Hello, I was referred here from the "where do I go to today forum": ;-) I'm tasked with maintaining the hard- and software equipment of a small office: 1 server, 4 workstations, about 10 users. The office is connected to Internet by a relativly slow DSL line. For this office, I need the following capabilities: email: each user has one personal email account, then there are a few global ones to whom a number of users have to have access (info@..., support@...). One or more common "contacts" lists are mandatory. Currently, this is realized via (external) IMAP accounts and address lists shared on file level. documents: currently, documents are organized in directories on the file server. There is no overlying structure, versioning, and backups tend to be difficult. managing: currently, there is no global nor personal calendar. It might be beneficial to introduce such. I'm currently in planning to update this installation. However, I'm unsure what platform(s) are available, e.g. whether Exchange would be worth considering, can I use Outlook without Exchange (while still maintaining global contact lists), how about Sharepoint and so on. Do you have any suggestions on which technologies could best fit my needs? Regards, AngusMac

small business server could be a solution for that size (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/small-business.aspx). email: with exchange, its possible to either share a mailbox, so that other users have access to it (you decide if read only or more per permissions) or have distribution groups, so all users in the group will receive the mails (of eg info@). you can also put "contacts" in those distribution lists to mail external contacts, this is however maintained in active directory, so depending on how many lists you have and if they change alot its not really the most elegant solution. files: bringing structure into your shares wont be anything you will get around doing personally. you can however utilize dfs in windows to access multiple shares through a common path. say you have \\server1\share1 and \\server2\share2, with dfs you can structure them to be accessed like \\yourdomain\dfs\share1 and \\yourdomain\dfs\share2. with exchange, you can share calenders or use public ones (public in your organization), you can also use sharepoint services for it (its a free component of windows and does work with outlook, so you might try it out if it is working for you). suggesting technologies depend a bit on the budget. while exchange is worth it in my point of view, you will have eventually to argue over the price for 4 workstations using it. id take a look at sharepoint services first (unlike the full sharepoint server they are free)

Thank you for your help! email: I would have considered going to Outlook primarily because of its easier management and because I personally like the 2010 release. However, as far as I understand it, Outlook means Exchange or I won't get common calendars and contacts (without an addition third-party solution.) Is this correct? Are the contacts also part of the user-individual PST, or can I file-share a list around? If I use Outlook as an IMAP client only: Am I able to present the user with two mailboxes at a time? I believe I read somewhere that v2010 didn't require switching profiles anymore to maintain two seperate email accounts as the previous versions did. files: I already have one global "data-share", and even the subdirectories are more or less organized. If nothing exciting comes to mind, I'll keep this solution. Still, it is a little too "fragile" for my taste - no versioning, and no protection against one user moving everything anywhere typically without telling anyone else about it. Which invariable leads to my phone ringing the day after the event at the latest. A simple solution might be the shadow copy concept introduced in Server 2003 and extended in 2008. After having done a little more research it looks to me that Sharepoint is only effective if you need to share data with the outside, such as a globally distributed team. There would be use cases for this here, but as mentioned the office doesn't have a very fast Internet connection, and I don't feel comfortable about opening up the server for public access either. Therefore, I think that I can bury that idea in the first place. Regards, AM

email: yes, as short answer thats correct. you can save contacts as vcf files and thus share them via file system, but thats no "clean" solution imo. you can integrate sharepoint into outlook and use a sharepoint calendar from all clients (see below comment on sharepoint) while you can have multiple mailboxes (pst) open in outlook, the access is exclusive, so its a pain to access one pst (for example for the info mailbox) from multiple clients. one way to trick around would be to leave a copy of the mails on the mail server for x days and let all clients fetch them, but it leaves a potential mess if someone has longer holidays then mails are kept on the server (as an example). file: if you have the spare storage, having shadow copy active works good for us, but its no replacement for a real backup (windows comes with a build in backup software, which is better then nothing, depending on what you want to backup, a3rd party backup solution will make sense though). versioning, eg of office documents, you could do again with sharepoint, though that requires some planing what needs versioning, placing the complete file space in sharepoint isnt going to be a good solution. sharepoint can expose to the internet, but in a standard installation of the sharepoint services, its really ment as an intranet solution. as the sharepoint services are free (download for w2k3, integrated in features in w2k8 r2), if you have a spare (virtual) pc around, i would suggest to try it out. sharepoint can do lots of stuff, but needs some playing around with to get familiar with it. (till version 3 the free edition of sharepoint is named windows sharepoint services, with sharepoint 2010, the free edition is foundation)

Hi, Thank you for your post here. As FZB mentioned, SBS solution would be a good choice here. If you can admit the outsourced online service (infrastructure), Microsoft BPOS would be a more competitive solution out there for you. SBS solution: 1. E-mail, Microsoft Exchange system with best practice deployment, outlook, outlook anywhere and OWA Global/personal contacts, and calendar Flexible mailbox share permissions 2. File-access VSS and automatically backup Remote access (VPN) available for external date access SPS best practice dedicated for small business As you may know, SBS solution is designed to fulfilling the Small business IT requirement with integrated setup (best practice deployment), wizard configuration (ease configuration with non/less specialty knowledge) and automatically backup/monitoring. Microsoft BPOS: For those who are focus on business productivity and want to take advantage of the flexibility of fully-hosted Internet services, Microsoft Business Productivity Online service introduced Exchange Online, SharePoint Online service and etc to enable you enhance the business productivity capabilities without too much consideration of the low-level infrastructure. You may get more information about Microsoft BPOS from: Business ProductivityOnline Standard Suite http://www.microsoft.com/online/business-productivity.aspx

Hi , I go for BPOS rather installing heavy exchange server ( with tons of features ) , BPOS gives flexibility of offloading your managment / monitoring task and enjoy the hassel free business.

That's very interesting to learn. I'll dig into it to see whether it really is what we need. Thank you for the pointers! Regards, AngusMac