I thought I had a good handle on what Server to sell to what sized customer until I got this flyer in my action pack, so why do I care?
SBS 2003 R2 seems to be the perfect package for 5 to 60 Users, I even have some 2 User clients using this and they don’t blink about the investment.
So now we are in the Windows 2008 Era and we have a different set of brackets and I thought they were well defined even though I thought they might not be priced adequately so here is my understanding:
- Home Server: 1-10 Users
- Foundations Server 2008: 1-15 Users
- SBS 2008: 1-75 Users
- EBS 2008: 50 – 300 Users
- Windows Server 2008 with Full Server Products: 300 Users ----> Really Big Numbers
Microsoft published sizing as above:
- Home Server: Consumer
- SBS 2008: 1-10 Users
- EBS 2008: 11-249 Users
- Windows Server 2008: 1 User ----> Really Big Numbers
What am I thinking?
- Home Server = SOHO Server: 1 – 10 Users
- Home Server = SMB Backup Server: in Groups of 1 per 10 Workstations
- SBS 2008: (8) 11 – 60 Users
- EBS 2008: 50 – 300 Users
- Windows Server 2008 with Full Server Products: 280 Users ----> Really Big Numbers
AND no I don’t know where the Microsoft Numbers came from but I did think What The????
This blog is a precursor to the follow up posts about solutions as I’m getting all excited again
I think we will want to virtualize all the SBS 2008 Builds we do moving forward and it seems that the biggest question people are having is around fax services, I have been thinking about the standard approach for our customer networks and one answer is as follows…
This is not the only answer and probably not the best answer but it will likely be “our” answer
We used to sell just normal Laser Printers and we thought of MFDs as an expensive Scanner on a cheap printer, that was until we discovered the Samsung Devices that is
We bought the CLX-6210FX for our internal printing and scanning needs and I think it is a funtastic little box especially since we scan in duplex to a shared volume on our SBS 2008 box and then OCR and manipulate them later, but the best thing has been the faxing. I was never too happy with having to scan signed documents and then print to the SBS fax printer. Now I just send the fax directly from the fax machine, and of course I can print to fax just like I did with the SBS Print driver.
But how do I get faxes distributed to our SBS Users?? Really simply we just configure the fax machine to forward All faxes to a Distribution Group on the server exactly like we used to when directly using the SBS Fax.
Naturally if the client needs a smaller slightly cheaper model there are the CLX-317xFN models which support manual duplex and I assume all the same configuration options but for a few hundred extra dollars having a 50 Page ADF with Duplex scanning and printing, I’m pretty sure we will be only selling the CLX-6210FX
BTW the fax forwarding is simple to configure check it out in the graphic.
Now I just Need to fix the Backup Problem as elegantly.