Hi, on this page http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/licensing-web-server.aspx, I'm a bit confused by this FAQ: Q. Can database software running on Windows Web Server 2008 R2 support external applications running on other servers? A. No, with Windows Web Server 2008 R2, the database software may only support applications that are running on the same local instance of Web Server 2008 R2. My question is "Can the database be a merge subscriber to another sql server?". I would like to create a B2B website and setup a merge replication from the web server database to our intranet database server.No external application would access the web server database, only the B2B website. Kind Regards Sami Marzouki

The only way to know for sure is going to be to use the "contact a specialist" link on the right side of this page: http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/ The way that I interpret that is that they do not want you to use Windows Web Server to host a database for an application that is on another server, but applications on the Web server can use a database instance that is installed locally. I think that having a merge subscriber on the Web server would not be a problem as long as you did not have applications on other servers using the SQL instance on the web servers for their data sources. -- Mike Burr