Microsoft call to drop EBS “like a bombshell”

Mourning a good product

Small business customers reaching the limit of their Small Business Server licence were prime candidates for Essential Business Server, said resellers. The Essential Business Server platform was attractive for a number of reasons.

"Everything's included and integrated for a nice bundled price," said Hexworks' Jackson. For customers that couldn't afford the full enterprise products, Essential Business Server gave customers cheaper licensing, added Jackson.

One feature lost with Essential Business Server is Remote Web Workplace. This gave single log-on to Outlook Web Access, Terminal Server, SharePoint and to the desktop in the office for staff on the road.

However, the most important feature was the integration and pre-configuration of the separate components in the suite. A single dashboard across all applications reduced the amount of maintenance and monitoring.

The dashboard in Essential Business Server was a big step up from Small Business Server and better than System Centre Essentials, which was the only product that could offer similar functionality with individual components.

All servers were configured according to best practice guidelines, and basic security measures were already programmed.

"Everything works together and it cuts down on management because it gives you all the best practice. This is how the three apps should talk to each other," said Jackson.

"If one of those three servers goes down it can see which one and re-integrate it all together," said Jackson.

EBS also gave a performance boost to customer applications. Hostworx has "a couple of clients" edging up to the limit of Small Business Server and they were experiencing "performance issues", said Jackson.

"It already seems to be an overloaded server anyway. Essential Business Server was better at sharing that load out a bit."

Changes to Small Business Server had also made Essential Business Server a more attractive proposition. Jackson also said he felt that Small Business Server 2008 was "not as good" as the 2003 version.

"SBS now has less features and is more expensive. It felt like Microsoft were trying to push you up into EBS to get some of the features," he said.

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