Is Essential Business Server easier to use or does it have the full server products?

The short answer is - both! But if you’ve bought software suites at a discount before, you may be skeptical. Often suites come with lesser products in them and restrictive wizards to accomplish a lower price or ease of use of one task.

The EBS design team knew that midsized businesses and their IT administrators needed both. So in EBS, we took a unique approach to provide both ease of use for midsized companies, and to provide full access to the full featured enterprise level products of Windows Server, Exchange and the other EBS components. One of the hardest parts of being an IT admin is making things work together, so we focused the EBS-unique code on making that experience easier – with a unified setup and configuration experience, and a single all up admin console across all the products and servers. Being able to see everything you need in one place is a huge time saver – especially in troubleshooting.

We chose not to pull features out of any of the included products. It’s true we don’t pre-configure all the features (we don’t configure, or “light up”, features most mid size company don’t use: e.g. ISA arrays, …). But the products are there and installed for customers to go configure if they want to. While most of what you need is pre-configured to best practices defaults for you out of the box, we let customers also change many of those settings directly from the admin console or the included product UI as needed.

We call this, contextual fall-through. From the unified EBS admin console, we provide links to common tasks or things people might want to change over time – like tweaking the exchange anti-spam threshold from the defaults. These links launch a Terminal Services session to the application needed and launch that Admin console taking you right to the place you need to configure that task (the “contextual” part). When done, you can just close that admin console and return to the EBS unified admin experience.

With all up information included in that EBS admin experience, and an easy way to “fall-through” to the included products directly, EBS aims to provide easier and full featured.

- Eric Watson