SBS 2008 Product Launch Tour Visits Cincinnati

SBS 2008 Launch Tour visited our windblown and powered off (580,000+ outages) city yesterday.  We had to scramble and relocate the meeting so we didn’t have to run a PowerPoint presentation via candles. It was encouraging that a descent crowd found the changed last minute gathering spot.

Can’t say anything revolutionary was learned that I hadn’t already seen from using the SBS 2008 RC code but it was nice to converse with someone from the development team and marketing team.  It was also fun to throw out some suggestions to the guys who can implement them or directly influence those that can.  One suggestion that got good reception was for a web based matrix in order to provide a simple guide of upgrade options based upon licenses and CALS presently owned.  Bernardo Munoz, Microsoft Director of Marketing, took particular interest in surveying with raised hands how many current clients would likely upgrade during the next year.  The popular estimate was that 30-40% of businesses would upgrade and the remaining market for SBS 2008 would be new purchases.

There was quite a lot of conversation over the changes to the emerging licensing non-enforcement ‘honor code’ system and how that would play out in the competitive marketplace; it should be interesting to see if everyone plays fairly.   When things aren’t concrete there is uneasiness and that was revealed in spades.

We did learn that there will be a short term period in which Open Value Subscriptions might be leveraged to get a current SBS install qualified for an upgrade; however, as always the devil is in the details and we weren’t presented with those.  There is a licensing boot camp coming next week from the Heartland PCM, Brad Rozen, so I hope to learn more then.  My guess is that Eric Ligman will also have great and timely licensing and Open Value resources to support us during launch if they aren’t there already.

We were told that SBS 2003 R2 SKU’s will continue to be listed for sale through the end of October; so if you want to take advantage of SA rights and getting the extra software such as ISA 2006, an extra Server 2003 R2 license, Outlook 2007/Entourage, …etc and cheaper prices, the window is quickly closing to take advantage of the deal.

By the way, I would be remiss if I didn’t call attention to some nice rebates and incentives that have come in place such as the Big Easy 2.0.  Brad Rozen, Heartland PCM, touched on this and as always was very well heard; he can deliver and be understood throughout a crowded room.  Also Brad called the Partners’ attention to upcoming licensing boot camps including next Tuesday’s in the Cincinnati Microsoft Corporate offices.  Additionally others are scheduled in other cities in the upcoming weeks.

RWW with your own logo

To add your own logo to the SBS Remote Web Workplace aka RWW you merely need to replace the file shown below, RwwOEMLogo.gif, with your own .gif formatted logo.   The default is a blank 135×20 pixel rectangle – whatever size you bring in that fits in the RWW form window should be good to go.  The size of the header logo at the top is 448 x 175 pixels and its name is login.gif in case you want to modify it to carry that same look for use on the bottom logo.

Now Windows Home Server integrates this same RWW feature.  I’ll bet Kevin a dip of Graeter’s black-rasberry-chip that this works exactly the same in WHS.

Here’s my site in action:

Here’s another way I found it useful.  To notify those on vacation on cruise ships, skiing, or otherwise impractical to call that their access is suspended due to password security breach of a dismissed employee.  Can’t say that many words so brevity has its limits.  **FYI – notice something else customized?**

***late breaking update***

If you want your logo centered rather than alligned to the right you can make this happen.  Edit and search through the logon.aspx for this picture file’s name – ‘RwwOEMlogo.gif’.  Preceding it is the HTML code align=right.  Change “right” to “center” and you are golden.

A special note to the Paint.NET tool at www.getpaint.net .  It rocks!

What’s this ISA 2004 thing in the SBS R2 Premium suite?

