Merry Christmas!

All of us at Quality Systems Solutions, Inc. wish you and yours a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

No rest for the Wicked...

I must be more wicked than most! A quick look at my calendar and it looks like there will be no "Christmas Break" for me... Mind you, that in today's economy, my problem is not a bad problem to have. At least not for the time being.

We have seen a flurry (no pun intended) of activity at the tail end of Q4. We are currently in various stages of deployment for three separate clients, all doing new installations of Microsoft Small Business server. In this case, they are all SBS 2003, two Standard Edition and one Premium Edition.

I have to admit, we have seen no interest in then newest, version of SBS, Microsoft Small Business Server 2008, released November 12 of this year. The same can be said for EBS, Microsoft Essential Business Server 2008. We recently had to cancel an EBS event due to low enrollment. Its too bad, because they are both awesome products!

I don't know if there is a "Vista" factor here or not. We have seen fairly good adoption of the Windows Server 2008 product and for those that have deployed WS08, there have been absolutely no issues. It just seems like SBS 2003 has developed the same reputation as Windows XP, ROCK SOLID. We all know that in both cases, the "reputation" may exaggerate the reality, but what do they say, "perception is reality!"?

I'll admit, that we are still operating our business on SBS 2003. The reason has more to do with budget, timing and resource availability. With all the work we are currently doing, I might actually be able to afford a NEW Lenovo ThinkServer to install SBS 2008 on. Actually, we will likely Virtualize SBS Premium (a two box solution) on a single physical host. Our actual load on an SBS environment is very meager and the virtualization process actually enhances system recovery capabilities. Its a safe bet that will happen in Q1 of 2009.