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.
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.
Remote Web Workspace had a very nice face lift in SBS 2008. Along with it came the ability to add custom links, which it comes handy when you want to track different sites.
The URL is the same https://servername/remote.
After supplying the user credential the new interface shows up and in the bottom half of the screen there are two columns of links which are customizable
In order to add custom links we have to go to the Windows SBS Console click on the Users and Groups tab, and then click on the Manage Desktop Links Gadget to the right of the window
From the Properties window there are options to add Links to either the Organization or Administration columns. For this post, I selected the Organization links section, and added a link to the SBS 2003 newsgroup.
The next time we log in, the custom link is visible under the appropriate section
SBS 2008 RC0 is out and I’m very excited with everything I’ve seen so far. The server is 64 bit so I had to go and buy a new hard drive for my Intel Core 2 Duo test machine (which has 4GB of memory).
After reading a couple of documents about the new features, I decided to go through the step and join a Vista computer in the domain. The first difference between SBS 2003 and 2008 is that we don’t have to set up a computer account anymore. The wizard does that for us.
The second difference is that instead of typing http://servername/connectomputer , we now need to type http://connect. The process starts and the following are the screens I encountered while going through the process.
After successfully joining the computer to the domain, I clicked the plus ( + ) button the Windows Sidebar and selected to add a Gadget. I selected to add the ‘Windows Small Business Server Desktop Links’ gadget that is installed when the computer joins the domain.
The following picture shows the gadget on the Sidebar
The first public news, as far as pricing goes, for Microsoft Windows Essential Server came out of Redmond today. The full announcement can be found here
The first thing that I noticed is the doubling of the price for Small Business Server 2008, Standard Edition. That’s not too bad though considering that the CAL pricing was reduced.
Anyone interested to see a preview (read ‘beta’) of Windows Essential Business Server 2008 can go here
