Microsoft announced Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008 earlier today. The emphasis of their press release seems to be about saving time and money, displaying a good grasp of their marketing 101 lessons:
They are designed and priced to help customers save money and compete more successfully in the global marketplace.Wow, sign me up! But wait, there's more:
"If time equals money, then we're saving a lot of money," said Rob Harris of Robby Gordon Motorsports.
Based on feedback directly from customers, SBS and EBS greatly help reduce the setup and ongoing management of IT, while enabling new scenarios to enhance end-user productivity, as well as saving companies money on license costs.Two hours a week for upgrades? Call me right now! I can't wait!
"We used to spend 15 hours a month doing upgrades," said Tom Goddard, director of Information Technology for Lee Company. "Instead, with EBS, this is down to two hours a week.
Bilal Jaffrey, who does all sorts of great marketing stuff for Lotus Foundations, caught this first, and calls MS out:
I am confused. As a small business owner, I am looking for maximum uptime and minimum IT headaches. Small Business owners cannot afford to have downtime, they don't have backup data centers in place nor they can afford to have in house IT guy to constantly upgrade the darn server.More on Bilal's blog: Microsoft admits to wasting 2 hours a week on upgrades alone! >
Should I even talk about the fact that Microsoft's own case study on Essential Business Server deployment outlines deployment time reduction from 4 months to 1 month. That is right, a month to setup a small business server? Lotus Foundations take 30 minutes.
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Christian Tillmanns | 11/13/2008 1:34:29 AM
Wow
Let's see …
They save 11000 $ a year. That's $917 a month. That's $131 per hour. That is about the cost of one hour of your trusted microsoft partner. Supposing they have two of the new systems (one for SQL Server), which costs about $5000 (5 Users) each, plus at least 4 days for migration, we are at about $14'000. Oh, Office 2007 must be added to this, too. Let's say 20'000 for the migration? And I am cutting my own throat here.
It will take roughly 2 years, until that investment is profitable, which I doubt will happen, regarding the track record of SBS reliability. Prove me wrong please, but isn't that a huge chance for Foundations? Especially in a crisis, where everybody wants to spend less? If they all just new about it!
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Flemming Riis | 11/13/2008 3:39:37 AM
did anyone bother to actually read the press release.
i know the incorrect quotations are more fun though.
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Michael Whang http://spinondemand.wordpress.com | 11/13/2008 7:52:51 AM
Speaking of upgrades.... perhaps this could provide some ideas on where IBM could be focusing upgrade efforts to Notes:
{ Link }
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Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 11/13/2008 8:50:04 AM
@3 If you're going to condescend, you should point out the actual misquote. Because I read the press release, and I don't see any misquotes.
Two hours a week. That's incredible.
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Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 11/13/2008 9:22:17 AM
@4 if you read the section of the header labeled "Update:", you'll see that these tests were conducted on the POP/IMAP stand-alone configuration of Notes. That's not the typical configuration, and in a typical Domino-based configuration, we perform quite well on inbound e-mail HTML rendering.
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Thomas Bryner | 11/13/2008 11:07:03 AM
If I got this correct - they used to spend 15 hours per month and are now down to 2 hours a week (= 14 hours per month) yielding a 6.66% decrease (1 hour) per month. Not sure if progress of such paramount magnitude qualifies for a press release, though...
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Thomas Bryner | 11/13/2008 11:08:45 AM
.. ok; got me - it is 8 hrs / month that is 53%. sounds way better.
- 9
Irv Schor | 11/13/2008 11:11:27 AM
After review @1, I'll add that a native Domino FTP add-in task option certainly would be a plus and give sites flexibility. I've definitely had a need for that on various occasions, and an add-in would yield an OS independent way to use it.
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Flemming Riis | 11/13/2008 12:22:42 PM
-@3 If you're going to condescend, you should point out the actual misquote. Because I read the press release, and I don't see any misquotes.
Well i need to apologize for my comment i reread the press release now and its a direct quote as i read it as the time to monitor all servers and not the patching
-Software updates that would have taken eight hours a week if we were doing them now take two hours a week,”
But 500 Clients and now 4-12 servers for 2 hours a week isnt that bad.
I dont know how they can use 2 hours approving stuff in WSUS but i guess they include the testing in that time.
