Windows Small Business Server 2008 Unleashed - Softcover

Eriq Oliver Neale is the owner of EON Consulting (http://www.eonconsulting.net), a small business technology consulting practice in Denton, Texas, and a partner in Third Tier (http://www.thirdtier.net), an organization that provides escalation support for IT organizations around the globe. He is an internationally-recognized Small Business Server expert, and has been awarded the Most Valuable Professional designation for Small Business Server since 2005. Eriq was the lead author for Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Unleashed, and his other writing credits include contributions to The Internet Unleashed 1997, Windows 2000 Server System Administrator’s Handbook, E-mail Virus Protection Handbook, and several books in both the 2000 and 2003 series MCSE exam preparation series.

Eriq is a 20+-year veteran in the IT industry, getting his start with DOS 2.1 and Novell 1.1. Over the course of his career, he has worked with various operating platforms (Microsoft, Apple, Novell, UNIX, Linux, VAX, AS/400), and he has focused on providing integration solutions for differing platforms. He has worked for small organizations, as well as Fortune 500 companies. Eriq’s introduction to the Small Business Server product line came in a one-year stint supporting the product for Microsoft Product Support and Services in Las Colinas, Texas. Since then, he has been focusing on providing solutions to make running and supporting SBS easier.

In addition to writing, Eriq maintains two blogs, one technical (http://simultaneouspancakes.com/Lessons) and one business-focused (http://msmvps.com/blogs/onq), and hosts a technology-focused weekly Internet radio program for small business owners (http://www.eoncall.com). He speaks regularly at industry conferences and user groups on a variety of SBS-related topics.

Eriq is a native Texan and makes his permanent residence in Denton. He is married, and he and his wife have a menagerie of animals for children. When not writing, blogging, or speaking about technology, he can be found attending baseball and women’s college basketball games, writing and recording music, or reading mysteries.

Amy Babinchak has officially been in IT since 1994 and unofficially for 10 years prior. Like many IT professionals, she started out helping people around the office and in the college dorm to build and use computers. Her knowledge grew from MS-DOS and the early PC applications into a full-time career, when she made the switch from professional environmentalist working from grant to grant into the world of enterprise IT support. In her career, she has supported MS-DOS, Windows 3.11, Novell, and Mac OS, all the way on up to the current versions. Having started her career in enterprise support, Amy noticed that many small businesses were languishing with poorly conceived networks and lack of consistent support. Excessive travel coerced her into opening her own business in 2000.

Amy is now the President of Harbor Computer Services (http://www.harborcomputerservices.net) to serve small businesses in the metro Detroit area and a Managing Partner in Third Tier (http://www.thirdtier.net), which provides escalation support services to IT organizations around the world. Harbor Computer Services has been recognized as a Small Business Specialist (SBSC). Amy actively participates in two local user groups and several online newsgroups. She has spoken at local and international conferences on SBS technical and security topics, including SMB Nation and SMB Summit. Amy is a Forefront MVP and has contributed her technical writing skills to Microsoft SBS 2003 Unleashed and various web sites. When these things don’t keep her busy enough, she provides remote support services for small business consultants using ISA. Amy firmly believes in maintaining work-life balance and has designed her company around this concept. She practices what she preaches by spending as much time as possible on her sailboat, cruising northern Lake Huron.

Steve Banks is a speaker, author, and consultant focusing on the small business space and Windows Small Business Server. With more than 17 years in computer technology fields, he is also the founder of the Puget Sound Small Business Server User Group and president of Banks Consulting Northwest Inc. Steve has collaborated with Microsoft, Forbes, and Hewlett-Packard on white papers and case studies focusing on TechNet, Small Business Server 2000, and Windows Small Business Server 2003.

Timothy Truman Barrett is cleverly disguised as a mild-mannered geek. He actually is a happily married man with his lovely wife of 18 years, Dayna. They have two wonderful daughters, Stephanie and Lauren, who are also lovely. And Tim hates monkeys. A lot. Obsessed with building things from Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys almost from birth, Tim finally got his first computer at age 15--an old used TRS-80 Model I. It had no instructions or manuals, but by trial and error, he figured out how to make it work. He also learned BASIC and spent the entire summer bugging his mother and six siblings by constantly showing them all the “cool” stuff he could do with it. After studying computer aided drafting (CAD) and physics at Louisville Technical Institute, he went to work in the healthcare industry and then moved into information technology. As a veritable jack-of-all-trades, Tim has worked with just about everything: sewing machines, table saws, X-ray machines, IBM mainframes, phone systems, servers, PCs, and the occasional backhoe.

