Microsoft announced about a week ago that SBS 2011 standard is now fully available from volume licensing through to OEM. I think this latest release of Small Business Server is a significant one for many reasons.

Lets go back a few years and a couple of versions and you’ll find working with Small Business Server 2003 was great. Aimed at between 5 and 75 user small businesses the standard and premium editions of the software were affordable and would run on pretty much on any decent bit of server kit you could find making them really easy to sell.

Microsoft recommended hardware requirements for SBS Premium (if you want a shock follow that link – and look at the minimum requirements)

• A Pentium III 550-MHz-or-compatible processor
• 512 MB of RAM (maximum RAM supported is 4 GB)
• Two or more mirrored 5-GB hard disks

Even though we all know these recommended requirements generally need bumping up a bit, a server with a dual or quad core processor, 4GB of RAM and at least one RAID array was still generally affordable for just about any small business.

SBS 2008 was released and the hardware bar jumped up.

• Processor: 2 GHz 64-bit (x64)
• RAM: Minimum: 4 GB Recommended: 6 to 8 GB
• Disk space: 60 GB

Again these specs generally need bumping up and it’s not uncommon to see a dual core processor, 8-10GB RAM and a couple of RAID arrays as a starting point for reasonable performance.

At this stage we started to the see the price start to get out of the reach of businesses in the 5-10 user range as the hardware costs began to rise. You could run SBS 2008 on lesser hardware but performance wouldn’t be great.

If you were putting together a hardware specification for a “cheaper” server such as a HP ML110 by the time you’d put enough RAM and disks in to get decent performance you weren’t that far off the price for a one of the servers higher up in the range such as the ML350. All this made the price creep up.

To get around this lots of IT providers started to get creative with things like Home Server and Foundation Server and SBS 2008 shifted to start at around 10-15 users. (I know I’m generalising quiet a bit here though)

Which brings us up to the latest release and these are the hardware requirements for SBS 2011 Standard.

• Processor: Minimum Quad core 2 GHz 64-bit (x64) or faster for 1 socket
• Memory: Minimum: 8 GB Recommended: 10 GB
• Disk Space: Minimum: 120 GB

See those processor requirements? That’s a quad core as a minimum and if it’s anything like SBS 2008 that recommended amount of RAM is probably better as your minimum amount meaning a larger outlay on server hardware again.

So as well as SBS 2011 Standard we now have SBS 2011 Essentials.

Built around the home server technology this brings most of the benefits of SBS 2011 Standard but without Exchange server (as one of the main standout differences), which is a part of the high hardware requirements, as well as no need for client access licenses.

What does Essentials need in terms of hardware?

• Processor: One 1.4 GHz (x64 processor)  Or, one 1.3 GHz dual-core
• Memory: Minimum: 2 GB  Recommended: 4 GB
• Disk Space: Minimum: 160 GB

Nothing too taxing and would work really well on a something like the HP Proliant Microserver that I mentioned recently.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned the cloud at all here. Everything I’ve mentioned above is still applicable whether you’re moving applications to the cloud or not. Whether you should is another discussion altogether and a lively one based on sessions I’ve been a part of at AMITPRO.

So what’s my point? Well right at the start I said this that is an important release for the SBS range.

Now that we have a two very distinctively different editions in the Standard Edition and the Essentials Edition I imagine the sales figures will determine the future of the product range.

It may very well be that we’ll eventually see Exchange server disappear from the SBS range and we could quite possibly go back down to just a single edition of the server.

The only other thing that I’ve been thinking about is the migration path as a small business grows.

It used to be really simple. Start with SBS (2003/2008) and you could stay with it until you grew past 75 users and you moved onto the “regular” server range.

Now there is a bit of a weird overlap.

A small business can start with SBS 2011 Essentials. If they outgrow Essentials where do they move to?

You’d expect the natural answer to be SBS 2011 Standard which allows up to 75 users but what about email?

Since Essentials doesn’t have Exchange server, email will be provided by a hosted/cloud service.

