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JANUARY 29, 2004 - Issue 22
Small Business Server 2003 cuts costs
By Brian Livingston
Are you responsible for a company or a workgroup that has 5 to 75 users
connected to a server at any one time? Have you decided to upgrade your
network to Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003? If so, you can save
money by purchasing the software in a bundle called
Small Business Server (SBS) 2003, says Harry Brelsford, the founder of
SMB Nation, a consulting site
that sponsors workshops and publishes books on SBS.
If you plan to use Microsoft SQL Server 2000 in
addition to Windows 2003 and Exchange Server 2003, the purchase of
SBS 2003 Premium Edition, which includes SQL Server, can also be a
good investment, Brelsford says.
Interest in SBS 2003 has been stimulated recently by an Editor's Choice award
given to the product by PC Magazine, which reviewed the software in the
Feb. 3, 2004,
edition of the publication. SBS bested the Novell Small Business Suite and
several other integration products to take the top honor.
To be sure, installing either the Standard or the Premium Edition of SBS 2003
tends to "lock you into" the above-mentioned Microsoft applications. But if
using Microsoft software is your company's strategy anyway, you might as well
know about the pricing bundles that the Redmond company is offering.
To review SBS 2003 myself, I purchased a new Hewlett-Packard Model d220
personal computer - a low-end server with a 2.66 GHz Pentium 4 CPU, a 40 GB
hard drive, and 768 MB of RAM - from
Seattle Micro,
an authorized HP dealer. I then installed the Premium Edition of SBS 2003,
with Brelsford assisting me in the configuration and tuning of the system.
Microsoft's aggressive SBS pricing
Let's start with a comparison of the list prices of Small Business Server
2003's Standard Edition and Premium Edition, and the contents of these
two bundles if purchased separately. (I'm aware that actual volume prices are
lower than the list prices, but let's start with list, and you can mentally
subtract any discounts you may be entitled to.)
The list prices I show in the table below are those Microsoft provides
on its Web site for
SBS 2003,
Windows Server 2003,
Exchange Server 2003,
Outlook 2003,
SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition, and
Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server Standard Edition.
All prices are in U.S. dollars:
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SBS 2003,
Standard Ed. (5 users) |
$599 |
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Includes: |
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Windows Server 2003 (5 users) |
999 |
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Exchange Server 2003 (5 users) |
1,034 |
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Outlook 2003 (5 users) |
545 |
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SharePoint Services |
* |
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Remote Web Workplace |
** |
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SBS
2003, Premium Ed. (5 users) |
$1,499 |
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Includes: |
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All of the above |
2,578 |
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plus SQL Server 2000 (5 users) |
1,489 |
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ISA Server (per server) |
1,499 |
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Full-text searching for SharePoint |
** |
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*part of Office 2003 |
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**not available separately |
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Obviously, the main cost of any software, especially Microsoft's, is not
the initial purchase price but the continuing maintenance and upgrading
that may be required. Still, it's apparent that Microsoft has given
SBS 2003 a list price that's designed to seriously undercut the list
prices of its individual components.
Since most companies that purchase SBS 2003 will have more than 5 users,
an additional expense must be considered. Microsoft sells access rights for
additional users in the form of Client Access Licenses (CALs). These
CALs come in packs of 5, 20, and so forth, at a list price of under $99
per license.
Fortunately, Microsoft uses concurrent licensing for these CALs.
That means that if you have 75 licenses, 75 people can be logged on to the
server at any one time. You could have hundreds of authorized users, as
long as no more than 75 of them are logged on simultaneously.
Microsoft sells both user CALs and device CALs. You should
buy user CALs if you have users who log on from different machines, such
as work, home, and laptop PCs. You should buy device CALs if you have
machines that are used by several different people in shifts,
such as daytime, evening, and graveyard.
If your company already uses SBS 2000, you can upgrade the server and
your CALs to SBS 2003 at a reduced rate.
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Finally, what if your company grows past 75 concurrent users? In that
case, you can upgrade to the full version of the respective Microsoft
server products. For details on prices of CALs and the other products
mentioned above, see Microsoft's SBS 2003
pricing page.
Tips for the transition
Based on my experience with the installation of SBS 2003 Premium Edition,
I offer the following pointers:
• Fix the Windows 2003 date bug
Due to a DLL bug in SharePoint Services, a component of SBS 2003, an
installation or upgrade of SBS 2003 will halt
if the system clock of a PC is Nov. 24, 2003, or later. To work around this,
simply set the system clock to any earlier date, install the software, then
change the date back to the current date.
Microsoft acknowledged the problem in a
bulletin on Jan. 5, 2004, a Knowledge Base article
833019, and provided a
patch. The bulletin offers purchasers of SBS 2003 a free, corrected Disk 3
by filling out an order form online.
• Get 5 free CALs by Feb. 5
As compensation for the SharePoint date bug, Microsoft is offering
5 free CALs to anyone who purchased SBS 2003, but the offer is good only
through Feb. 5, 2004. Taking advantage of this
offer would bring the base edition of SBS 2003 up to 10 CALs for the
price of 5. To get the free CALs, see the Jan. 5
bulletin, and then click the
order form link under
the heading "5-Pack CAL Offer."