At age 39, Tim is currently a Microsoft Certified Professional, a Microsoft Small Business Specialist, Microsoft SBS MVP, and the founder of the Kentucky Small Business Server User Group (KYSBSUG). His motto is, “No Geek Left Behind.” He also has strong religious values as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Susan Bradley blogs at www.sbsdiva.com (http://www.sbsdiva.com) and writes on patch management issues for Brian Livingston’s Windows Secrets newsletter. In addition to being one of the writers on this book and Windows Small Business Server 2003 Unleashed with Eriq Neale, she has been a contributing author to the Windows Server 2008 Security Resource Kit, and she has been a contributing author for Harry Brelsford’s SBS 2003 Best Practices book.

Dean Calvert is owner and managing director of Adelaide-based Calvert Technologies (www.calvert.net.au), a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, and South Australia’s first Small Business Specialist. For more than 13 years, Calvert Technologies has been one of Adelaide’s leading providers of IT solutions and services in the SMB market. Dean has presented at SMB Nation (Seattle and Redmond), Microsoft ANZ Partner Conference (Sunshine Coast), Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (Boston and Denver), and TechEd (Gold Coast and Sydney). He often works with Microsoft to present at partner and customer events throughout Australia. In October 2004 Dean became a Microsoft MVP (SBS) and was selected as Australia’s first Small Business Specialist Community Partner Area Lead for the 2007—2008 year. Dean also facilitates the Adelaide SBS Users Group (www.sbsusers.net) which has been running since July 2003. Dean is extremely fortunate to be the husband of Vivienne and father of Reece and Brittany, who regularly pull him away from his computer to show him what life really is all about.

Cris Hanna, BS, SBS-MVP, is the only remaining original SBS MVP, first recognized by Microsoft in 1997. Cris holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems and in Management from Park University. Cris is the owner and principal consultant of Computing Possibilities Unlimited in Belleville, IL and focuses on Small Business Customers and consumer support. With over 20 years experience in IT, ranging from enterprise to single users, you can typically find Cris regularly posting in the Microsoft Public Newsgroups specifically focused on Small Business Server.

Cris is the founder of the St. Louis area Small Business Solutions Group, made up of Microsoft Partners who focus on providing software and services to small business.

Kevin James is a solutions architect with more than 15 years of IT consulting experience in Microsoft technologies. He provides services and solutions to large international corporations and small business entities alike through organizations like Microsoft Consulting, HP Services, and his own consulting company. Kevin James is now in his second consecutive year as a Microsoft Small Business Server Most Valuable Professional award recipient.

Jeff Middleton is well recognized worldwide in the Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) community, known as a speaker, author, advisor, and technical community leader. Microsoft has awarded him each year since 1999 with the prestigious Small Business Server Most Valuable Professional recognition. Based upon 20 years of experience as a consultant and system integrator in small business and vertical market applications, he’s operated his own business located in New Orleans since 1990. Jeff’s name is now synonymous with Swing Migration, the worldwide SMB consultant’s choice of methodology for SBS Server replacement. He founded SBSmigration.com in 2004, providing a technical mentor and training product as a project consultant to consultants. His work is both published and cited in books and trade journals.

As an expert in disaster recovery, domain migration, and a full-range of topics on the SBS and Windows platforms, Jeff travels constantly as a popular speaker. He has presented at conferences internationally including the Microsoft Partner Program, Tech Ed, SMBTN, ITA, and SMB Nation, as well as lending his support in person as a guest speaker to more than 50 local IT Pro groups of all sizes in North America, Australia, and Europe. Starting in 2007, he launched the SBSmigration.com IT Pro Conference held annually during May in New Orleans, offering a unique discussion forum for experts in SMB business and technology.