If you then move to SBS 2011 Standard you’ll be bringing e-mail back in-house. What if you’re quite happy with your hosted email service? Sure you could just not use the Exchange part of SBS 2011 but look at the hardware muscle you’ll need to pay for just to run an Exchange server you’re not going to use.

Does that mean you’d just jump over SBS Standard to the “regular” range (including the need for client access licenses – that’ll scare them )

If this happens, SBS Standard suddenly only fits a specific niche at the higher end of the market which is unlikely to need a server to work in the 25-75 user range as their first server…..doesn’t that sound a little like EBS? (on a massively over simplified basis)

This post isn’t intended to give SBS a hard time, I’m still a huge SBS fanboy and I’m really looking forward to working with both editions of the product. I’m just interested in where we’re be going over the next few years and the conversations I’ll be having with clients and other SBSC partners. 

Really very interested on any thoughts you might have on this.

I had a hard time thinking of a title for this post and I’m not entirely sure if it’s applicable…but it’ll do!

Yesterday I read a post called

“Dropping my MVP”

The post from David Woods who was until very recently an MVP in developer security.

David isn’t happy with his experience of the MVP program and has decided not accept any further awards.

Now it’s not actually David’s post that prompted my post. It’s some of the comments made.

1) “As someone who is trying to get into the MVP program but has not succeeded yet I can’t speak to your comments on that.”

2) “My observation is that there are people who are professional MVPs; it’s not that they are experts who end up being selected, it’s that they are consultants, writers, and trainers who need the credential as a part of their job.”

3) “Don’t disagree at all about the MVP; from what I’ve seen it’s way too easy to “game the system”. Do the right things to get the MVP, then just coast for years.”

I’m just curious to know what other IT Pro’s (and MVPs!) think about the program and similar community recognition.

I always thought MVP status was something that was awarded to you as a recognition of things you were doing in the community, regardless of any rewards.

How can you getting into the program be a goal? Something you intentionally seek out?

Surely that would be like me working towards becoming an MBE?

This isn’t in anyway belittling the MVP program or the people on it as this isn’t what its about. You can swap out MVP for any other community recognition award.

I’ve met lots of MVPs and they work they do is fantastic. The amount of their own time, money, blood, sweat and tears (etc) they put into community participation just because they want to should be commended.

I’m very interested to get other peoples thoughts on this. Do you look at any work you do for the IT community with your CV/Status/Image/etc in mind? or is it just a happy consequence of something you’d be doing anyway?

Just following on from my last post about SBS 2008 setup hanging while expanding and installing files.

I mentioned in the last post that since it appeared to be Windows Update causing the problem I was hoping the update got stuck would be downloaded again when I manually ran the updates.

So I started the update process and got exactly the same thing.

The progress bar sat doing nothing for ages, simply telling me it was “downloading updates”.

I mentioned in the last post that I’d forgot to the use the /ALLUSERS switch with BITSADMIN so I may have missed queued jobs. Turns out i was right. This time there was a number of jobs listed and as they were getting downloaded they started to drop off the list until I was left with job three or four jobs.

The byte count on these jobs didn’t appear to be changing so it looked like the jobs were stuck so my first port of call was to restart the BITS service.

This seemed to have some effect as the byte counts started to go up again.

However, even when the downloaded byte count matched the file size byte count the jobs were still displayed.

Each jobs status was set to “transferred “ but didn’t look like it was going anywhere.

I found this helpful post on the lifecycle of a BITS job which says

The job moves between the queued, connecting, and transferring states until BITS transfers all files in the job. At that point, the job moves to the transferred state. BITS uses round-robin scheduling to schedule jobs that are at the same priority level. Each job is given a slice of time to process its files. If the job does not complete during its time slice, the job goes back to the queued state and the next job in the queue is activated. This prevents large jobs from blocking smaller jobs. Jobs are processed largely on a first in, first out (FIFO) basis; however, BITS cannot guarantee FIFO processing because of round-robin scheduling, job errors, and service restarts.

So for some reason the job wasn’t reaching the “complete” stage.

