Advice needed - New IT Manager

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• Thursday, June 11, 2009 9:03 PMMeinolf Weber [MVP-DS]MVP

   
  

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  Hello,
  
  depending on the future needs you can move to Essential Business server, it supports up to 300 users/computers. It includes Management and monitoring.
  
  http://www.microsoft.com/ebs/en/us/default.aspx
  
  For upgrading and additional questions i suggest you use:
  https://connect.microsoft.com/ebs08/community/discussion/richui/default.aspx
  
  or when changing from SBS to "normal" server version:
  https://connect.microsoft.com/sbs08/community/discussion/richui/default.aspx
  
  

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  Best regards Meinolf Weber Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

  • Marked As Answer byKevin RemdeMSFT, OwnerFriday, June 12, 2009 12:46 PM
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• Thursday, September 24, 2009 10:44 PMDoug Evans

   
  

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  With the drastic increase in staff, is there also going to be a huge increase in services provided by your company?  If so, then the need for expanded servers and increased IT services could also expand.  Growing from 25 to 100+ users in 1 year is not having "time to properly maintain" in my opinion.  Do you have additional support staff?  Who is going to be handling helpdesk duties?  Who is setting up account?  Training staff?  Do you have policies in place?  I used Spiceworks for a few weeks.  It's ok, but I found I needed much more.  Is your company a Microsoft Registered Partner?  If so, you could get the Microsoft Action Pack (MAP) which includes a server license and a license for Microsoft System Center Essentials.  With that kind of increase, do you suddenly have up-time expectations?  If you only have 1 SBS server, what happens when it goes down?  Is that an acceptible risk with 100+ users?  In my organization of 50 users, we estimate it costs us ~$8,000 per hour that we are fully offline.  If you forsee needing to upgrade in the near future, I would recommend building 2 cheap DCs (so that if 1 goes down your 100 users have another DC to connect to) and moving your domain now, before you have 100 users.  Moving 25 means less variables to cause the process to break.  (I helped move 5000 users from 4 domains to 1 domain at a university.  There were issues, it took some time)  Build a file/print server and an Exchange server.  That would be my bare minimum to be able to support 100 users.  Also, unless they are all tech savy and provide their own support, your going to want a helpdesk/desktop admin person.  With that many users, do you have a good switching infrastructure?  Are they going to be dealing with large files?  Thus need gigabit access to your file store?  That's a few things I can think of off the top of my head.
  
  Good luck!
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• Tuesday, September 29, 2009 12:16 PMKevin RemdeMSFT, Owner

   
  

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  Another option I think a lot of small-to-midsized companies are going to want to consider is moving e-mail offsite and letting Microsoft or some other provider host it for them.  Microsoft has Microsoft Online Services offerings, one of which is hosted Exchange, and a "BPOS" (Business Productivity Online Suite) that includes Exchange plus SharePoint and Office Communications Server (for IM and presence). 
  
  There are tools that are included with the solution that will help you migrate and synchronize your AD user accounts into the online services, and a tool that will migrate mailboxes over for you also. 
  
  http://www.microsoft.com/online/default.mspx
  
  
  
  

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  Kevin Remde US IT Evangelism - Microsoft Corporation http://blogs.technet.com/kevinremde
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