Comments on: Small Business Server and Managed Services: The Perfect Mates?

By: Joe Panettieri

Joe Panettieri — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 15:08:30 +0000

Ben: What types of opportunities, if any, do you see for your company with SBS 2008?

By: Ben Ahlquist

Ben Ahlquist — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 04:57:09 +0000

msp disciple- I’ve got a handful of SBS 2003 servers under management with Kaseya with no problems at all. I know of MANY MSP’s using Kaseya and LPI, monitoring what amounts to hundreds of SBS servers with no problems at all.

By: Joe Panettieri

Joe Panettieri — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:55:08 +0000

MSP Disciple: I still see a connection between SBS and MSP platforms … but I want to reiterate that readers should put the vendor claims to the test.

OCM Networks: To take your thoughts one step further, I think SBS 2008′s two biggest inhibitors are (1) customer inertia … why upgrade if SBS 2003 is working, especially in a difficult economy and (2) Software as a Service … as a small business co-owner myself, I know we always look to SaaS and cloud options first because we don’t want the hassle of buying/maintaining on-premise servers.

Despite those two inhibitors, I think SBS 2008 will be a strong seller because lots of small businesses prefer to keep their data on-premise.

By: OCM Networks

OCM Networks — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:45:08 +0000

I am not convinced that the take up will be fast in the UK for SBS 2008.

Our client base uses SBS 2003 a great deal and in todays market what is the driver for them to migrate ?

Most SBS 2003 users only have 1 server and with SBS 2008 being 64bit are they really going to review their accounting, crm, etc to see if it is compatible with 2008 ?

As for monitoring platforms we use Zenith and they have had no problems with SBS 2003 and are pushing SBS 2008 for their datacentre in a box concept so I cannot see it being an issue.

By: msp disciple

msp disciple — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:52:42 +0000

I’m surprised to see these vendors named in the same article as SBS. It’s my experience that they have great difficulty in working with SBS. They can monitor SBS but their agents/clients haven’t run on them very well. This was with 2003. Sure 2008 is different but the problems seemed to be fundamental conflicts as it relates to what is bundled with SBS. Most companies with an SBS server don’t have an additional server to run their agents/clients on. Running the agents/clients on a workstation also presents it’s own set of problems/limitations. I’m not sure I see a strong connection here.