I initially didn’t think this would be a problem as BITSADMIN has the /COMPLETE flag but when I ran it I was given an access denied error.

The penny dropped then and I realised why I hadn’t seen the jobs until I used the /ALLUSERS flag. The job owner was set to the system account so even though I was logged in as the administrator I couldn’t make changes to the job.

Once again I thought BITSADMIN would come to my rescue as there is a “/TAKEOWNERSHIP” flag. My optimism was short-lived though I got the access denied message again.

So my dilemma was that I needed to mark the job as complete while being logged in as the system account. How was I going to do that?

Then I remembered one way of getting something to run under the context of the system account

Scheduled Tasks!

I setup a batch file with a single command for each listed job

BITSADMIN /COMPLETE <job number>

Then I set it as a scheduled task to run in a few minutes time.

Once that was complete both of my jobs disappeared from the job queue and my windows update completed as normal.

I’m still at a bit of a loss as to why the jobs were stuck in the first place but I’m just happy it worked in the end!

A full list of the BITSADMIN switches are here

How very annoying this was.

I’m setting up an SBS 2008 server for a client and the setup process got to the “expanding and installing files” part.

It was running in the background whilst I was doing some other bits and pieces but I noticed it had seemed to get stuck right at the end for some time.

As is always the way when waiting for software to install I thought it was just me so left it a bit longer. (Progress bars play tricks with your mind!)

Eventually I realised nothing was going on so pressed ALT+F10 to bring up a command prompt.

From here I opened the log file

C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Logs\SBSSetup.log

and found this at the bottom

Looking at the timestamps it had been at this stage for some time so I figured the downloading of the update had stalled.

I used the BITSADMIN tool to see if there were any queued up jobs but no luck. Though on reflection I forgot to use the /ALLUSERS flag so there could have been jobs queued that I didn’t see.

I disconnected the network cable and reconnected it with a faint hope it might kick off the download again but no luck.

I even restarted the DHCP Client service with a similar hope but nothing happened.

So I bit the bullet and used “net stop wuauserv” and “net start wuauserv” to restart the Windows Update Service.

The progress shot to the end, SBS setup finished and within in a couple of minutes I was at the desktop.

The SBS Console reported this installation issue.

Since the problem seemed to be just on the download of an update and not an install I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to run Windows Updates again to pick up whatever didn’t get installed.

The main frustration was that I didn’t know there was an issue as there was no feedback to think there was anything wrong.. It was only the fact I thought it was taking too long that made me investigate. I could have very easily have left it running overnight to have come back the following morning just to find it in the same state!

This is where practise makes perfect. I’ve seen the SBS setup process run so many times I know roughly how long it should take to complete.

Anyway – the SBS logs directory is a really great source of information. I may have linked to this in the past but there is a great post on the official SBS blog about them.

* UPDATE * – I wrote a follow up post about this as my problem wasn’t entirely sorted!

Looking back at my recent posts it looks like this is all I talk about at the moment!

Anyway….after giving this presentation to both AMITPRO and the North West England SBSC Group I’ve been asked to do it again by Chris Timm from the Thames Valley Group.

The meeting is on November 4th in the Symantec building, Green Park, Reading (RG2 6UH)

Doors open around 5.15 with the meeting to start at 5.30

But wait there’s more!

At this particular even you’ll get two AMITPRO members for the price of one as Richard Tubb from JamesCash.co.uk will be delivering the Business Processes for SMB IT Companies presentation he gave at AMITPRO earlier in the year.

Richard is a great speaker and I’m looking forward to hearing the presentation again.

As always when I’m out and about if you read my blog and you’re going to be there let me know as I’m always happy to talk geek with people!

If you’ve never been to an SBS user group meeting before and this is in your area let me know and I’ll be happy to get you an invite.

I may have mentioned once or twice over the last couple of weeks I’d been invited to the Manchester SBSC group to deliver the presentation I gave at AMITPRO a few months ago.

So last Thursday I made the trip up to Manchester and as I’ve done every time I’ve presented to a user group I thought it’d critique myself again (in the interests of self improvement of course!)

