Windows Essential Business Server 2008 RTM
I’d like to do two things right off the bat in this, my first, blog post here…
1) Announce that Windows Essential Business Server 2008 has reached RTM! (English now, more languages to come soon)
2) Extend my sincere gratitude to the many customers, MVPs, users, partners and enthusiasts that helped us build what we hope proves to be an exceptional product. Thank you.
The team (at Microsoft and extended by the community mentioned above) has been hard at work on this for a long time - Beta 1 shipped in December 2006 – and we’re now very close to general availability (GA) when we’ll have the privilege of hearing from customers what they like and what we can make better. The final step in release comes with our November 12 product launch (previously announced), which kicks-off GA. See Eric Watson’s earlier blog entry describing the difference between the RTM and GA milestones.
Our #1 goal with EBS has always been to increase the satisfaction of our customers in midsize businesses – giving them a better experience and helping them to leverage the full value of their IT investment. We believe we can do that by tailoring our software to their specific needs, practices and preferences. The challenge is to take complicated technologies designed for the enterprise and make them more easily consumed by companies without enterprise-size resources. To succeed in this we knew we’d have to stop talking and start listening. We have put what I believe is an unprecedented effort into learning about our midsize business customers/users; really getting to know what they need, like and don’t like. These activities weren’t just limited to a few program/product managers and UX researchers – the entire team got immersed and it went well beyond the typical betas, TAP programs and newsgroups we always run (although we had those too)… The team also assembled customer advisory boards that helped us make decisions about the product. We visited hundreds of customers around the world in their businesses and got to know them in their environment and we interacted with thousands more in various other ways to discover what we should be doing and then to test, refine and validate our designs. We also integrated Microsoft’s MVPs and leading SMB VAP/VARs into everything we did in product development. These two groups of professionals contributed a ton in making EBS a better product right out of the gate. In whole, we worked with an amazing collection of people and I know the product is much better than we could have made without their help. We are very proud of this collaboration and approach to designing and building software.
For midsize businesses, I’m confident that EBS is the best way to buy this software – Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server, System Center Essentials (SCE), Forefront Security for Exchange and Forefront Threat Management Gateway. Whether it’s the integration and pre-configuration to best practices that’s baked-in; the vastly simplified and accelerated setup and migration, with a minimum of configuration needed; the defense-in-depth security included in the box; the EBS unified administration experience (with SCE) that gives the user one place to monitor system health and perform daily administration tasks across their entire environment; or the single/consolidated EBS license (including a new EBS license management system) and ~30% price discount our customers will find reason to be happier and we will achieve our goal. EBS will give them a confident, reliable and ready IT platform in service of their growing business needs and time back for the IT administrator to focus strategically, not just reactively.
As I said, we’ll soon know as we hear from customers and we can’t wait!
Eric Kidd – General Manager EBS
A couple of things you might like to check-out:
The EBS Preparation Wizard - scans your existing network environment for health and EBS pre-requisites - available as a download
Bjorn Levidow, EBS Lead Program Manager, gives the inside story on migration to EBS...
EBS migration interview and RTM
Comments
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Il bello di lavorare in Microsoft è anche quello di non riuscire a star dietro a tutti i prodottiAnonymous
January 01, 2003
Windows Essential Business Server (EBS) has been released to manufacturing (RTM) with general availabilityAnonymous
January 01, 2003
Congradulations to the Windows Essential Business Server team for hitting RTM! Essential Business Server, for thouse of you who dont know, if a step up from Small Business Server. this is for companies who have more than one server and allows you to run,Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Excerpt from the post on the EBS blog by general manager Eric Kidd: I’d like to do two things right offAnonymous
January 01, 2003
Windows Essential Business Server 2008 Released to Manufacturing!Anonymous
January 01, 2003
E’ stata annunciata da pochi giorni l’RTM di Windows Essential Business Server 2008 , la soluzione multi-serverAnonymous
January 01, 2003
I know I’m a day late, but it’s still worth blogging!  Bring on November 12th 2008.  You canAnonymous
January 01, 2003
As of earlier this week, Windows Essential Business Server 2008 (EBS 2008) reached RTM! (English now,Anonymous
January 01, 2003
RTM = Released to Manufacturing It’s a big week!  Not only is Microsoft releasing an update to theAnonymous
January 01, 2003
PingBack from http://www.227volts.com/?p=176Anonymous
September 16, 2008
PingBack from http://www.windowsportal.cz/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/185/Default.aspxAnonymous
September 18, 2008
Will EBS make it to TechNet anytime soon?Anonymous
October 06, 2008
When are we going to see EBS on TechNet / MSDN? It took SBS three weeks to get up there, but its already been longer than that since EBS RTMed. I don't get why it takes this long to post, Server 2008 was on TechNet the day it RTMed.Anonymous
October 06, 2008
Do those loyal Microsoft customers that already own Server 2003/2008 CALs of various types with Software Assurance get ANY VALUE whatsoever toward EBS licensing? Or... do we get nothing for that money spent?Anonymous
October 10, 2008
The windows Essential business server 2008 RTM server is one of the new technology provided by the software company. And it helps the customers to find out the solutions of their server problems. ========================================== Martin <a href=http://fsbo.fastrealestate.net>FSBO</a>Anonymous
October 14, 2008
When will EBS be available for download on Technet? We have been running through testing on SBS for awhile now and would like to see the full EBS in action.Anonymous
December 09, 2008
The comment has been removed