Aidan Delaney (what an accent!) led the technical portion of the first stop (Redmond) of the SBS 2008 Partner Tour. As a VAR/VAP, I highly recommend attending – both the business conversation and the technical presentation were valuable. Aidan owns several facets of SBS 2008, including User Management and the Admin Console. A good guy to talk to!
You can see all the cities where the tour is visiting and sign up at: http://blogs.msdn.com/mssmallbiz/archive/2008/08/20/8881511.aspx
Steve heads up Banks NW – as well as leading the Puget Sound SBS User Group. Steve worked with Microsoft to have SBS 2008 presented to Partners via User Groups all over the United States during the month of September 2008. Steve has a blog with great info at:
Steve recommends as the single place to get started with SBS 2008: http://technet.microsoft.com/sbs
Attending the tour in person is really the BEST way, of course… And of course, installing SBS 2008 will (technically) give you the most preparation of all. http://www.MultiplyYourPower.com
The other great place to learn about SBS 2008 (and for some great parties too) is to attend SMBNation – the granddaddy of SBS Training… http://www.smbnation.com
You can see all the cities where the tour is visiting and sign up at: http://blogs.msdn.com/mssmallbiz/archive/2008/08/20/8881511.aspx
Kevin Watt from Microsoft spoke to Varvid about the Partner Launch Tour – how to attend in person, and how to attend virtually as the tour ends on September 24th (and again on November 12th). At the tour Kevin showed off the SBS 2008 Event Kit (available free!) at http://www.mspartnerdirect.com
You can see all the cities where the tour is visiting and sign up at: http://sbsc.techcareteam.com/archives/272
We enjoyed working with Steven Leonard and Mark Pendergrast on the WHS team, putting together a video case study on Windows Home Server. Full Disclosure – the subjects are the CEO (and his girlfriend) of a company we do Outsourced IT for (Blythe Plumbing & Heating). You can learn more about Windows Home Server here. I’m sure everybody reading this knows that WHS is a great "Home" Server, but we’re using it with four clients now in a business setting. We think that WHS is a great low cost way to backup Windows laptops and key desktops. Because the backups are image based, the backups happen super quickly (after the first one). You can learn more about WHS backup here. Keep in mind that whereever it says "family," we see small business. WHS works in a workgroup (or domain!) environment, and will backup up to 10 computers. (workgroup limitation)
We are also using WHS as a SOHO NAS – with hosted exchange as part of a managed service offering. We’re looking forward to S+S from Microsoft to help us expand on that combined local premise plus hosted solution…
When I was at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, I overlooked a great video from Chris Almida on SBS 2008 migration.
Chris is really sharp – and although it’s a long video – it’s well worth watching. You can download SBS 2008 (current candidate) and learn more about Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008 at http://www.multiplyyourpower.com
We installed SBS 2008 RC1 yesterday for our TAP client – The Bellingham/Whatcom Chamber of Commerce. Easy upgrade from RC0. We have watched them go from an old and horribly unreliable Novell network to a network that has never crashed with SBS2008. We’ve been running SBS2008 in production there since last December, and the productivity for the Chamber has skyrocketed – they now have reliable and secure Mobility (Windows Mobile 5/6), Sharepoint with a heavily used Wiki (WSS 3.0), great WSUS patching, and a solid and stable (and FAST!) operating system. SBS 2008 is impressive software, and EBS 2008 is starting to intrigue me more and more, because SBS 2008 is just so darned good.
Here’s a fun video from Sean Daniels (on the SBS team) showing Kevin Kean (his boss) getting some pie in celebration of RC1 shipping… Thanks to Arlin for pointing me at this post.
Sean’s got a great blog over at http://sbs.seandaniel.com/
If you use/sell/install SBS, you should be reading it regularly…
Peter Gallagher on SBS 2008 Migration
Peter Gallagher, Microsoft TS2 Team – Partner Solutions Advisor, talked to us about the migration strategy in moving from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008. He emphasized that these products are very different and will involve migrating from one server to another server. Microsoft is developing a migration process to assist partners in moving their clients to the new version of the software. Check out Peter’s blog at http://ts2blogs.com/blogs/petergal
