Microsoft Small Business Server 2003

The recipe for Small Business Server 2003 (SBS2003), Microsoft's server platform aimed at small businesses up to 50 or so seats in size, seems to be quite straightforward. Take the highly regarded SBS2000 product and roll in the Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003 updates that shipped previously. Add a few licensing tweaks here and there, and you have a pretty good grasp of the package.

To sum it up in such terms might well seem a little glib, but it's fairly close to the truth. SBS has always been a bundling package, whereby Microsoft took its large server-side products, bundled them together and placed a veneer of end user-oriented management into the package. As the years have progressed, however, the veneer has taken on the role of a worthwhile set of user interfaces, and with SBS2003 the Server Management tool is finally a truly comprehensive place to do all the tasks necessary to work with an SBS computer.

Getting SBS up and running isn't hard - just feed the CDs in, after which you'll find the DVD at the bottom of the pile. Using the DVD would have removed the need to change CD discs, so go for that if possible. You need a big box to run SBS. The combination of Windows Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, SQL Server and the firewall product is enough to bring a four-year-old system to its knees. Buy a new box for this product. Twin processors would be best, together with 2GB of RAM. And don't forget this needs a proper backup device as well.

Once you've installed SBS, there's a long checklist of things you need to work through before you're ready to let users log in. This is a good thing, because it makes you think about users, groups, security and more. Once you've got everything ready, it would be wise to do a complete disaster-recovery test. Do the backup, print and read the disaster-recovery documents and then attempt the recovery. If you can't make it work, don't even think about going live with the box. Indeed, if I was to criticise the installation and configuration of SBS2003, it's that it doesn't make you go through this route.

So what's the experience like once you get everything going? Well, it's an exceptional software bundle. Indeed, it's hard to see what else you could want to add to an SBS2003 installation. You get superb workgroup integration, in the shape of Exchange Server and SharePoint. The big problem is that you have to wrap your head around all the various components to get maximum value out of the system, and each component is huge in itself. Fault finding is thus something best left to the experienced, and the number of people who understand all of the components in SBS in a fault-finding environment is worryingly small. End-user fiddling is likely to make matters worse before they improve things.

So what don't we like about SBS? Well, it's easy to find cracks in the veneer of the whole package. For example, go to the section where you can add licences and click on the hotlink 'Purchase additional client licences', which opens up a web browser pointing at Microsoft. You're then faced with a message from Internet Explorer that it has been locked down and this site (yes, Microsoft.com!) isn't trusted. We also don't like the way SBS does its DNS, forcing you to implement a '.local' domain namespace for no apparently good reason. And there's the strong feeling throughout the product that you have to do things its way rather than how you might like it instead. So it expects the server to have two network cards and to be the bridgehead between the internal network and the outside world. This sort of stuff could cause a lot of tears before bedtime and make you rewire your networking topology.