• Get SBS pre-installed, if possible
Several vendors offer servers with an image of SBS 2003 pre-installed.
For example,
Hewlett-Packard's Web site sells its Model tc2120 server -
a 2.66 GHz Pentium with 512 MB of RAM - for $729 without SBS 2003 and
$1,349 with SBS 2003 pre-installed. That's a difference of only $620,
almost exactly the same as the SBS 2003 list price. Getting SBS 2003
pre-installed save you hours of time that are otherwise required to
install the product from its disks.
Although a pre-installed instance of SBS 2003 still requires some configuration
steps, buying it pre-installed is a big labor saver. I deliberately purchased
an HP Model d220 - a version that's almost identical to a Model tc2120 -
without SBS 2003 so I could review the entire installation process. The install
required about 3.5 hours before I reached the configuration steps that I would
have started with if the software had been pre-installed.
Getting a machine with SBS 2003 pre-installed also ensures that all the
drivers needed for the particular hardware that's present will already
be there. Since I'd purchased a PC without SBS 2003 pre-installed, I needed
to download an updated Ethernet driver before the software would complete
the install process. Downloading a Windows XP Ethernet driver from the HP site
solved the problem. (Oddly, a Windows 2000 driver wouldn't suffice, only the
XP version would do.) This caused only a minor delay, but one that could have
been avoided entirely if I'd used a machine that had been built for SBS 2003.
• Start out with 2 NICs
For security's sake, the ideal hardware configuration is to use two different
network interface cards in the SBS 2003 server. One NIC connects to the
local area network, while the other connects to the Internet. Separating
the two functions onto two different NICs protects the LAN from hacker
attacks that can't "hop" between the two. Having both NICs present when
SBS 2003 is installed simplifies the configuration process, as opposed to
adding a NIC later.
• Install from the DVD, not the CD-ROMs
If you find yourself installing SBS 2003 from disks, as opposed to configuring
a machine that has SBS 2003 pre-installed, look in the packaging for a
single DVD that contains the entire product. In my experience, the
DVD was hidden under two CDs in the second of two hard-shelled disk cases. The
"quick start guide" that came with SBS 2003 wasn't at all explicit
in explaining that installing from the single
DVD would be much faster than installing from the five included CDs.
• Boot from the DVD
Some PCs require a change to their setup routine in order to boot from a
CD or DVD. If you can't boot from a DVD, run the setup program by launching
CD1\i386\winnt32.exe, then run the rest of the install from the DVD.
• Use two separate drives or partitions
Installing SBS 2003 onto one hard drive, with other programs on a second
physical drive, can improve performance. But it isn't necessary if your server
will be lightly used. I installed SBS on a single disk with two partitions:
a 10 GB partition for SBS, with a second partition for everything else.
• Disable any DHCP servers
SBS 2003 requires that it be the only DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration
Protocol) server on a network. However, SBS 2003 must be connected
to a local area network when it's being installed, in order to recognize the
layout of the LAN. This could cause a conflict if an existing network device
is already acting as a DHCP server. In my case, the
installation was completed smoothly by attaching the SBS 2003 machine to a
spare passive hub that had no other machines plugged in.
• Get professional help
Despite Microsoft's claims that Small Business Server is a simple
piece of software that any small business can use, the product is still
a highly technical animal. The installation and configuration process
is not something that a nontechnical business owner can or should handle
alone. A consultant who's installed SBS many times before can make
the upgrade go smoothly and pay back the investment in his or her expertise
many times over.
The SBS consultant who worked with me, Harry Brelsford, is a busy guy.
As the founder of the SMB Nation Summit,
a one-day seminar on SBS for small- and medium-sized businesses, he's
scheduled to lead workshops in 2004 in nine cities in the U.S. and 32 cities
in 21 other countries. That includes seminars in Canada, India, Australia,
New Zealand, and other far-flung locales. The workshops are sponsored by
Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and other corporations that have an interest in
SMB computing.
Brelsford's latest book is entitled Windows Small Business Server
2003 Best Practices. For a review, see the
Recommended Reading section that follows this story.
I'm very interested in my readers' experiences in installing and using
SBS 2003. I'll send a gift certificate for a free book, CD, or DVD of
your choice to any reader who's the first to send in a comment that
I print.
To send me more information about this, or to send me a tip on any other
subject, visit
WindowsSecrets.com/contact.
RECOMMENDED READING - my book reviews of tech topics
Windows Small Business Server 2003 Best Practices
This new book is the latest guide to Small Business Server in a series
that's been published by Harry Brelsford, the founder of the
SMB Nation Summit (see main story,
above). The $59.95 book builds on his previous volumes about SBS 2000 and
Windows 2000 Server
and provides a wealth of information for information-technology professionals,
whether they are old hands at SBS or newbies just now dipping their toes into
the water. Brelsford devotes two chapters to planning and designing
an SBS network before plunging into installation, deployment, management,
and security issues. He follows this with sections on integrating SBS with
Exchange Server 2003 and Outlook 2003, plus describing the routine backup and
administrative tasks that SBS or any server requires. The book is
self-published and is currently available only from the author's Web site.
