A decent option for companies looking to host their own email and collaboration servers
Small businesses looking to install an in-house server will soon have a choice of two Microsoft products, both somewhat confusingly called Windows Small Business Server 2011, or SBS 2011 for short.
The Standard edition is a refresh of the existing SBS 2008 product, while the Essentials edition is a new departure based on Windows Home Server for companies mostly interested in file sharing and backup.
Unfortunately, the Essentials product is still in beta, so we’ll look at that when it’s released later this year, but SBS 2011 Standard is available now, enabling us to put it through its paces in the V3.co.uk labs.
As with previous Windows SBS products, SBS 2011 Standard is a bundling of the Windows Server operating system with Exchange and SharePoint. There’s also an integrated console to simplify management in companies with limited technical expertise, plus remote access facilities to support mobile users.
All of these come in for attention in the 2011 release starting with the operating system, which gets upgraded to Windows Server 2008 R2. Likewise you now get Exchange Server 2010 SP1 complete with Outlook Web App for browser-based email access, and SharePoint 2010 Foundation Services with its Office-like ribbon interface, plus proper support for browsers other than Internet Explorer.
The management console also comes in for a revamp, as does remote access. The Remote Web Workplace option becomes a SharePoint application with a new name, Remote Web Access. Extra functionality has also been added in the form of SkyDrive-like connectivity to remote files from a browser.
Most customers will buy SBS 2011 Standard preinstalled, but for our tests we downloaded a hefty (6.3GB) ISO image and loaded it onto a Dell PowerEdge R310 server.
This came equipped with an Intel Xeon quad-core processor, now the minimum requirement for the SBS product. Moreover, because it’s based on Windows Server 2008 R2, the software can’t be installed on older 32-bit systems, which could mean having to buy a new server if upgrading. Ours also had 16GB of memory, with 8GB the minimum you can get away with.
