Windows Small Business Server 2003<br>With 5 CALs<br>At Academic Rates now £345.00 plus VAT from Tekgia

Windows Small Business Server 2003
With 5 CALs
At Academic Rates
[Server]

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Windows Small Business Server 2003<br>With 5 CALs<br>At Academic Rates

Prices

The discounted prices listed here are for schools, museums, councils (including parish and town councils), churches, charities, not-for-profit and community-based organisations, etc.

For commercial prices, please click here: Small Business Server 2003 (commercial price).

There is more information on prices at the bottom of this page.

Do you need SBS 2003?

If you only have one computer in your organisation, you do not need SBS 2003. But if you have more than one and fewer than 75 computers then the likelihood is you do.

I will go over the advantages of what SBS 2003 can do. From that you should be able to judge whether you need it or not.

By the way if you find the following useful it is because we know what we are talking about.

The advantages of a client and server network

When you simply connect two computers together, you create a peer-to-peer network. This allows you to share the information on the hard drives of the two computers and any printers. Please see picture below.

Peer to peer network

Businesses normally use a client/server network. A third computer is connected to the network. This is called the server and it serves the other computers (they are called clients). The picture below gives you an example of this.

Client/server network

In a modern Microsoft network, client computers run best with Windows 2000 Professional, Window XP Professional, Windows Vista Business, Vista Enterprise, or Vista Ultimate.

The server runs best on Windows Server 2003. Windows Server 2003 is similar to Windows XP, but it has many additional features that are designed to run a network. It is a powerful program. Many large companies run their very large networks on Windows Server 2003.

You can buy Windows Server on its own or you can save money by buying SBS 2003 because Windows Server 2003 is one of the programs contained in SBS 2003.

Advantage 1: centralising and sharing

With SBS 2003, you can place all your company documents, media, and emails on your server. Each client computer acts as though the information is on that client computer.

Joe clicks on My Documents on his computer and all his documents appear. But they are not actually on his computer. They are on the server. He opens Outlook and all his emails appear. But they are not on his computer. They are on the server.

So if Joe is out on the road with his notebook and you need to get a quotation he did for a client, no need to phone Joe - you will find it on the server.

But what if that quotation is confidential? SBS can put limits on which users can see what documents, so sensitive information remains confidential.

Small Business Server outside the office

Small Business Server outside the office

What about Joe, outside the office and away from the server? Well, copies of his documents and emails are on his notebook so he can work on his documents and reply to emails away from the network (while on a plane, for example). When he next connects his notebook to the network, any changes are synchronised automatically with the server.

SBS 2003 also allows you to share printers, Internet access, hard drives, scanners, and anything else that is connected to the network. You can determine, for security or other reasons, who can access the files, the hard drives, the scanners and the printers.

SBS 2003 running a network

For example, by sharing one printer on a network, this could save you from having to buy five printers to connect to five computers. Another example: instead of five computers having five modems connecting to the Internet, you have one Internet connection to the server, and the server shares that Internet connection with the computers on the network.

The switch in the picture is a device that you connect all the devices (the server, the computers and the printer) on the network to. If you want to add it another computer to the network, you connect it to the switch. It handles the communications between the devices on the network, making sure they go to the right device and that they don't bottleneck.

This is a bit more advanced, but SBS 2003 also allows you to push out updates to the computers on the network. These updates could be security updates or improved applications. So you could update your network computers from the server by doing one action, rather than having to go round to each computer and manually update it.

Advantage 2: connecting to the network when you are outside

Accessing the network outside the office

If you spend a lot of time outside the office, this advantage is important.

Outlook outside the office

With SBS 2003, you can connect to your Outlook using your smartphone or by using any computer with an Internet connection.

You can also access files on the server or on your office computer while you are away from the office, or access the company website.

And this is all done securely.

As well as these features, SBS 2003 also offers virtual private networking (VPN) which is another secure technology that allows you to remotely connect, through the Internet, to your network to access files and documents and emails.

Advantage 3: sharing and collaborating

SBS 2003 outside the office

SBS 2003 comes with an internal website for your business. You can use this website to co-ordinate actions between staff, to make sure there is no clash in holidays, to provide an access point for common information, to post news of upcoming events, to list details of projects, to discuss issues, to track customer complaints, and so on.

If you have never written a website before, don't worry, you don't have to. You can design this website the same way you would design a flyer in Microsoft Word or Publisher. All the coding is done for you behind the scenes.

SBS 2003 comes with Exchange Server 2003, a server program for Microsoft Outlook. It works with Outlook to give you many extra features you don't get with Outlook on its own.

