SMB Nation - SBS Presentation

  • Article

So I just finished my presentation on SBS 2003 SP1 and R2 at SMB Nation, and got a lot of great feedback. Fortunately we had a lot of SBS team members there as well to help me out and take feedback from the partners there.

I try to time my presentations so it's 2/3 me, 1/3 questions and comments. That tends to leave things open for both good and bad comments, but I'd prefer to do that than not have time for our customers to tell me what's we're doing right and wrong. I had a great time - one of my favorite things to do as a Microsoft employee is go out and talk with people about SBS. A couple of big things I heard:

  • SP1 installation not always super smooth - Most people seemed to have small problems crop up, some were important, some less so, but consistently there seems to be feedback that some small details come up after applying SBS SP1. I got some details from some people and I'll see what I can find out.
  • Licensing, licensing, licensing. <sigh> There should be an entire blog dedicated to Microsoft licensing. I'm not qualified to be an expert on this, and in fact I got corrected by some people on some things I thought I knew. But I know it's often confusing/painful.
  • Messaging - Because we have to show value to both the business owner and our partners, we have messaging that applies to both markets. Sometimes a message that makes sense to one may confuse the other. We'll need to make sure we're careful about this, and fortunately our marketing team was in the room to hear that as well.
  • R2 - Since most of the talk was about R2, a lot of questions about what's in it, what can you do with it, how will it work, etc. I'll spend some time posting more information about R2 over the next few weeks so I can share the same information here that I did at the conference.