It seems to me that Microsoft wants to make more money on the licenses (by making you go to the standalone products) and discontinued a very successful bundle… that’s sad…
http://www.chrisrue.com/funcave/2010/03/ebs-has-left-the-building.html
The default RWW logo in SBS 2008 looks like the following:
If you want to replace it with your own company logo, you’ll have to have some editing skills but it isn’t very complicated. Navigate to the following directory in SBS 2008:
C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Bin\webapp\Remote\images
Right-click on the "background.jpg" file and select "Edit". The file will open in Microsoft Paint, click on the "Selection" tool (arrow "a") and then select the default SBS image (arrow "b")
Click the "Delete" button to delete the selected image. After that, you’ll need the logo you’ll want to place within the background image. Open the image file, copy it and paste it within the background file. The result should look like the following:
Save the file with the same name, background.jpg, and your RWW will display your company’s logo.
I have been very busy lately with a project in New York City (which requires me to work there most of the week), but the big news are that SBS 2008 was released to manufacturing and it’s on track for the November 12th launch.
For more information go to:
http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive/2008/08/21/sbs-2008-released-to-manufacturing.aspx
—– This post is based on SBS 2008 RC1 ——
In contrast to SBS 2003, SBS 2008 makes it very easy to mail-enable document libraries in Companyweb (which is based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 ). The following pictures outline the process.
First we must go to SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration (from the Administrative Tools menu) and configure Incoming e-mail settings.
Click on the link to Configure Incoming E-Mail Settings
Accept the default settings and click on the OK button
Go to companyweb (http://companyweb), click on the Site Actions tab and then click on Create
Click on Document Library
For the purposes of this post, I gave the library the name Project Documents, set the Allow this document library to receive e-mail to Yes, and provided a name for the email address (projectdocs)
After the document library is created…
…we can test it by using Outlook Web Access and send an email message with the document we want stored in the companyweb as an attachment. Note the email address of the message is projectdocs@companyweb (this is the email address we assigned to the library previously).
Wait for a minute or so (for the Timer Service to kick in and process the email message)… and the document is stored in the library.
This method works when emailing documents within the Intranet. I didn’t try to make it work over the Internet yet.
I’ve been reading a lot about Live Mesh lately, so I decided to spend some time to see what all the talk was about. Well…. VEEERY interesting…
First of all, the technology is still in preview but we can get an idea for what it’s capable of. The following steps outline how to setup your personal computer in Live Mesh. What you’ll need is a Windows Live ID. If you don’t have one just create a new one.
Well… here it goes. Fire IE and go to http://www.mesh.com
Click on ‘Sign in’ and provide your Windows Live ID credentials
Click on the ‘Add Device’ icon
Select the O/S for your computer. The options are Windows XP, Vista 32bit and Vista 64bit. (As the page indicates, Mobile devices, and Macs will be added soon). Click on ‘Install’
While Live Mesh is installing a component on your computer, you will be able to see the progress on the lower right side of your screen
After the installation is complete, you will have to supply your Windows Live ID again, along with your password.
Wait for a couple of seconds while the process of connecting completes…
…and now everything is setup for you to access your computer over the Internet. You can test that by going on a different computer, go to http://www.mesh.com and you’ll see your computer listed as a device. Click on it…
… IE will ask you to install an add-on. Click on the yellow bar at the top
…and you will be able to access your computer.
And that’s not all. When you get a chance, take a look at Live Desktop. You can create folders and save documents which can be accessed from anywhere someone has access to the Internet.
I think this is very promising..
I tried to installed the security updates that were rolled out last Tuesday and the SQL Server 2005 Security Update (KB948109) failed to install. I did a search on Google and came up with a blog post that shows how to fix the problem
I check the SQL Server instances on my computer and I found out that one of them wasn’t running. Since it was an instance I wasn’t using, I uninstalled it and the security patch was installed without an issue.
The solution to this problem as the blog post indicates is to make sure that all installed SQL Server 2005 instances are running.
It’s finally official!!
The release date for Windows Small Business Server 2008 and Windows Essential Business Server 2008 is:
November 12, 2008
For the full press release go here
—–This post is based on SBS 2008 RC0.—–
SBS 2008 have added the ability to create mail-enabled security groups that can archive the emails they receive in companyweb.
The following steps outline the process to create a new security group, mail-enable it and archive the messages send to the group in the companyweb.
From the Windows SBS Console, select the Users and Groups tab, and click to Add a new group
Go through the wizard,
supply the name for the group, make sure you select the Security Group option and then enable the group to receive emails
Provide the email address for the group, select whether outside users can email to it or not and whether you want to archive the emails the group receives.
Select the members for the group,
After the wizard successfully completes, click Finish…
and the new group is listed in the SBS Console
Open the browser and go to companyweb (http://companyweb). Click on Archived E-mails on the left
In the Archived E-Mails subsite, you’ll see a new document library with the name of the security group we just created. Every email that this group receives will be saved in this library.
SBS 2008 includes the latest version of Windows SharePoint Services, WSS 3.0 and companyweb is built on this version.
In order to properly configure the environment we have to go through a list of Administrative Tasks that are listed in the SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration module (which is accessed from the Administrative Tools menu).
This post is focusing on changing the Central Administration pool account and could seem simplistic for many, but I thing is very important for those with not much experience in SharePoint to understand what the necessary steps are to configure it properly.
Let’s start by creating a new user account for the Application Pool. This should be a Standard User account
After the account is created, we can go to its Properties and we’ll see that the account is a member of the default SBS groups.
We can safely remove all the groups listed there and click OK
Now that we created the account, let’s go back Central Administration. Towards the bottom of the screen we see the ‘Central Administration application pool account should be unique’ task.
Let’s see what is the current account that is used by the Central Admin Pool. If we go to Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager (from the Administrative Tools menu) and click on the Application Pools option, we’ll see on the right pane the SharePoint Central Administration pool using the NetworkService account. This is the account we want to change.
This application pool is used by the SharePoint Central Administration site and we can verify that, by clicking on Sites, then select SharePoint Central Administration and click on Basic Settings… on the right pane.
From the window that opens up we can see that under Application Pool, the SharePoint Central Administration pool is listed
Now that we know what we need to change, let’s go back to the Administration Console and select the task we want to work on.
Here is the tricky part. When we select the Change Service Accounts option,
we come to a page that let’s us select the Web Application pool , but the Central Administration Application Pool is not listed. The only application pools listed there are the SBS SharePoint AppPool and the SharePoint – 80 pool.
In order to change the Central Administration Application Pool account we have to go to the Command Prompt(with Administrative credentials) and issue the following statement from the 12 hive (which is under C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin) :
stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin <DOMAIN>\useraccount -password <password>
After that we must issue the iisreset /noforce command.
If we now go back to IIS Manager, and examine the account for the Central Admin. Pool, we’ll see that it was changed to our custom account…
Running the stsadm command, added the user account to the appropriate security groups as well.
That’s all it takes to change the Central Administration Application Pool account. The question now is what does the Service Accounts page change? The next post will explain and show how to change the SBS SharePoint AppPool account.
One thing to keep in mind…. In SharePoint, everything must change from within the environment.