Large Fortune 500 businesses have standardised on the partnership of Exchange and Outlook. With these two programs you are getting an industrial-strength email and PIM infrastructure. A PIM is a personal information manager (a personal organiser).

For example, this combination of Exchange and Outlook allows you to co-ordinate appointments between staff through your Outlook calendar and their Outlook calendar.

You could buy Exchange Server 2003 on its own. But why bother when it is included in SBS 2003 and SBS 2003 costs less than Exchange Server 2003?

Advantage 4: backing up and recovering data

Let's face it: things go wrong. SBS 2003 gives you many ways of making your life easier when it does.

Volume Shadow Copy

So what happens if Joe's hard drive dies? Did Joe back up work regularly? Unlikely. But even if he did, the backup he made may not be readable on another computer.

With SBS 2003, because all Joe's documents actually reside on the server, all you have to do is replace the hard drive and reinstall Windows.

When Joe starts his pc and logs onto the network, he will be presented with his documents in My Documents and, if you have reinstalled Office, his emails in Outlook.

What if Joe accidentally deletes some of his documents or an important email?

SBS 2003 has a new technology called Volume Shadow Copy that takes regular snapshots of the server hard drive.

These snapshots allow Joe to find copies of the deleted files or emails and restore them. Ths means you don't have to go thorugh a backup recovery cycle to restore them.

SBS comes with backup software so that all the files and documents on the server can be backed up to a tape drive or another hard drive (such as on another computer or a portable hard drive). The SBS backup has a wizard to take you through the backup set-up steps.

Advantage 5: security and reliability

As I mention above, SBS contains Windows Server 2003, the most secure version of Windows yet. It was developed during the coding hiatus of 2002, when the staff of Microsoft took a one-month break from writing new code and went through old code looking for security holes and weaknesses.

Security updates can be automated. Applications that fail don't bring down the entire system. If you have Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows Me on your network, you will be amazed at how reslient Windows Server 2003 is to their problematic applications.

Additionally both editions of SBS 2003 (Standard Edition and Premium Edition) come with firewall protection. The one in the Premium Edition is better. It is called ISA Server and it is an enterprise-class firewall that many Fortune 500 companies use. But for a small or medium-sized business the firewall in SBS 2003 Standard is fine.

By the way, there is a myth that hardware firewalls are better than software firewalls. A software firewall is installed on a computer. A hardware firewall is a device which you connect to a computer or to a network. The reality is that hardware firewalls have a software firewall inside them and it is that software firewall that determines their effectiveness.

This is a bit advanced. SBS 2003 gives you contol over the computers on a network. This means you can also restrict what users can do on their computers. For example, you can prevent them from installing certain software that you think may be risky or should not be installed on work computers (such as games).

Advantage 6: the optional SQL Server

SQL Server is the premier enterprise database application that is designed to be run on network.

SBS 2003 Premium Edition includes SQL Server, but SBS 2003 Standard Edition doesn't.

If you are familiar with databases, you have probably come across Microsoft Access. Microsoft Office Professional includes Access. You may wonder why use SQL Server when you already have Access.

Reports

The answer is that you may never need SQL Server. However, there are some situations where you will.

Access is excellent for small teams. But Access is not designed for handling large amounts of information.

For example, an Access query that needs to provide a total of 10,000 orders needs to pull all 10,000 orders across the network, do the computations on the client computer, and then provide the total. With SQL Server, the same query is handled directly by the server, and only the result is sent across the network to the client computer.

Access is not designed for reliable performance with large database sizes. This means that with large database sizes, you may experience data corruption caused by poor network connectivity or incorrectly designed applications.

So when the amount of information becomes large, when reliability is important, when more than 20 users need to access the information at a time, or you want to make the information available in a browser (such as Internet Explorer), consider using SQL Server.

Even if you use SQL Server for handling your information, you can still use Access to design queries, create forms and reports, and write macros and Visual Basic code to automate the overall application. This gives you the ease of use of Access, with the reliability and security of SQL Server.

One of the key benefits of Access when upsizing to SQL Server is that you can redesign your application to continue to use the forms, reports, macros, and code you have already designed in Access, to manage SQL Server.

The following table gives you a technical comparison between Access and SQL Server.