But before that the rest of the event.

First I’d like to thank Simon Belt for organising the event and for very kindly hanging around for a couple of beers afterwards.

Next, thanks to the group members for their kind welcome and for not heckling.

Finally the other speaker of the night, Gary Duffield of QA. Garry attended WPC this year and gave a great presentation which summarised the key points that came out of the event and where Microsoft and their partners are heading in the near future. The session was very much discussion based and it was great to see that interactivity and gave everyone some good ideas to think about.

Garry also has a blog you can check out.

So onto my presentation.

On the whole I was pretty happy. I’ve had some nice follow up comments which I always appreciate.

What did I think though?

Preparation

I mentioned in my previous review that I’d used OneNote to put together an outline to work against and I was pleased with how it helped me last time. Because of the way i put it together it made the presentation much easier to pick up and and repeat (it’s the first time I’ve ever done a talk twice!). That said the first time around I created the presentation and then delivered it shortly after I’d finished it so it meant I knew everything inside out. While I had gone back through my notes when preparing I didn’t quite know it in the same way as first time around. Luckily the notes helped so while I did forget to do a couple of things it was very easy to pick that up.

As a result I actually didn’t build-up the application as much as last time. I did do enough to get my point across though even if I did race through a lot of it. I don’t think there is a lot I can do about this other make sure I’ve got enough time as possible and know the steps as well as I can. Building a fully working SharePoint application and explaining everything along the way in a hour is an ambitious thing to do but worth racing through if it gets people thinking about how they could do it.

Speed

When I gave this presentation for AMITPRO I didn’t use a slide deck (it wasn’t actually intentional) this time since very few people in the room knew me I started with the slides to introduce myself. There weren’t many slides but because of how much content there is in the demo to get through it stole a bit of my time. I’ll bear it in mind next time if it’s a packed agenda and maybe go back to the PowerPoint free presentation Guy praised me for last time.

Demo

I know a good workman shouldn’t blame his tools but I’m going to anyway. My laptop is a couple of years old now. It’s got an Intel mobile chip (so no virtualisation extensions!) with 3GB of RAM. While it just about ran the two virtual machines I used it very obviously struggled at times and it slowed the presentation quite a bit which wasn’t helpful when I had so much to get through. When I purchased the laptop I never really expected to be using it for running virtual machines for demoing SharePoint to a user group. Times have moved on though and user group presentations aside, the ability to run virtual machines on the go has lots of other benefits. I’m not planning on rushing out and getting a new laptop but when my next hardware refresh comes around I’ll be able to factor it in.

Not too much to complain about on the whole!

It was also good to see how another user group runs. Other than AMITPRO the only other time I’d been to another group was when I visited the Bristol group for the SBS 2008 launch. That was a slightly different format because of the SBS launch so I’m counting this as my first time!

Thanks again for to everyone who attended the meeting. Would be great to hear any comments you have!

I’ve been waiting to post this as I wanted to make sure it was shared on the official site first!

As you may or may not know (if you read this blog or know me you should!) I can quite happily ramble on about SharePoint in a small business context for a long time. So much so that I get to stand up in front of the AMITPRO members and bore them from time to time

So after the last time Simon Belt from the North West SBS group asked if I’d go up to Manchester to bore them too and give a repeat performance and I was happy to say yes.

The meeting is on August 19th at 18:30 at QA’s training facilities on the 3^rd Floor, Westminster House, Minshull Street, off Portland Street, Manchester M1 3HU

Full details of the event are here

Let me know if you’re planning on attending?

I’ll be staying overnight so if anyone wants to chat about all things SBS-related I’ll be happy to do so.

Also if you’re in and around the North West region and have never visited an SBS user group meeting why not make this your first?

I’ve been told there will be pizza!

I was recently migrating a client from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008.

I was using the Microsoft method (backed up by the techniques in Dave Overton’s book!) and having ran the source tool on the old server I kicked off the migration on the new server and got this error.

Weird….I’d ran the source tool without issue?  

