture, start now to learn about migration so you'll be in a position to succeed when you are ready to move your clients, not in a position to fail miserably.

On Redmond in July

eriq — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Be warned, this is a long post. But the payoff at the end may well be worth the read.

This past week, I had an opportunity to work on a project at Mothership Redmond. In addition to the fabulous weather (highs in the upper 70s compared to the 100s back home, yet sunny and clear skies, go figure), I had was able to catch up with some people who I don't get to see very often: Amy Babinchak, Steve Banks, Mark Crall, Chris Rue, and Oliver Sommer. And those were only the folks who were on the same work project. I was also able to spend some time with Terri Schmidt, documentation manager for WEBS, and Kevin Beares, a name that should be familiar to everyone in the community. and while I do not want to belittle the time I spent with these folks and the discussions we had, the highlight of the trip for me happened on Friday.

Dean Paron, Group Program Manager for SBS, invited me to sit in on a ship room meeting the team had Friday morning. Since I'm not an idiot, I accepted the invitation without batting an eye, even though I had no idea what a "ship room meeting" was. But after sitting in on the meeting, I have a much deeper understanding of the process the team goes through to develop the product and bring it to market. And after confirming the NDA line, I'm blogging about it to shed some light to others who may be interested.

Anyone who has worked on any type of software development project, whether large and formalized like what MS and other large companies use or smaller and independent, will understand some of the basics of the development cycle. In the case of SBS, the process is a little differnet than for other products, because what the SBS team is developing is the "glue" that will allow all the disparate MS component technologies to run seamlessly on the same box. Oh, and there's the management tools, too. But the development folks on SBS are not writing code for Windows Server 2008 or Exchange Server 2007, instead they are taking those products and writing integration code. In many ways, this is a more challenging process, because to meet your own design goals, you have to deal with the building blocks that have been handed to you. If the team found, for instance, that the User Management tools would work a whole lot better if there were a change made in Windows Server 2008, they're not going to be able to go in and modify code in that product. Sure, they could request accomodations from that team while the product is in development, but once Server 2008 shipped, that was what they have to use to build their code.

Once they get the product matured to the point that they're ready for other people to start using it, they make the code available to certain groups of external users. This comes in the form of CTP (community technology preview) releases and then the beta releases. Generally, these external releases start with a very small group of outsiders, then expands to a larger audience as the product gets closer to release. SBS just announced the release of the RC1 build late this week, and it will be available to beta participants early next week. Many more people will look at RC1 than looked at RC0, or Beta 2, or Beta 1, etc.

The goal, as I understand it, of these releases is twofold. Early in the process, the goal is to get feedback on the functionality of the product as well as identifying any problems (bugs) in the code so that those bugs can be fixed in later releases. Later in the process, the functionality aspects are pretty much set in stone and the team is more interested in finding and fixing the problems instead of adding or removing major elements. That's where we are in the process of SBS at this point - the feedback Microsoft is looking for in RC1 is "what doesn't work" and "how significant of an impact will it have if it's not fixed."

People who participate in the beta process access software and feedback through the Connect site that Microsoft has put together for this process. When someone finds a bug, they are expected to enter that bug into Connect, then it gets on the developers' radar and they can start addressing the issue identified in the bug. But just because you enter a bug does not mean it will get addressed by the team the way you want it to. There are several bugs (and suggestions) that I've entered into the system that have not and will not be addressed by development, at least not in this release of SBS. Am I frustrated about some of them? Sure. But I also know I've identified a couple of bugs that did get fixed, and fixed immediately.

OK, so that's what we see on the outside. When I sat in on the ship room meeting Friday, I got to see what happens on the inside. And I have a better understanding of how and why the process works the way it does.

After Dean introduced me to the team in the meeting (more to confirm that I was under NDA), Cassie Hicks opened the list of outstanding bugs and went through them with the team to determine which bugs would get addressed and have fixes entered into the system before the next build was done, which was scheduled for Friday night. As each bug was introduced, the owner of the bug identified the status of the bug, and if a fix was not imminent, there was a brief discussion about what the next steps of the bug would be. No, I can't discuss any of the bugs that were brought up in the meeting, but it was pretty cool to see the process in motion.

Following the ship room meeting, a pizza party ensued celebrating several teams that had releases that week, including the announcement of SBS 2008 RC1. I was invited to attend with the rest of the team, which was an honor, and got to listen to all of the thank yous to all of the related team members who helped with each of the releases. While everyone ate, I was able to talk a little with Boodhisatva Deb and Sean Daniel, as well as Cassie Hicks. But the icing on the cake, so to speak, was getting to witness Kevin Kean have his head dunked in a large bowl of whipped cream (and yes, you can just make out my face in the background of the video).

All in all, a great week in Redmond, but now it's time to return home and take care of important matters. After I deal with a 4 hour delayed flight, that is...