David Shackelford works for himself as an instructor and gun-for-hire for Exchange, Windows Server, and SBS-related projects. He plans deployments and migrations, conducts audits, and troubleshoots Exchange and SBS problems around the world, all remotely from his office in Olympia, WA. He is associated with CoopLink Ltd, a Microsoft Gold Partner, where he serves as the network architect and project planner. David actively participates on the technical forums at Tek-Tips.com and other random places where Exchange and SBS are being discussed, and he authored a TrainSignal video course on Exchange 2007. He has been awarded the Microsoft MVP award for his contributions to the Exchange community every year since 2004, and keeps a close involvement with the SBS production cycle and program group.

Kevin Weilbacher, SBS-MVP, is a small business consultant in the Tampa, Florida area, and is involved with the Tampa Bay SBS User group. He has worked with the Microsoft SBS Server product for eight years, and was first selected as a Microsoft SBS MVP in 2004. He has managed IT departments in the automobile, healthcare, and financial industries, and speaks on the topics of SBS and small business issues, especially security and compliance, at both the local and national levels.

Introduction

Whether you have been working with the Small Business Server product line for years or are seeing an SBS server for the first time, you will find that Small Business Server 2008 is not like many other Microsoft products. Like its predecessors, SBS 2008 combines core Microsoft technologies such as Exchange, SharePoint, and IIS, all on the same box, but SBS 2008 goes beyond just providing the glue that allows those tools to interact seamlessly. And that is where the learning curve comes in.

This book has been written to help the reader shorten the learning curve for SBS 2008. Readers who have never touched a Small Business Server before may be mystified by all the wizards and consoles and tools that are not found on “standard” Microsoft server products. Readers who have a solid working knowledge of previous SBS versions will recognize many of the elements of previous versions in SBS 2008, but those elements have changed drastically in this edition. To that end, the contributors for this book have worked to present SBS 2008 in such a way that the qualified consultant can quickly learn about the product as he or she first starts to work with it, as well as using the book as a reference guide for ongoing support of SBS 2008 after initial installation.

Whether SBS 2008 will be a big seller when it hits the streets in Fall 2008 or not remains to be seen. Regardless of how many units Microsoft sells in the first six months of the product life, the author team believes that any consultant who plans to provide support for SBS 2008 should start becoming comfortable with the product sooner rather than later. To help make that goal a reality, the contributors have worked to bring this book to print as close to the release of the product as possible.

One element that is not included in this book is a discussion of the use of virtualization technology in and around an SBS 2008 installation. This was a conscious decision on the part of the development team for several reasons. Most importantly, the virtualization story provided by Microsoft was not announced until after the product was released to manufacturing, and the author team did not feel that there was enough time to fully develop content related to virtualization, given the very short amount of time between RTM and the release of the book. Rather than present an incomplete, or worse, incorrect, story related to virtualization, the team opted to wait for the best practices of virtualization to develop in the industry. That said, there will be content related to virtualization in and around SBS 2008 posted to the book’s web site as the process and understanding matures. Quite honestly, the story surrounding virtualization and SBS may not even be fully complete by the time this book hits the shelves.

With changes in the licensing model and enforcement, the inclusion of multiple server OS licenses in the Premium Edition, the ability to split the bundled SQL software on a separate server, and the updates to the core technologies, there is much to learn about SBS 2008. The contributors hope that the material you find in the remaining pages of this book will help you quickly improve your ability to support the SBS 2008 product and grow your practice at the same time.

Book Overview

• Part 1, “Introduction and Setup,” details the history of the product and how to plan for and install an SBS 2008 server.
• Part 2, “Managing Network and Web Configuration,” focuses on the networking technologies of SBS, including DHCP, DNS, IIS, remote access, and VPN, as well as discussing SharePoint and Companyweb.
• Part 3, “Managing E-Mail,” focuses on the e-mail features of SBS at the client and server level and covers Exchange disaster recovery issues as well.
• Part 4, “Managing Client Connectivity,” details the management of clients in the SBS network and covers incorporating Macintosh clients and setting up Terminal Services.
• Part 5, “Managing Security and System Health,” takes an in-depth look at the maintenance side of SBS, including the monitoring and reporting tools, backups, group policy, and keeping systems up to date with security patches.
• Part 6, “Beyond SBS 2008,” covers two of the newer technologies incorporated into SBS 2008, IPv6 and PowerShell, as well as covering advanced topics for setup.

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