So I rebooted and ran it again yet I still repeatedly got the same message.

I found an article on the official SBS blog outlining the error but it basically says the resolution is to run the source tool.

Confused I decided that there must be a log somewhere so called up a command prompt (did you know you can do this during setup? press SHIFT+F10) and changed to the log directory.

SBS 2008 keeps all the major logs in one place.

C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Logs

There is a post on the official SBS blog about this with full details.

So I opened the setup log and saw lots of passes until I got to this.

[3040] 110609.125848.6694: Setup:     Setting sValueName to MigrationReady
[3040] 110609.125848.6694: Setup:     ReturnValue=0
[3040] 110609.125848.6694: Setup:     uValue=1
[3040] 110609.125849.3246: Setup:     Setting hDefKey to 2147483650
[3040] 110609.125849.3246: Setup:     Setting sSubKeyName to SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SmallBusinessServer\Migration
[3040] 110609.125849.3246: Setup:     Setting sValueName to LastCheckTime
[3040] 110609.125849.3246: Setup:     ReturnValue=0
[3040] 110609.125849.3246: Setup:     sValue=2010-06-10T09:50:48.3281250+01:00
[3040] 110609.125849.3246: Setup:     Error – Run the Migration Preparation Tool on the Source Server – Has Help

Basically the new server connects to the registry on the old server and checks various things. In the section of the log I’ve listed above it shows the “MigrationReady” value. This is how the wizard knows if the source tool has been run as it sets this value.

The final check is the date stored at “LastCheckTime”

When you start the migration you get 21 days to complete everything. I was doing all this on the same day so I initially thought checked everything OTHER than this.

I tapped a couple of friends up and got suggestions such as bad media and OEM specific media and I was considering starting again when I checked the date and time on the NEW server using the DATE command at the command prompt and the penny dropped.

The time was correct as was the day and the month but the YEAR was set as 2011.

No wonder it didn’t work! As far as the server was concerned I was well over the 21 days!

I’m still trying to figure out why the year was wrong on the new server. It may have been human error but I can’t say for sure.

Anyway once I corrected the date the wizard carried on as expected.

It would have been helpful if the wizard displayed a more specific error but at least the logs were there to help me out.

I’ll definitely double check the date and time settings next time around.

Urgh….I meant to do this a lot earlier but I’ve had a crazy week since the AMITPRO meeting last week. I’ve got a back log of posts I want to put together but between holidays, hospitals and a couple of major client projects I’ve been at full tilt since then.

Anyway, back to the point!

Last time I spoke at an AMITPRO meeting I posted a brief “critique” of myself so I could figure out where I went right and wrong so I thought it was worth doing again.

First of all though a big thank you to everyone that attended!

We had a really great turn out and as well as our regular crowd there were a lot of new faces as well as appearances from some familiar faces we haven’t seen for a while. Thanks everyone for making the effort.

So what did I think?

Demo – Something I’d mentioned in my last critique was that I’d wanted to have a lot more structure in the demo itself. This was even more important subject matter and I’d used OneNote to great effect to give myself an outline to work against which meant everything went far more smoothly.

Speed - I didn’t quite feel as rushed as last time. By that I mean myself. I really did go through the demos quite quickly because I had a lot to try and do in a short space of time but I felt a lot more relaxed when speaking which will be down to experience and the fact it’s not the first time I’ve presented to the group.

Slides – Even though Guy very kindly made it look like I’d dropped the dreaded slides I had put together a very small deck that I didn’t get to use. I was still running the Office 2010 beta on my laptop and when I tried to open the file I got an error. Because I was literally minutes from speaking I just made the decision to drop them. When I checked it again afterwards it turned out I could have clicked through the error and used the slides. Which brings me onto my next point.

Organisation (1)– There had been a mix up at the venue about the room we’d booked and we were in a room for 10-15 with almost 30 people. I’d already started to setup in the smaller room when we needed to move. Also since I’m involved with the organisation of the event I had to help sort the new room,  get everyone moved and setup again. I then ended up speaking first instead of second so I was in a massive rush to get started as we were now running late.