More info
SMB Consulting Best Practices
An earlier work in Brelsford's self-published series of books, SMB
Consulting Best Practices is a general tutorial on running a small
consulting practice, with a chapter on using SBS 2003 as the server for your
small- to medium-sized business clients. The book, published in September 2003,
is full of tips such as how professionals can bill their clients as much as
1,200 hours per year, which Brelsford considers the extreme upper range of
what's possible for a consultant who's actually working 2,400 hours annually
(50 hours a week). Anyone who's interested in high-technology consulting
will find a lot of useful advice within these pages. This book, although
self-published like Brelsford's SBS book, above, is available through
Amazon.com.
More info
FORWARDING INSTRUCTIONS - news gains value when it's shared
Please share this information with your colleagues
You're encouraged to refer your friends and colleagues to this free
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BriansBuzz.com/w/040129.
HERE'S A TIP - you'll get a better newsletter if you choose the paid version
You're reading the free version of Brian's Buzz on Windows
Subscribers to the paid version receive additional information in each issue.
Some of the extras this week are:
- Problems with CHKDSK in Windows 2000 and XP.
Many people have been confused by awful-sounding error messages, but
you can handle them with confidence - if you know the secret.
- PayPal links can reveal your e-mail address.
For those who are trying to keep their e-mail address away from spammers,
PayPal can lead to a huge exposure. Fortunately, there's a workaround
that corrects this.
- You can't trust those 800 numbers in Windows.
You're in for a big surprise when you dial one of the toll-free numbers
provided by Microsoft.
Paid subscribers are also entitled to a free download of special content
at least once every calendar quarter, as well as the ability to search all
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If you make a contribution before February 12, 2003,
you'll be sent the full, paid version of this week's newsletter.
To upgrade to the paid version, please visit
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Thanks in advance.
BRIAN'S BOOKSHELF - new e-books from the author
Spam-Proof Your E-Mail Address
This 27-page e-book in PDF format gives you step-by-step instructions
that can eliminate 97% of the spam that would otherwise clog your e-mail
account. You could call it "Brian Livingston's Spam Secrets." The book
is the result of months of experiments and tests I conducted, and I now
receive little or no spam to the addresses I used as guinea pigs. These tests
show that you can actually reduce your volume of spam to practically nothing,
not just battle an unstoppable and ever-growing flood. The methods I describe
work with Windows, Apple, and Linux and don't require any filters or block
lists - but you can use those in addition to the book's techniques, if you wish.
More info
WACKY WEB WEEK - playing for you the Internet's greatest bits
Save Them Goldfish!
Here's a Flash game that's sure to infuriate the most environmentally sensitive
among you, but also provide a lot of fun for everyone else. Save Them Goldfish!
is a challenge to your mouse-hand coordination. You, a hard-working student,
return to your dorm room to find that your slovenly roommate has decided
your pet goldfish would make tasty snacks. You open your door just as
he's tossing your fishy friends into a hot frying pan, one at a time. You
must snare the wriggling fishies with your mouse and drag them back into
their goldfish bowl before they roast. After you've saved a few, your
roommate starts dropping them into the pan two at a time, and things get
more interesting from there.
With this game, it's actually a good idea to read the rules for a minute
before playing the first time. Also, the game has an audio track, so turn
down your speakers if you're in an office cubicle.
The game is the invention of eCampus.com, the online bookstore for students.
You'll see ads for eCampus here and there on the site, but they're easy to
ignore. No actual goldfish were harmed in the making of this game,
so you can stop with the outraged phone call to Greenpeace now...
Play the game
CLOSING REMARKS - the best is yet to come
In this section, I provide links to columns I've published recently that
you might find useful.
Datamation: What's protecting your open-access PCs?
Do you sometimes wake up at night from a bad dream of ruthless hackers
somehow breaking into your company's PCs? The nightmare may not actually
be coming from outside your enterprise. If your company has PCs that are
open to the public to use, or machines that more than a single employee
has access to, the threat may already have walked in your front door.
More info
eWeek: ASP musical chairs
Providing applications remotely to enterprises, usually over the Internet,
was once a hot business model, but it cooled off fast. Survivors are
emerging, though, and it's beginning to look like it might be safe once
again to partake of hosted applications.
More info
Datamation: In PCs, silence is golden
Whether you're responsible for preparing corporate conference facilities,
executive suites, or a surround-sound home theater system, technology is
now available to make the PC at the heart of the operation so quiet that
we humans would never notice it. Released last month by Hush Technologies
of Leonberg, Germany, the new Hush AVX Music Server is an almost totally
silent PC that the company says can hold and play back the equivalent of
more than 1,600 compact discs.
More info
In addition to columns I've previously published on the subject of
suing spammers, Forbes.com wrote an
article in its Jan. 20 edition about my program consultant, Ben Livingston
(no relation). The article describes the $6,000 in fines he's collected
so far via lawsuits he's filed against numerous spammers and junk faxers.
More info
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