“Microsoft estimates there are 1.2 million businesses of this size worldwide. Many of them have complex IT requirements. “Their infrastructures really rival those of enterprises,” says Russ Madlener, director of product planning for the Windows Server solutions group. Microsoft’s Small Business Server includes a number of different products installed together on one physical server, but medium-sized companies need more scale and better reliability than they can get with one server.

There will be both a Standard Edition and Premium Edition for the product. Both are based on Windows Server 2008. The Standard Edition will include Exchange Server 2007 for messaging, Forefront Security for Exchange, System Center Essentials for management and the ISA Firewall for firewalling and network security. This will be installed across three separate servers, one each for e-mail, management and security. The Premium Edition will add the next version of SQL Server.

Though companies could buy all of these products today, Windows Essential Business Server should cut costs and deployment headaches to a minimum, since the bundle will be cheaper than buying everything separately and easier to install since it’ll all be integrated. One license will handle all the products together, installation will automatically be done according to best practices and IT admins will have a single administration console from which to manage all of the products.”

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