Organisation (2) – While the previous point was a little out of my control this wasn’t. I’d setup my demo on my home setup with the intention of copying it to my laptop I’d use on the day. On the morning of the meeting I took my virtual machines to the offices with intention of tweaking my machines and going over my notes. We had such a busy day at the office that it just didn’t work out that way.

At around half three I realised I needed to setup a scheduled task to make everything easier. However, my server machine was running like a dog and generally unresponsive. I’d run a couple of VM’s on my laptop before no problem but was now panicking. After a bit of investigation I found a couple of articles that indicated that laptop hardware can go into reign in the CPU when VMs are running as it thinks the system is actually idle (though I don’t know if this actually true!)

So in my panic I uninstalled Virtual PC 2007 and installed Windows Virtual PC so I could make a setting change that would overcome this. At the same time I totally forgot that the VM’s aren’t directly compatible so it was almost four thirty (i.e time to leave!) and I had no way to run the demo! I quickly got rid of Windows Virtual PC, loaded Virtual PC 2007 back up and left for the meeting.

On the way I realised in my rush I hadn’t copied my slide deck onto the laptop. Once at the meeting I had to fight a dodgy 3G signal to try and remote back to the office and grab the file. My intention was to get everything prepped while the other speaker was on but I ended up going on FIRST!

I was quite lucky in that other than the slides everything from a demo perspective went to plan.

The lesson to learn was that I should have included the actual laptop the demo would run from as part of demo build instead of just assuming it would all work as expected.

Thankfully I’d prepared my demo and notes in such a way that I was able to get back on track quickly even though I was quite flustered at the beginning

All in all I was pleased with how it went.

I still don’t think I’m a natural presenter but hopefully anyone who was there learning something. If they did then it was mission accomplished.

I got some very nice comments from people in attendance and via Twitter and e-mail the following day which were much appreciated.

There was a TON of stuff I’d actually prepared that I just didn’t even cover because of time and the fact I didn’t want to go on for too long and have everyone lose interest. I joked during the presentation that I can talk for HOURS about SharePoint but in all honesty I was being serious!

Yeah i know….me again.

We’ve had a speaker drop out at short notice so I’m going to speaking at AMITPRO this month. The topic is one you’ll probably know is something I quite like talking about – SharePoint!

My presentation will be titled – SharePoint as a Helpdesk

I’ve had the idea for the while so it’s something Guy and I have been sort of keeping in reserve just in case we had any issues with speakers so I finally get to roll it out this month.

So what exactly do I mean by SharePoint as a Helpdesk?

One thing I’ve found when talking to other partners is that because SharePoint is such a flexible (large?) product is that many of them find it difficult to get into quickly. I can understand this as it can be an awful lot to take in.

However, I really do think many partners are missing out on revenue opportunities because of this! Now that don’t necessarily mean you need to instantly became a master in SharePoint but if you have a basic understanding of what it can do then you can always partner with a company that does if you have a client who might benefit from such a solution.

Partnering with other companies is something SBSC partners are good at!

So….what I’m going to try to do in the time I’ll have is to create a basic helpdesk. All IT companies know what a helpdesk is and what sort of functionality it needs so we can create a quick and dirty SharePoint application that showcases what SharePoint can do.

I’ll be touching on,

Lists and Libraries.

Columns and Views.

Content Types and E-mail Integration.

Web Part Pages and Web Parts.

SharePoint designer and Workflows.

Office integration and Mobile access

And if there is time another topic I like to shout about…InfoPath

Time depending of course!

Our other speaker is Dell Quinn from Microsoft.

She’s going to talk about the changes to the Microsoft Partner Network and how it’ll impact Small Business Specialists.

All this as well as the usual pre and post event banter that goes on at any AMITPRO event!

As always guests are more than welcome. If you’ve never attended a user group event we’ve love for you to come along.

If you’d like to know more than leave a comment here, visit the AMITPRO site or get in touch with me directly (or on Twitter)

Look forward to seeing you there!