	Access	SQL Server
Description	Database development environment that supports tables, queries, forms, reports, and programming logic.	Scalable, reliable, and more secure client/server database engine.
Maximum database size	2 gigabytes (GB)	1 terabyte
Maximum concurrent users	Up to 20 concurrent editors. Up to 100 concurrent reports being run.	Unlimited
Security	File access-based security.	Enterprise-level security.
Performance	Limited by file share model.	Limited only by hardware and application design.
Reliability	Adequate for individuals and small team usage. Recovery from network failures cannot be rolled back.	High reliability. SQL Server is a mission-critical database. Backup and administration tools available.

Things you should be aware of

Probably the biggest difficulty you will have with SBS 2003 is setting it up to match your requirements. During the installation process, SBS 2003 will ask you some questions to make sure SBS 2003 serves your network well. Some of these questions are a bit technical.

So if you are not a technical person you have two choices: (1) get someone who is to install SBS 2003 for you, or (2) get the book Using Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 by Jonathan Hassell. It has a chapter that walks you through the installation steps.

SBS 2003 cannot handle more than 75 users or computers on a network. Small Business Server 2003 is meant for small businesses. Bear this in mind if your organisation is expanding and is looking at reaching more than 75 users or computers on a network.

Once you have reached the limit and need to add more users or computers, you will need to buy a transition pack. This provides you with a key that will unbundle your SBS 2003 into its components (Windows Server 2003, Exchange Server 2003, etc.) and unlock the restriction on the number of users and computer that can access them.

Prices

The discounted prices listed here are for schools, museums, councils (including parish and town councils), churches, charities, not-for-profit and community-based organisations, etc.

To see if your organisation is eligible for the discounted rate, go to this page: Microsoft Educational Licenses.

Although you are not paying the full commercial price, you are getting the full product. You get all the features and it is not time limited in any way.

The Windows Small Business Server 2003 Standard Edition R2 with 5 CALs at academic rates is ?189.00 plus VAT.

The Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition R2 with 5 CALs at academic rates is ?349.00 plus VAT.

For details on the difference between the Standard Edition and the Premium Edition, please see the following section.

For commercial prices, please click here: Small Business Server 2003 (commercial price).

What you get

The full name of SBS 2003 is Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 R2. This, the second release of Small Business Server 2003, came out in 2006 and includes various improvements on the first release. The R2 in the name means Release 2.

SBS 2003 includes 5 Client Access Licenses (CALs). These access licenses allow computers on the network to access SBS 2003 and make use of its services.

There are many flavours of SBS 2003 out there. The one we sell have several advantages over the others.

The license in the SBS 2003 that we sell, unlike many out there, will allow you to remove SBS 2003 from one computer and install it on another. This is useful if you decide to upgrade your server or it dies on you and you have to replace it.

Do you sometimes lose things? Well, with the SBS 2003 that we sell, Microsoft keep the product key (which you need to install the software) secure for you so that if you ever lose it, you can get it back again from their secure website. Of if you lose the software, you can always download it from the Microsoft secure website.

There are two editions of SBS 2003: Standard Edition and Premium Edition. The Premium edition is for small businesses with demanding IT needs, such as data-intensive applications, or advanced firewall and Web-caching capabilities. The Standard edition is for customers who do not require such higher-level functionality.

SBS 2003 Standard Edition contains:

Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
Microsoft Outlook 2003
Microsoft Windows Server Update Services
Microsoft Shared Fax Service
Microsoft Routing and Remote Access Services

SBS 2003 Premium Edition contains:

Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
Microsoft Outlook 2003
Microsoft Windows Server Update Services
Microsoft Shared Fax Service
Microsoft Routing and Remote Access Services
Microsoft ISA Server 2004
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition
Microsoft FrontPage 2003

System requirements

These are the requirements we recommend so that you get good performance and stability.

Processor (CPU): 1 GHz or faster. If the computer has two physical processors, SBS 2003 will use them, but not more than two.

Memory: 1GB or more. SBS 2003 can use up to 4GB of RAM.

Hard drive: 16GB of available hard drive space.

CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive in the server, but preferably a DVD-ROM drive.

Monitor: Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher, and a graphics card that will support a resolution of 800 x 600. Trying to install SBS 2003 at a lower resolution and having to scroll across the screen can be very frustrating.

Network cards: At least one, possibly two. One to connect to your company network. The second if you want the Internet connection to be shared across the network by going through the server.

Fax modem. Optional. With a fax modem in the server, you can have SBS 2003 receive faxes and also have the computers on your network send out faxes through SBS 2003.

You will find more information in the Product Info box near the top right. The Product Info box contains links on related products and information. Click on one of the links to go to its web page.

For further information, please email: info@tekgia.com.

For quotes, please email: quote@tekgia.com.

To discuss, please phone 0845 124 0484.