PreviousSunday 25 July 2004, 5:21 PM
Ideal for Small Businesses
As a Director of an IT company providing IT services for small businesses, we've rolled out several Small Business Server 2003 installations recently. Whilst I wouldn't recommend getting Dells preinstall (they seem to make some subtle but damaging changes to the setup compared to using Microsofts own clean install cd's), otherwise it's been 100% stable, and a joy to install for clients. It's a huge step over SBS2000, with nearly all of the major activities now handled within a single Server Management window using wizards, making it easy for clients to do simple things themselves.
Perhaps the only problem is that you can only have one SBS server in a domain, but for most businesses, if they need multiple servers, then they're doing so well they won't care about the cost of Windows Server 2003!
The recent release of IMF (Intelligent Mail Filter) as a free download adds effective and simple to setup junk mail filtering. SP1 for Exchange also adds even more functionality to OWA (Outlook Web Access).
The really neat thing is that there's a whole community of SBS techies out there; so most problems you get are already well documented and quickly resolved.
Overall, we now recommend SBS2003 to all our customers.
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