I posted a poll a little while back about the name for the next version of SBS. Microsoft will have their ideas, and as yet I’m not privy to what has been chosen. I thought it was interesting to see what people were thinking on this front. 
Most felt that SBS 2010 was the best name for the product and that was despite Microsoft not having announced a release date for it just yet, but based on peoples expectations that it would be released around 2 years after SBS 2008 was. What I thought was interesting most though was the percentage of people that said “I don’t care just give it to me now”.
My biggest thought is WHY? Why do you need it now? What fundamental features are missing from SBS 2008 right now that make THAT MUCH of a difference that you want it now? What is it that you need?
Tell me – I’m keen to know.
I would like to see a refresh based on server 2k8r2. I don’t think that’s going to happen so i would base the name on the year the suite is going to be released in. SBS however is getting a bit too expensive for true SMB’s….and with the cancellation of EBS I expect SBS to migrate higher in the business ladder(with the “required” price increase).
http://www.emmanuelcomputerconsulting.com/archives/2289
In say a second release of SBS 2008 say called R2, I would at least like the second license in the premium edition be Windows 2008 R2 from a Hyper-V Virtualisation point of view. Other then that the current release of SBS 2008 fulfills my clients needs.
Would really LOVE to see a version of SBS that is more along the lines of the Server 2008 Foundation, where we would get a version of SBS that is limited to maybe 15 users. Price it the same way Foundation is priced – something like $200 or $300. For true mom and pop style outfits, this will be more than sufficient and financially feasible. For businesses with 20 employees, the current SBS would work just fine, and priced as it currently is would make much more sense. It is very difficult telling a 3 or 4 person company that they need to spend over $1,000 on an operating system.
Great idea Warren – I know many of the SBS team read my blog and these comments with interest.
Fundamental features..!? It surprises me that you even ask the question. Features are not the issue in my opinion. It’s the bloat and hardware requirements. First, Exchange 2007 was never engineered to run on Server 2008 so there is an inherent flaw in the most coveted feature of the SBS product. Second, Exchange 2007 (and more so with 2010) was engineered for large enterprise and rapid scaling. As far as I can tell, EX2007 was not reworked in any way to get it’s system requirements in-line with a single server deployment. The performance is so atrocious that it really requires a dedicated Exchange box or a $6000 server which defeats the purpose of SBS, correct? WarrenG is spot on with the concept that the OS is over priced for the 3 or 4 person shop but that is only a small part of the cost. As I stated earlier, we are having to go to clients and say “well it’s $1000 for all these great Microsoft products that would normally cost you 4 times that much!!…Oh and by the way, you’ll need a $6000 server with split 15K SCSI drives, 12 gig of RAM, a quad core high end processor so it doesn’t run like a pig.” As a small business support vendor, I deal with 4 person shops up to 300 user shops (not on SBS obviously) on a weekly basis. I love the SBS feature set but what I want is an OS and feature set that can truly run on small business hardware.
SATA drives? Can’t keep up. Single SATA RAID1? Even worse. 4 Gig of RAM? Not even possible! Small Business Server should also mean Small Physical Server.
Mh,
an “R2” version would be sufficient, if these many errors would get corrected! Some examples? The integrated backup program should cut the logs after a successful backup (or the monitoring database will fill up the c: drive), the domain configuration wizard shouldn’t crash after you installed updates (so run the wizards before any updates and never touch it again!), WMI should get more stable so the SBS console won’t crashe on some machines after an uptime of about 2 weeks and the Hyper-V console should be able to connect to localhost (Microsoft support wasn’t able to solve this within 3 month and recommended a fresh installation!), the Sharepoint services should get preconfigured so you won’t have many error events in the logs (SharePoint Gatherer error every 15 minutes), the integrated POP3 connector should work flawlessly and should have a catch-all-mailbox option (not every customer has a broadband connection and the ability to use SMTP for incoming mails), and many many other things. Let’s say: A bunch of reasons similiar to why we waited for 7 after XP 😉