David spoke to us about some of the products that he is responsible for training partners on at Microsoft. They include SBS & EBS, but also the tools around them like the Best Practice Analyzer for SBS and the Preparation Tools for EBS. These tools are phenomenally useful in our practice as we evaluate a new client environment. David is also responsible for the newly updated Business and Technical Assessment.
First day wrap up at SMB Nation – Harry Brelsford
We interviewed Harry Brelsford about the first full day of SMB Nation 2008. Busy keynote and good sessions on SBS 2008. Interesting to see new vendors at the vendor hall entering our SMB Space – from NetEnrich to ClearOne to Calyptix. Lots more too… Harry and I had fun talking about how the first day went and what to look forward to tomorrow with EBS 2008.
Bjorn Levidow on EBS at WPC
Bjorn Levidow from the EBS team on varvid.com
We spoke with Bjorn Levidow, a program manager for Essential Business Server. Bjorn is really proud of the product and clearly has been working really hard to bring it to fruition! He feels that Small Business Specialists could really use EBS to grow their practices up to include midsized businesses by using the similar technologies they learned with SBS in more complex environments (with EBS). You can learn more about EBS at the Windows Server Blog. I also found some nice posts on EBS over at the D’Technology Weblog.
The HP C3000 and Greg Starks at WPC
Greg Starks from HP and the C3000 BladeServer on varvid.com
Greg Starks, Senior Member Technical Staff for Solution Alliances Engineering at HP, proudly showed off the C3000 Bladeserver. The C3000 was designed with Microsoft’s Essential Business Server 2008 (EBS) in mind – it’s a really cool running box – and it’s obviously pretty HOT too – Ready to ROK! 
FYI – Greg is also a MCSE and a MCDBA – pretty serious software AND hardware engineer… Susan Bradley over at SBSDiva.com did a great job covering the the C3000 today – so I’ll just point at her post in the interest of efficiency! http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2008/07/10/hp-and-smb.aspx
Eric Watson from the EBS Team at WPC
Eric Watson – Microsoft Group Program Manager for Essential Business Server spoke to us about EBS. He feels strongly that EBS is the foundation of a strong practice for VARs. He posted here about it being great for Line of Business Applications. You can read more posts from him on the EBS Blog at: http://blogs.technet.com/essentialbusinessserver/