Someone recently asked for my reflections on ISA and here’s what I came up with:

Is ISA valuable?  It is an enterprise class solution that does stateful packet inspection, can accelerate internet browsing through proxy caching, provides real-time monitoring and logging, with its firewall client desktop tool provides for sophisticated proxy bypass functionality, generates a very nice executive summary style daily report, is very simple and useful if you ever have the need to publish a website or application, and is great IMHO.  The logging feature can satisfy regulatory or compliance concerns and is a safety net of documentation should intrusion and/or information theft ever be an issue.  As a professional administrator it is worth learning.  Also the SBS CEICW will set up a basic foundation of firewall rules for most of whatever needs you are going to want including RWW, OWA, FTP, VPN, …from the CEICW firewall list of optional functionality.  For further inquiries on ISA, search www.isaserver.org where Thomas Shinder is the man.  Jim Harrison also has a website with very valuable downloadable tools at http://isatools.org with a pretty authoritative (and concise) list of links to ISA/SBS resources.

Do you have to install ISA along with the other Technologies Disk offerings?  No, each is an island to itself.  If you are going to install ISA & SQL it is worthwhile to install SQL first so that you have an instance to use optionally for ISA’s database.

A negative to ISA is that in the next version of SBS we have been told it won’t be included on the same box as SBS.  So using ISA today will provide you current value, protection, and usefulness but your experiences with it may not have a future legacy come the next rendition of SBS Premium.

Buying Retail Boxes from Microsoft? – Think About It

http://www.noretailbox.com/

Eric Ligman of Microsoft has again answered the bell with resources to take Microsoft Licensing to the people in plain “speaksy Englishy” style.  Perhaps you like having this information for yourself as an advisor or a reseller but this site is designed to be useful to your customer as well.  The business decision maker can see why they might want to consider Open License purchases whenever possible.

This site has some nice comparison visuals and the links at the bottom round this out as a singularly authoritative place to come first for SMB Microsoft software purchase guidance.  There is a reason why Eric doesn’t just table out the product sku’s and their estimated retail price amount.  They are not all the same.

To be fair you really need to know what each type offers and why you would want or recommend one option over another.  Not all businesses are built the same way.  That higher priced but three-year spread payment Open Value Licensing scheme may be right up the alley of some.  It certainly makes things easy to track and brings extras to tempt anyone on the edge of going one way or the other.

SBS R2 install and the ASP.Net version

While installing SBS R2, I recently ran across a limited web site lack of display issue and this began a conversation in the SBSC Private Managed Newsgroup under Windows Server Small Business Server.  Below I’ll copy and share the post I made on 8/21/2007.

Initially the thread advised using ASP.Net v. 1.1.4322 across all websites and at that stage of installation everything worked as anticipated.  After later changes happened resulting from remaining R2 Technologies Disk items and others described below, it was required otherwise to use the latest ASP.Net version.   I have not had any problems viewing Monitoring and Reporting or having RWW timeouts since upgrading to ASP.Net 2.0.50727.

“today after running through the rest of the install:

R2 Technologies Disk (Exchange SP2, SharePoint SP2, Update Services aka WSUS 2.0), then configuring IMF, adjusting SharePoint Central Admin UI settings, adding RipCurl Server side patch 911829, installing MS Report Viewer 2005, upgrading to WSUS 3.0, verifying Windows Server SP2 is installed and all other patches are up to date, and then making necessary changes for Outlook 2003 SP2 slipstreamed for SBS Client App deployment

…I discovered strange behavior in viewing browser views from within Server Management or Companyweb.  The message said to go to Application log in Event Viewer for more information.  There I was referred to KB894903 which provides for the ASP.Net version issue fix/upgrade.  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894903

Prior to the following step I made sure that SharePoint Central Admin website and Companyweb were both set to use ASP.Net version 2.0.50727.  The WSUS 3.0 Administration site does not offer the ability to change ASP.Net versions.

What I did was to type the following command: 

“stsadm -o upgrade -forceupgrade -url http://companyweb” (no quotations)

this was done from the directory of STSADM which by default is at:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\BIN

Now done everything seems to be working as intended and I have the benefit of using the more secure version of ASP.Net”