News

Windows SBS 2011 Essentials Hits General Availability

• By Kurt Mackie
• July 07, 2011

Microsoft made Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials generally available last Tuesday. The server can now be purchased through Microsoft's volume licensing channels or from OEMs and retail outlets.

Microsoft volume licensing customers were supposed to have had access to SBS 2011 Essentials, which is designed for small businesses with up to 25 users, beginning May 1, according to a March announcement. The general release supports 19 languages. A trial copy is available for testing here.

According to this Microsoft blog post, most of its OEM partners currently offer SBS 2011 Essentials server products. While that may be true, only HP's offering is easy to find. In fact, Microsoft provides links to six OEMs on its Windows SBS purchasing options page, but those links mostly lead to SBS 2011 Standard offerings, which is a different server product that supports up to 75 users. Microsoft released SBS 2011 Standard to OEMs and volume licensing customers in March.

Microsoft's announcement indicated that more OEM server products using SBS 2011 Essentials software will be available "in the next few months."

SBS 2011 Essentials is designed to rely on cloud-based services, or at least more so than SBS 2011 Standard, according to Microsoft's general marketing messaging. One benefit that SBS 2011 Essentials users get over SBS 2011 Standard users is that no Client Access Licenses are required to use the Essentials version. Microsoft provides a table here that shows the differences between those two servers.

In keeping with that cloud-based orientation for SBS 2011 Essentials, Microsoft is planning a means for better integration with Office 365, which is Microsoft's latest collection of cloud-based services released last month. The integration will be carried out through a Microsoft connector called "Office 365 Integration Module for SBS Essentials." Microsoft expects to release that module sometime this fall, a Microsoft blog explains.

Currently, IT pros create new users manually in both SBS 2011 Essentials and Office 365. They can use the same alias name in both the premises-based Essentials and in the cloud-based Office 365 suite. The integration module, when released, will automate porting user aliases created in Essentials into the Office 365 cloud, saving time for IT pros, according to the blog.

More improvements to SBS 2011 Essentials will be coming soon, either from Microsoft or its partners. Microsoft stated in its announcement that "many more solutions for cloud back up, hosted email integration, online productivity are already on the market or will be available soon."

There's also an experimental connector currently available for Windows Phone 7 users that can help them remotely monitor SBS 2011 Essentials servers using their smartphones. It also works with Windows Home Server 2011 and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials. The connector is currently available as a release candidate test version, but is not recommended by Microsoft for use in production environments.