back to: Articles Archive
Microsoft Solutions for the
Small
and
Medium Business
By Dale Walls
These days, it’s not just the deep pockets of large corporations that can take advantage of technology solutions to enhance business practice. Many hardware and software vendors have taken to the light that there are millions of small and medium businesses (SMBs) in need of comparable solutions at affordable costs.
Microsoft has been attentive to the specific needs of the SMB market since the release of Windows Small Business Server (SBS) product in 2000. Since then, Microsoft’s latest SBS release, Windows Small Business Server 2003, is enriched with features for documentation management, advanced email solutions, mobility, team collaboration, internet security, and much more. These services introduce a high return on investment when properly implemented.
Small Business Server supports up to 75 users and is available in two editions, Standard and Premium. The SBS 2003 Standard Edition includes Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Exchange 2003 for email, Sharepoint Services, Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, and Microsoft Shared Fax Service at a retail value of $599. To put the value in perspective, keep in mind the individual retail value of Windows 2003 Standard alone is $999 with 5 Client Access Licenses CALs. Exchange 2003 Standard is $699 before adding client licensing. The SBS 2003 Premium Edition includes all of the products of the Standard Edition while adding Microsoft’s SQL Server 2000, Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2000, and FrontPage 2003 products for a retail price of $1499.
With SBS 2003, a small business would benefit from local resource sharing such as printers and files through centrally managed user accounts. Employees could quickly access and share information from the server rather than having to transfer files using media such as CD or floppy. For those of you still running a printer on every desktop, now you can cut costs by attaching printers directly to the network for shared access by all. Using centrally managed user accounts, files can be shared securely by assigning rights to who has access and who doesn’t. Finally, having files stored centrally on your server running backups will prevent your users from loosing their data to faulty desktop hardware or the like.
Of course file and print sharing could be done on a peer-to-peer network, but what about internal email and sharing calendars or contact lists. Can you effectively assign tasks to your employees through your ISP provided POP3 email account? Chances are that you can’t. Using Microsoft Exchange 2003 as a part of your new SBS solution, you can efficiently share internal emails, distribution lists and contacts. Users could quickly schedule appointments and notify attendees, send tasks and track their status, as well as access their own email via the web from any place that they could access the Internet. Additionally, with Exchange functionality users can quickly recover deleted emails on their own. For those of you always on the go and don’t have time to pull out a laptop or have access to the Internet, you can even send and receive email securely using your mobile phone using Exchange mobile services.
Microsoft Shared Fax Service allows a SMB to send and receive faxes from the desktop. That’s right, no more paper fax necessary. With SBS 2003, users can draft documents and fax them without having to leave their desk. For receipts of faxed documents, the Shared Fax Service can direct inbound faxes to individual user email, shared file folders, or Sharepoint Services document libraries. If you must, faxes can also be directed to a printer as well.
What is this Sharepoint Services you ask? Sharepoint is a component of Windows Server 2003 that provides team services such as web portals, team sites, presence awareness, document libraries and indexing. Sharepoint is a powerful and highly customizable tool that can be used to empower team communications, document collaboration, and information publishing such as events, tasks, calendars, and more through the web browser.
For those of you concerned about your office’s daily Internet usage, the implementation of the Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server in SBS 2003 Premium edition is for you. With ISA Server, policies can be applied to control usage to protect users from malicious Internet traffic, enable web site blocking, and content filtering to improve productivity and block inappropriate content. ISA Server integrates with the centralized user account database to allow for custom access levels based on organizational roles and job levels. Additional features such a stateful firewall and web caching is also configurable.
As you can see, Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2003 is very feature rich and can greatly improve your operational efficiency and reduce costs. To be honest, there is much more functionality and added value in SBS that has yet to be covered in this article such as Virtual Private Networking, Real-time communication, Remote Access to Desktops, User File Recovery, and much more at a price suited for the SMB user.
Other Microsoft products such as Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2003 include Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word 2003 applications at reduced cost. Additionally, Microsoft released the new Microsoft Office Small Business Management Edition 2006 that adds Access 2003 and the new Small Business Accounting 2006.
Next year’s release of Microsoft’s new client operating system to succeed Windows XP, Microsoft Vista, will also include a Small Business Edition as well.
Dale Walls is President of Corsica Technologies, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner & Small Business providing complete IT Solutions for businesses, government, and home computing in Maryland, DC, and Virginia. Feel free to contact Dale at 443.262.9290, or by email at dale@corsicatech.com.
