You’ve more than likely heard that Microsoft are ending development of EBS with immediate effect. If you browse to the website you’ll see this

(eventually…I got this and the regular product page randomly on each page load)

There is also an an announcement on the official SBS blog

“New IT Trends Bring Change to Mid-Market Product Line”

This didn’t exactly come as a massive surprise. If you work in the SME market hands up who sold lots of EBS?

When the product was initially announced it sounded like an interesting proposition but I had a few problems making it “fit”

Comparisons to SBS are bound to happen so that’s where I’ll start!

SBS works because it fits really well into a couple of scenarios that met a need for small businesses

New company, first network, first server

Obvious really. New company, buying infrastructure to get started. Decides to do it right from the offset and goes for SBS

Existing company, existing network, first server

A company that’s grown and needs to go from that peer to peer network to their first server

Existing Company, existing network, replacement server

You know the type. They’re using a “beefed up" PC as a central storage area for their files or they have been sold sold a more expensive "big daddy” Windows Server for sharing files and have no other functionality

As a side note Windows Foundation with some hosted services thrown in could easily swap out for SBS depending on the size of the company

So where in comparisons does EBS fit?

That was my problem.

Business that were generally large enough to look at EBS don’t really fit any of the above

New companies generally don’t start out needing to support 50+ users straight away

Existing companies that have grown to that size do so for a reason and they’ve usually made their IT mistakes and got something in that fits well. Usually “big daddy” Windows server but they pay enterprise prices because there isn’t a product specifically for them. Hence the introduction of EBS!

Since most existing companies like this generally have decent enough networks running it’s difficult to justify ripping the whole thing out and starting again.

So the other scenario I see is the businesses reaching the upper limits of SBS

I actually have this exact scenario going on at the moment with one of my clients and have agonised over EBS vs the regular server products

One of the issues I had was with the “Security Server”

The client in question had already made investments in protecting themselves at the gateway with a dedicated hardware firewall so had no need for Forefront Threat Management Gateway and were already covered by a message hygiene solution so no need for the Exchange Edge role so what exactly were they going to use this server for?

If you are doing it the traditional way then it’s a whole physical server you just don’t need. Obviously you could virtualise it but it’s still a running server that you need to provide support for, patch management, etc  (* this is based on my understanding being that you have to roll out ALL the servers to make EBS work. If I’m wrong please correct me)

There is also another point made by Andy Trish (UK SBSC PAL), that I saw on an email discussion tonight I hope Andy won’t mind me quoting him

They were trying to sell to a market that didn’t need the resellers knowledge to install and support
We wanted to sell using our knowledge to a market who we wanted to get rid of their support and use ours.

Andy is spot on here. Companies of this size have grown up enough to usually have some sort of IT function in-house. They may lean on a support company for advice or specific project work but they’ll make their own decisions about infrastructure. They’ll already have a happy system ticking over quite nicely. What benefit will they actually gain by ripping it all out and replacing it EBS. Slightly simplified licensing and Remote Web Workplace? Technically there really isn’t anything in EBS they aren’t already doing

Again I have a client where a similar situation occurs. They run about 30 internal staff and some external staff. They are quite a technology smart company and don’t run SBS as they have been running multiple Windows servers before SBS was actually relevant (I’ve known this company a LONG time!)

They improved the system a server at a time and now have pretty much all the servers in the EBS stack

File and Print, Domain Controller, Exchange, SQL, ISA (at one point, that has gone now though)

While EBS looked like a decent fit here it would be at the expense of ripping it all out and starting from scratch. This obviously makes no sense.

We actually had the same discussion around SBS a while back with them but what benefit would they get from ripping the whole thing out to start again with SBS?

The killer SBS/EBS feature they don’t have natively is Remote Web Workplace. There are other options for this though such an SSL VPN device or TS Gateway. Remote Web Workplace would be great here but they’ve done ok without it so far

Obviously this all my opinion and very specific point of view. In some ways though it’s a brave decision for Microsoft to just cut their losses and continue with the stuff that does make money so maybe we should applaud them for that

If you’ve already purchase EBS though Microsoft will be making an limited time offer (June 30th to December 31th) available to transition onto the regular products. Someone will have to actually perform the transition which will have a cost attached so it’s not entirely free

So as Guy Gregory said in tweet earlier

Farewell Essential Business Server, we hardly knew thee.

As always your own opinion more than welcome via comment below or email!

After a ton of partner feedback the Microsoft UK team have decided to do away with the traditional all singing-all dancing launch event Emily Lambert and Gareth Hall have decided to take the event to the partners!

This means they will visiting the various user groups around the country to show off the brand new SBS 2008 and EBS 2008. The upside to this is that it will be a much tighter event and will also give a boost to the local user groups as partners who don’t usually attend wont have much choice if they want to be at the launch event!

The brief for existing AMITPRO members is also to “bring a friend” so if your based in the midlands area and you’ve never attended a user group meeting drop a comment here or email me at andy@ibitsolutions.co.uk and “you can be my dog” (terrible 80′s reference – I shouldn’t blog while under the influence)

So the date to mark in your diaries is Wednesday 12th November

AMITPRO normally meets on a Tuesday night but the shift to the Wednesday night it so that we can ensure the venue can accommodate us (we’d better make sure we all bring a friend!)

There will the usual network before and after the event so should be a good night!

As always check out the other AMITPRO blogger’s for their views

Vijay Riyait – UK SBSC PAL

Steve Wright – AMITPRO Leader

Richard Tubb – AMITPRO member

Also Emily Lambert from Microsoft blogs too

Make sure you attend!!!!

On the Microsoft download site I found this:

Windows Essential Business Server SDK

Brief Description

Public Preview Software – Release Candidate 0
The Windows Essential Business Server SDK provides a set of APIs for extending the functionality of the Windows Essential Business Server Administration Console.

Overview

The Windows Essential Business Server SDK gives you the tools and information to create application add-ins and security adapter add-ins that will enable a system administrator to manage even more applications and security issues. A system administrator can use add-ins to manage application and security data from additional sources in a familiar way.

I wonder if there will be one for SBS 2008?

Interesting……

I’m geeky enough to subscribe to the RSS feed for the Microsoft download site. A lot of the time there is plenty of stuff that just isn’t relevant but sometimes there is very cool stuff

Today was one of those days..

Click here to get “Public Preview Software – Release Candidate 0 of Windows Essential Business Server 2008″

You’ll need three 64-bit systems to play with this

There is a system requirements section on the page

Just to give you an idea of what you’ll need!