Question : SBS Server 2003 vs Server 2003

To everyone:

I work at a medium size design firm, currently we have maxed out our peer-to-peer network and we have to get a domain controller. With that, we have about 25 employees looking to grow to more, relatively soon, which we would be best for us right now: SBS Server 2003 or Server 2003 based on the issues below.

We like the applications in SBS Server 2003, my boss really doe not want to bring e-mail in house, currently it is POP-3 ISP based, which is still fine .He prefers the options of Server 2003 over SBS, because he does not want Exchange quite yet and he wants the option of having a secondary domain controller option for Server 2003. Does SBS 2003 have that ability to provide a secondary domain controller as well? From what I know and researched, it won't allow a secondary domain controller, is this accurate?

Additionally, we currently do not have any full time IT staff, but myself and a colleague are savy enough that we have the ability to set everything up andmaintain it. How difficult is the setup for Server 2003, would it take a good weekend, week? I've gone through several installation guides and it does not seem too difficult, perhaps I am under estimating Microsofts abilities.

Thanks for the help.

Jonathan

Answer : SBS Server 2003 vs Server 2003

There's tons of help for SBS, as leew stated, the product is designed to work best if you follow the "Best Practices" for setup and configuration.

To answer your DC question first, though, you can have as many DC's as you want... it's just that the SBS must be the PRIMARY DC, and the ROOT of the Forest, with no TRUSTS allowed.  This works just fine for most small businesses.

Please see my post regarding setup and configuartion issues:  http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/Windows_Server_2003/Q_21031607.html

Regarding in-house mail vs. ISP.  I have 22 customer SBS installations - ranging in size from 2 to 30 users.  In every case, we've brought their email in-house to their Exchange server which is especially useful if you have a lot of local user to user email.  But the best practices for email is to have a back-up email server.  For my customers, we use their web server (an offsite, specific purpose server) as the back-up email server.  By simply adding a second MX record to the DNS zone with a higher value, email will go to the first server if available, and then to the second if it's not.  To see an example of how this works, go to http://dnsreport.com and enter a test email address in the Mail Test box (use [email protected] to see a multiple server response).

Then, you can configure your SBS with a POP-3 connector to the back-up email server to automatically pull any email that lands there.  FYI, this is especially good if you lose your Internet connection to the SBS... but honestly it rarely gets used... it's just a good-practice back-up method.

Please let me know if you have any other specific questions.

Jeff @
TechSoEasy