SBS 2003 has everything you want — perhaps too much

OK, I’m supposed to be discussing solutions for managing Windows in the enterprise in this column, but enterprises come in more than one size. Some are huge, while others are, well, on their way to being huge. For those companies, especially those with 20 or fewer employees, the newly overhauled Microsoft SBS 2003 (Small Business Server 2003) is a great solution.

In its previous incarnations, I usually found SBS to be simply a bit too top-heavy for most small business customers. SBS 2003, however, underwent the Atkins diet and is now composed mostly of the three “everyman” applications: e-mail and calendaring, backup, and file and print services. E-mail and calendaring are provided via Exchange Server 2003 and Outlook 2003, while backup, file and print services rely on an optimized feature set within Windows Server 2003.

For those who want a little more, SBS also integrates a fax server and a Web-based desktop component that allows users to remotely access their personal files and e-mails via any Web-connected PC. It’s quite handy and easy to set up, especially with your typical small business firewall, like the SonicWall SOHO 300.

The fax server is my least favorite component, though it is functional as long as you don’t mind playing with hardware a little bit. But after encountering Venali’s  hosted fax via IP service, I see no reason for anyone to mess with fax boards or modems again, no matter what the size of their enterprise.

And should your particular humungous enterprise-in-the-making require yet additional products, such as a database, SBS 2003 can be integrated with pretty much any portion of Microsoft’s back-end server line, including those aimed at smaller workloads like MSDE (Microsoft Database Engine) instead of SQL Server 2003 .

What’s sweet about SBS from a consultant’s point of view is that setting up a small business from soup to nuts really becomes a 1-2-3 process. SBS with hardware will cost $1,500 or less and shouldn’t take more than three to six hours to properly configure as long as you’ve got the usual prerequisites in line: small business hosted ISP account with domain name, a SOHO firewall, anti-virus software, and probably Microsoft Office. Throw Symantec’s Ghost into the mix, and you can churn out complete small office IT kits, including server and clients, in just about a day.

Because SBS comes set up to use Remote Desktop and Terminal Services, accessing a client’s desktop for remote support is cake. Just make sure you’ve configured an encrypted account with the client’s firewall and you can probably take care of 80 percent of support calls over the phone.

The only gripe I have with SBS 2003 is that Microsoft saw fit to include both Exchange and Outlook. Because most customers also want to run Microsoft Office, you always bump into the question, “Well why do I have to pay for the same thing twice?” It’s not a major headache, but Microsoft could have made it a little easier if it left Outlook in the Office suite or provided an SBS edition of Office that lacked Outlook. Barring that minor nag, however, SBS has turned into a slick little piece of packaged software that can take a lot of the headaches out of supporting smaller customers.