Review: Microsoft's Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 is the company's attempt to make its server software both attractive and accessible to small businesses with little IT support. The package, which costs about $100 per desktop, includes e-mail and collaboration services, Internet access with firewall, Web and intranet servers, protected data storage, and printing and faxing. For a little more, you get better security and the ability to run line-of-business applications on SQL Server 2000. If all you need are simple mail, print, and file services, you can also find competing solutions for Linux and the Mac OS. But SBS ...
Expand full review Microsoft's Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 is the company's attempt to make its server software both attractive and accessible to small businesses with little IT support. The package, which costs about $100 per desktop, includes e-mail and collaboration services, Internet access with firewall, Web and intranet servers, protected data storage, and printing and faxing. For a little more, you get better security and the ability to run line-of-business applications on SQL Server 2000. If all you need are simple mail, print, and file services, you can also find competing solutions for Linux and the Mac OS. But SBS is competitively priced, more tightly integrated, and offers more out of the box.The goal of Small Business Server 2003 is simple: to provide small businesses with the same technology employed by the big boys without requiring an IT army. During our tests, we discovered that SBS 2003 is not quite do-it-yourself simple, but it isn't all that difficult, either. Anyone with a basic knowledge of servers can be up and running within a few hours of opening the box.
SBS may be purchased on its own or preinstalled on servers from vendors such as Dell and HP. A large poster guides you through the setup process, which is fairly painless if you know how your Internet connection and network are configured. Our advice is to read it carefully. The easiest way to mess up an SBS installation is to launch into it without your network properly configured.
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If you purchase SBS with a new server from an OEM, the manufacturer provides the service and support. Dell provides 30 days of free phone support for setup, installation, and troubleshooting issues with each license. Additional phone support is available from Dell on either a per-incident basis or for a period of time (with a maximum number of incidents). HP offers 90 days of free phone or online support for each SBS 2003 license.
Finally, many small businesses will purchase SBS 2003 through a VAR (value-added reseller). Microsoft hosts an online directory for finding a local VAR. The support options will vary depending on the VAR you choose and the partner level. Hide Review
Average User Rating 5.0 stars out of 1 user review Rating Breakdown -
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1 star: 0 My Rating 0 stars click stars to rate product Most recent user reviews Showing 1 of 1 review 5.0 stars Pros: Stable, usable, efficient, fast, a non-stop productivity workhorse, works with everything from Windows 98 to Windows 7. Great value for the money. Provides all the services that a small business can ask for in a server. Very reliable. Cons: The only real issue I have with sbs 2003 is that when so many things running in this system plus all the software that gets installed on top of it, it becomes difficult to troubleshoot with severe problems. Summary: We have had this SBS 2003 Standard for almost 5 years now. You might want to read the full summary to get the full sense of this product.
There was a time, in the beginning, when I was totally frustrated with it because I rebuilt the entire system on two ... Expand full review Summary: We have had this SBS 2003 Standard for almost 5 years now. You might want to read the full summary to get the full sense of this product.
There was a time, in the beginning, when I was totally frustrated with it because I rebuilt the entire system on two different boxes and it kept shutting down with no clues as to what is causing it. Finally, with just blind luck, I stumbled on to the fact that it was a badly designed instant messaging server (a third party software) that I was using. Got rid of it immediately. And since then ... No problems.
It has since been a work horse of a product. I'm running it on a Dell PowerEdge 2800 with 4GB of RAM (recently upgraded from 2GB) and two Xeon 2.8 GHz processors.
The best part is that it is providing the following services to our small business, without any problem (knock on wood; hard), for the past several years:
1. File Server (Serving up almost half a million files to main office, two remote offices, 8 field personnel via vpn)
2. Print Server (Serving up 4 heavily used printers)
3. DNS Server (Primary DNS Server for the entire organization)
4. DHCP Server (Heavily used with lots of reservations)
5. Terminal Server (Admin only)
6. VPN Server (PPTP; Up to 10 people are connected at any given time)
7. Instant Messaging Server (Using OpenFire Server now)
8. Backup Server (Backup Exec 11.5d; Backup broken down into segments to allow completion over a week and then repeats).
9. Exchange Server (25 mailboxes heavily used)
10. Anti Virus Server (25 User AVG Business Security Edition; Virus updates distributed via server)
11. Two multi-terabyte external drives connected for data management use
12. File sharing with clients via SSL protected third party software
13. Running license server software for three different products
14. Quickbooks database server
15. Active Directory Server with AD tapped into by various other devices like routers and other server software
16. Web server for OWA only
17. Workstation Audit (third party software running on server)
18. Dell Server Management Software Running
19. Large format scanner control software running
20. VNC Repeater
21. Running 8 SCSI discs with three RAID volumes
22. Still manages to run desktop software to create disk catalogs and Firefox for downloads; IE security is set to tight and I like to keep it that way
23. and last but not least by any means; version control server via Shadow Copies
All this is on top of the fact that it is backward compatible with most older windows server software and it will happily take the new ones too.
Yeah, I have bashed Microsoft at times too but you know what? Their products speak for themselves.
I for one have had an awesome experience with this one server alone and I have setup numerous in the past 20 years including hundreds of workstations. I won't go into details of other products in the interest of keeping this review about SBS 2003 only.
Thanks for reading.
Updated on Apr 23, 2010 Just noticed that the title of the product says 5 clients but obviously we have had to add CALs to bring it up to 25 users. SBS 2003 makes it very easy to add and/or manage CALs as well. Another plus. Thanks for your submission!
- License qty: 5 clients 1 server
- License type: Complete package
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