- 11
Christian Tillmanns | 11/13/2008 12:47:40 PM
@9 Foundations has all that (FTP, Mac File System support, Domino etc.). Domino is a application and database server. Nobody would expect a file server included in Domino, nor a FTP Server.
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Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 11/13/2008 1:33:56 PM
@11 - Sure they would. We had the original Domino File System in R5, which was supposed to be replaced with WebDAV in 6, but IBM never followed through with that in the native platform. Now we have Quickr, which uses APP rather than WebDAV (for some reason that utterly escapes me.)
What's silly is to want to use FTP as the protocol. What year is this, anyway?
Foundations' file sharing services are ok, but that platform won't be anywhere close to complete until there's a unified data store model for file services and applications. Someday, IBM will finish the WebDAV story for Domino, and then it will be trivial to design NSF repositories that look like file shares to various OS's, yet have integrated security management and can replicate and be version controlled. Plus be locally secured on the appliance hard drive because the content is encrypted via DAOS.
The only problem is at that point, there's no need for Quickr as a product line. Then again, I won't miss it.
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Charles Robinson http://www.cubert.net | 11/13/2008 1:46:16 PM
Does no one else see the obvious flaw here? The 15 hours a month quote is from a customer. That's not a Microsoft figure. Second, he said upgrades. Not maintenance. Windows Updates are not upgrades (usually). Without clarification it's hard to know what he is talking about. Or maybe I'm just being too logical.
I do know for a fact that I manage 30 Windows servers and spend less than 5 hours a month total on all of them. The biggest time sink is GFI Mail Essentials, our spam filter. That's two and a half minutes a week per server. I'm sure someone will take issue with that overwhelming burden.
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Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 11/17/2008 1:54:41 PM
Charles, Bilal makes a good point in responding to your concern on his own blog:
"Charles, welcome. The point is that Microsoft’s marketing is proud of those figures. They chose to highlight this on their launch!
I don’t even want to know whats the bottom figure. Lee Company is Microsoft’s top story of choice. That’s not coming from anyone else but Microsoft themselves."
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www.MaximumExchange.ru http://www.maximumexchange.ru/ | 11/25/2008 5:36:21 PM
Dear friends!
Before swinging your arms, beating your chests and simultaneously blaming Microsoft for lying about costsavings - First Read this: "Premier Marine" , a 75-employees-small-company that really benefits from getting to Microsoft SBS, { Link }
Let this would be something REAL against your simply words ;)
I have a customer that has moved from an ISP-based POP3 & IMAP setup to Exchange. After getting their 2003 SBS(w/free upgrade to 2008 server and user cals), we set the server up (only 4 hours). We then added the users (1 hour). Setup the FTP and Web sites and set access (1.5 hours). Then we migrated the contents of the old FTP sites and Web sites (4 hours). Now we are in the process of spending 30 mins to teach each user how to switch to server-side Exchange mail from their local PST. They are excited because now they have "split calendars" and "overlayed freetime". Of course the overlay does not seem to work as a public folder. So now they are playing with "integrating" their server based public folders and local (peer-to-peer) Groove "apps" together.
We left the MS Outlook/Exchange/Access/SQL side in '98. We have Lotus Notes e-mail with custom hybrid Notes- and web-based integration that require one product: Lotus Domino and its Notes clients. They now have Outlook/Exchange, FTP, IIS, SharePoint, and Groove (via MS Online/Live). They are going to spend the next year creating silo kinds of integration points, where we over the last 10 years created related applications within one Domino silo.
They looked at Notes but didn't like the "lock-in" to the interface, the don't see the fact that Domino is really the more Internet "friendly" option. More than once, the response I get is that it [Domino] doesn't even have an FTP server. They see all the separate Exchange / SharePoint / Groove as the building blocks to a solution.
The MS shops that do see all those servers as a maintenance pain are leaning (or going)with MS Online hosting instead. That's why I think that IBM having their own hosted solution is so important even if it does compete with us the business partners. It rounds it all off.
In addition, I think it is interesting your last few posts. This one deals with maintenance. The previous dealt with the need for more app templates coming with Domino (Personally I like expanding the sandbox and linking over to OpenNTF. I would love to discuss that with you further. There's great opportunity for business partners here.) And a couple previosly talking about the hosting now availale from IBM. This all bodes great value for the Lotus customer in both deployment options and value-add with more applications/templates coming with the Domino server to better jump start them. Exciting.