Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 user reviews

5.0 stars

"After 5 years of use" on April 23, 2010 by H760234

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 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.