Microsoft Essential Business Solutions being disco'd

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YeOldeStonecat

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Anyone get the SMBNation blast about EBS being dropped?

When EBS first came out, I was psyched....it was a logical upgrade path for those clients that would outgrow SBS and its limitation of 75. EBS was sort of like the big brother of SBS, designed to scale up to 300. And maintaining some SBS cool features such as the Remote Web Workplace portal.

But danged did EBS end up being expensive! And from looking at its details, seemed to be very...limited, not flexible. I never ended up deploying one, just did 1 quote for one.
 
yeah didn't make sense for me when i looked at it, most of the uses were just exchange for more than 75 people. just get 2 servers, server 08, and exchange and be done. came out cheaper in licensing i think.
 
Hrm... Kinda sucks...was looking at this to migrate a client from SBS to EBS because they are at 65 systems now.

Oh well... guess have to look into SBS Transition Pack.....
 
I'm bummed. Been running EBS since it came out and love it. Was really looking forward to V2.

Now to come up with a migration path. Ugh
 
sc0tty8 said:
Didn't this just come out?
Click to expand...

Pretty recent....it came out with SBS08. So it's relatively new.

It's too bad. Having a "big brother" to SBS was a great idea.

At the very least, I really wish MS would release a product like "Remote Web Workplace" as a separate product, it's such a cool and VERY useful feature.

You can download WSUS and Sharepoint as free products, why not have RWW separate?
 
I agree, even thought RWW is becoming less and less important with the move to Sharepoint and the TSGateway it would still be nice for my users. it is the main reason we went with EBS and not standalone products.
 
yeah no real need for RWW when you have TSGateway.

only reason i use RWW was didn't want to change RDP port on clients workstation, now with SBS08 im just adding the twgateway and making them a shortcut, not many are using remote.domain.com for anything but OWA.

with the pricing of EBS< it seemed almost better to get server 08 and grab exchange seperately, wasn't much cost difference.
 
marley1 said:
yeah no real need for RWW when you have TSGateway.
Click to expand...

"When you haveTSGateway"....correct me if I'm wrong, but TSGateway requires the purchase of a Terminal Server? If I have an SMB office where I want to have clients remote to their office desktop workstations....I wouldn't have a need for the expense of Terminal Server...
 
With Direct Access thats built into Windows 2008 R2 I think VPN's are going to become less and less useful.
 
TS Gateway is a role that can be deployed on a seperate server from the actual Terminal Server.

With that said, Microsoft has some docs on deploying "Personal Virtual Desktops" either through "Remote Desktop Web" or by direct RDP through the TS Gateway.

I figure by reading through those docs, if you can do a 1 to 1 mapping of user to virtual desktop, you can do a 1 to 1 of the user to a physical desktop.

Alot more work involved than remote web workplace!
 
I really wish they'd release soemthing like LogMeIn... IE- clients on machines (Even behind firewalls over the internet), that connect into your central "Remote Server", that has a nice web interface for folks to connect through. Sadly- no such thing yet. RWW works great for local stuff but across the internet it's still a pain.

IMO going the EBS route- wasn't much of a market there. I mean- you get that big, you're going to want standalone products anyway.
 
RiDDLeRThC said:
With Direct Access thats built into Windows 2008 R2 I think VPN's are going to become less and less useful.
Click to expand...

Ahhh, but Direct Access is a VPN. MS just doesn't call it that because VPN has a tendency to leave a bad taste in people's mouths. Nortel's Contivity comes to mind . . .
 
TechieSooner said:
I really wish they'd release soemthing like LogMeIn... IE- clients on machines (Even behind firewalls over the internet), that connect into your central "Remote Server", that has a nice web interface for folks to connect through. Sadly- no such thing yet. RWW works great for local stuff but across the internet it's still a pain..
Click to expand...

If they could build a SMB version of Windows Live Mesh that would be cool
https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/features/features.aspx
I've yet to play with that.

However, IMO, and IMyClientsO, RWW isn't a pain, it's quite nice 'n easy. I don't have any that use if for local stuff..I don't see why, they have their PCs for that, but as a nice one stop portal that's a secure incoming service on your firewall...it's a great and simple way to access their desktops from home or on the road. RDP is quick and smooth, other alternatives like logmein...not as fast...esp with the latest bloated version.
 
RiDDLeRThC said:
With Direct Access thats built into Windows 2008 R2 I think VPN's are going to become less and less useful.
Click to expand...
I'd deploy (and recommend) a Cisco VPN solution over an MS one any day because I don't have to patch it every Tuesday.

VPNs are here to stay and if anything they are getting more and more common.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
If they could build a SMB version of Windows Live Mesh that would be cool
https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/features/features.aspx
I've yet to play with that.
Click to expand...
I've seen it before, but creating accounts for each computer would be a major pain... So like you said, I wish they'd build a SMB version.

YeOldeStonecat said:
However, IMO, and IMyClientsO, RWW isn't a pain, it's quite nice 'n easy. I don't have any that use if for local stuff..I don't see why, they have their PCs for that, but as a nice one stop portal that's a secure incoming service on your firewall...it's a great and simple way to access their desktops from home or on the road. RDP is quick and smooth, other alternatives like logmein...not as fast...esp with the latest bloated version.
Click to expand...
When "local"- I mean machines local to the SBS server. IE, when you're remote and connecting in- it works great for machines on that server's network.
For REMOTE machines it really sucks without having to have everything VPN'd together.
 
TechieSooner said:
When "local"- I mean machines local to the SBS server. IE, when you're remote and connecting in- it works great for machines on that server's network.
For REMOTE machines it really sucks without having to have everything VPN'd together.
Click to expand...

Oh I see what you're getting at..like when you have a WAN, and some remote machines on the domain but in satellite offices? Depends on your setup, need 1/2 decent bandwidth between the sites via the VPN tunnel. I have one client that uses that pretty well, 'cuz their upload at each satellite is 2 megs, and the upload at mothership is 5 megs.
 
Yea... My point is RWW doesn't really serve that purpose well.
LogMeIn is the best use for a bunch of satellite offices like that- unless you spend the big bucks to get fat uploads everywhere.
 
Speaking of RWW.....playing with SBS08...and doing a bit of reading on it, it's actually built on Terminal Server Gateway...instead of the older RWW.
 
I haven't looked at it... I won't be using it. 90% of the machines are remote on slow ISPs... Can't really make use of it.
My goal is to make as much stuff web-accessible as possible so that it's minimal bandwidth.
 
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