The team at the Official SBS Blog have posted details on how to get your Windows 7 machine running on your SBS 2008 network:
Using Windows 7 BETA With SBS 2008
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
Windows 7
I’ve been using Windows 7 since the public beta and I’ve been very impressed. I’ve got it dual-booting with Vista on my laptop and running as my primary OS on my home machine. It runs very nicely, although these are both pretty new machines (Core 2 Duos). From what I’ve heard it will run on lesser hardware, but it still needs to be current gen hardware. One example is it runs quite happily on Atom based Netbooks, where Vista would struggle.
Unfortunately the public beta has now finished, however I’m sure readers of this blog will either have already got it, or know certain means to lay their hands on it. Also, if you’ve got TechNet, it’s still there for the taking.
I did run into a problem with it on my desktop yesterday where a RAR set made in the old 00x style wouldn’t open. However, trying the same RAR set on Vista produced the same problem. Luckily 7zip came to the rescue and happily opened the set for me.
One other problem which I’m hoping will be addressed by a driver update is some sort of conflict with my video card on the desktop. It’s a ATi 2400 Pro and I had the same problem for a while on Vista. The driver crashes and Vista would usually recover, however Win7 seems get stuck in a loop which eventually crashes the system. I’m still running the MS driver installed for the card when I installed the OS, so I’m hoping getting the ATi driver will resolve the issue.
All in all Win7 is a polished version of Vista and I’m a Vista fan. However, I think Win7 will also win over some Vista haters – it’s certainly a lot more OS X like which will to be some people’s taste.
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
How to Stop WSUS Downloading Updates in SBS 2008
In SBS 2008 WSUS is enabled by default and will start downloading updates once setup is complete. We use a centralised update service which manages updates for all our clients and means we only have to approve updates once and not for each server.
WSUS in SBS 2008 gives you the option to not install updates and download only. However, this means the server is still downloading all the updates and wasting bandwidth and disk space.
I raised this issue with the guys in microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs and after some internal discussion they came back and said the only way to stop the downloads was to remove WSUS. Unfortunately this has the side effect of stopping SBS reporting on patch level, but our centralised software covers this anyway.
So I’ve followed MS’s advise and so far so good. No unnecessary downloads and the server is ticking along nicely.
Tuesday, 3 February 2009
SBSC Survey
Emily Lambert has posted about the Small Business Specialist Community online survey and the deadline for this is Feb 6th – this Friday. If you’ve got five minutes today, please head on over there and fill out the survey to help MS understand us SBS’ers a bit better.
Change the Anti-Spam Setting in SBS 2008
SBS 2008 has the Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) enabled by default, so out of the box mail will be filtered and the default behaviour is block rather than quarantine. One of our customers had some missing mails so I needed to adjust this and Microsoft’s very own SBS expert Dave Overton had done a neat little blog entry that sorted it out in a few clicks:
Thanks Dave.
Wednesday, 14 January 2009
SBS 2008 – SendAs and Full Mailbox Permissions
This turns out to be a lot simpler than I thought, but a Google didn’t give me the answer, so I thought I’d share what I found. Thanks to the guys in microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs for the information:
SendAs Permissions
To use the Exchange Management Console to grant a user the Send As permission for another user's mailbox
1. Start the Exchange Management Console.
2. In the console tree, click Recipient Configuration.
3. In the result pane, select the mailbox for which you want to grant the Send As permission.
4. In the action pane, under the mailbox name, click Manage Send As Permission. The Manage Send As Permission wizard opens.
5. On the Manage Send As Permission page, click Add.
6. In Select User or Group, select the user to which you want to grant the Send As permission, and then click OK.
7. Click Manage.
8. On the Completion page, the Summary states whether the Send As permission was successfully granted. The summary also displays the Exchange Management Shell command that was used to grant the Send As permission.
9. Click Finish.
To use the Exchange Management Shell to grant a user the Send As permission for another user's mailbox run the following command (Run the shell as admin)
Add-ADPermission "Mailbox" -User "Domain\User" -Extendedrights "Send As"
Source: microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs
More info: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998291.aspx
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Full Mailbox Access
To use the Exchange Management Console to grant the Full Access permission for a mailbox
1. Start the Exchange Management Console.
2. In the console tree, click Recipient Configuration.
3. In the result pane, select the mailbox for which you want to grant the Full Access permission.
4. In the action pane, under the mailbox name, click Manage Full Access Permission. The Manage Full Access Permission wizard opens.
5. On the Manage Full Access Permission page, click Add.
6. In Select User or Group, select the user to which you want to grant the Full Access permission, and then click OK.
7. Click Manage.
8. On the Completion page, the Summary states whether the Full Access permission was successfully granted. The summary also displays the Exchange Management Shell command that was used to grant the Full Access permission.
9. Click Finish.
To use the Exchange Management Shell to grant the Full Access permission for a mailbox
" Run the following command to add the Full Access permission directly to the mailbox (Run shell as admin)
Add-MailboxPermission "Mailbox" -User "Trusted User" -AccessRights FullAccess
Source: microsoft.private.sbsc.windowsserver.sbs
More info: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996343.aspx
Technorati Tags: sbs 2008,exchange 2007
Wednesday, 17 December 2008
HP Bloatware on Business Machines…
We switched to reselling HP rather than Dell earlier this year and generally we’ve been very happy with the move. I’ve blogged about my dissatisfaction with Dell before so I wont go over it all again. Suffice to say they’re not channel friendly despite what they may claim.
We’ve supplied a few bits of HP kit here and there and been pleased with what we’ve seen. Last week we upgraded a five user network to HP kit and I was very disappointed to discover the large amount of bloatware shipping on the business machines we had supplied.
Something like a PDF reader I can accept, as well as HP’s various pieces of software – you’ll get that whatever the vendor. But when I discovered they’d installed the AOL IE Toolbar I felt they’d crossed the line. Not only was this ugly toolbar taking up desktop space, they’d also changed the default search provider in the top right-hand corner to AOL and the homepage was some amalgamation between AOL and HP.
With consumer PCs I can accept a certain level of bloatware, this often helps the vendor keep the costs down and it’s just become the norm. But when you’re paying a premium for high-end HP laptops and desktops I expect them to be clean of such crap.
Unfortunately there’s nothing they’re going to do about it, I just expect better from HP. I’ll just know in the future to include some extra time for each PC, to allow clean up before installing at customers.
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