Welcome to the Windows Essential Business Server Team Blog

Welcome to the Windows Essential Business Server Team Blog. That name is a mouthful for being Essential. But maybe that’s fitting. The product actually packs a lot of software and new features for an ‘essential’ product as well.

In this Blog, key people that design and develop the product will discuss all of those features, the software, tips and tricks, and yes, even shortfalls that we hear from customers. As engineers, we love details, and with 5 products and 15 workloads plus all the ‘can’t get it anywhere else’ software we added, there are plenty of details to talk about.

I’d like to introduce the product to anyone for whom Essential Business Server might be new .The product is a suite of software designed for companies between 25 and 250 computers – and there are around 1.2 Million of those businesses sandwiched between the ‘keep it small and simple’ of small businesses and the ‘we’ve got an army of tech people to do whatever we want’ of enterprises.

The product integrates the core IT infrastructure mid size company’s need to build their businesses upon – networking, email, security, management, remote access.

The products included in Essential Business Server (Exchange, Windows Server, System Center Essentials, ISA, Forefront Security for Exchange) are distributed and configured across three servers to meet best practices for security, manageability and performance. For instance, the Exchange Edge role that handles email message cleaning is integrated into the security server and ISA, while the main exchange roles are on their own server that is otherwise lightly loaded for exchange performance into the high end of the 250 user range of the product.

Some people ask, “Why a premium edition, since the main EBS product doesn’t need it to run?” We asked the same question to a lot of customers from different countries early on and about half of them said, “At the same time we make our infrastructure more reliable with EBS, we’d also like to clean up and get our Line of Business (LOB) applications running on a current version of SQL.” So we included it as an option with the premium edition.

In addition to all that software, which will be provided at suite pricing (pricing will be announced later), there is additional software you can only get with Essential Business Server:

1) An integrated setup across all workloads and servers – configured to best practices

2) A unified administration console and experience from your desktop (that covers not only EBS workload but your clients and other servers as well)

3) Integrated license management

4) An integrated security center that provides a single view of security from the edge all the way down to patching status on clients

In subsequent blog postings, we’ll talk more about each of these areas – why we built them, what the key features are, and what people that are running them now in our private production beta program are saying about them.

But I think the number one question I get now is, “Where can I go to find out more about Essential Business Server?” The answer is actually, a lot of places. Content is going up on Microsoft.com as well as a lot of press articles and sites. In my next blog posting I’ll give a quick overview of all the places to get more info today.

- Eric Watson

Group Program Manager

Windows Essential Business Server