SBS 2008 – Some services not available in your area

Part of SBS 2008 involves the integration of some of the Office Live services that Microsoft have. It would appear based on this information that these are only available in certain geographic locations. One wonders therefore if the pricing for SBS outside of those locations will be cheaper given that Microsoft are not providing the same features. Tread carefully here Microsoft – it’s a thin line 🙂

What am I talking about here? At the bottom of this page Microsoft have indicated that the Office Live services are only available in US, UK, Japan, Germany and France. One hopes that by the time SBS 2008 ships that they will have coverage across the globe.

UPDATE: 4:30pm Sydney Time. Dean Paron just pinged me to clarify one aspect of this post (Thanks Dean). This is what he said (in loose terms).

“We’re implementing the Office Live integration within SBS as a sign-up wizard. It will be a very similar user experience to the Domain Name Management Wizard. The Office Live offering that we’re partnering with is the standard, free-of-charge offering and it’s opt-in via that wizard. So, there’s no cost attached to it within the SBS base price. That allows us to be fair to all our customers across geographies. However, unfortunately, even the free offer isn’t available world-wide at this time but as you suspect, that improves and gets better over time. So we built it into the product to account for that eventuality. As more geographies light up, the wizard will automatically handle them.”