Jul 06

Small Business Server will be no more. The end of an era….

Small Business Server will be no more. Transition up (or down) to Windows Server 2012 essentials

source: http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/D/B/4DB352D1-C610-466A-9AAF-EEF4F4CFFF27/WS2012_Licensing-Pricing_FAQ.pdf

Windows Server Essentials and Foundation editions

Q30. What is Windows Server 2012 Essentials?

Windows Server 2012 Essentials is the latest version of Windows Small Business Server Essentials. It is a cloud enabled first server with an intuitive user interface. It can run on physical servers with up to two processors and has been designed for small businesses with up to 25 users.

Q31. What are some of the features that are now available in Windows Server 2012 Essentials?

Windows Server 2012 Essentials incorporates best-of-breed 64-bit product technologies to deliver a server environment well-suited for the vast majority of small businesses. The product technologies include:

 Windows Server 2012 operating system

 Data protection

 “Anywhere” access

 Health monitoring

 Workload flexibility

 Extensibility

 Add-ons for many small business solutions, including a connector to Office 365

Customers can use Windows Server 2012 Essentials as a platform to run critical line-of-business applications and other on-premise workloads. It can also provide an integrated management experience when running cloud-based applications and services, such as email, collaboration, online backup, and more.

Q32. What are the different editions available withWindows Server 2012 Essentials?

There is only one edition—Windows Server 2012 Essentials. It is a flexible offering that provides a platform for running on-premises or cloud-based workloads.

Q33. Will there be a next version of Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard?

No. Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard, which includes Exchange Server and Windows server component products, will be the final such Windows Server offering. This change is in response to small business market trends and behavior. The small business computing trends are moving in the direction of cloud computing for applications and services such as email, online back-up and line-of-business tools.

 

Q34. Will there be a next version of Windows Small Business 2011 Premium Add-on?

No. Windows Small Business Server 2011 Premium Add-on, which includes SQL Server and Windows Server as component products, will be the final such Windows Server offering.

Q35. If I have Windows Small Business Server2011 Essentials with Software Assurance when Windows Server 2012 is released, which editionwill I be entitled to receive?

If you have Software Assurance on Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, you will receive one Windows Server 2012 Essentials license.

This grant will be reflected upon your agreement renewal; however you are entitled to use the granted product upon availability.

Q36. If I have Windows Small Business Server2011 Standard edition with Software Assurance when Windows Server 2012 is released, which editionwill I be entitled to receive?

If you have Software Assurance on Small Business Server 2011 Standard edition, you will receive one Windows Server 2012 Standard edition license and one Exchange Server Standard 2010 license.

This grant will be reflected upon your agreement renewal; however you are entitled to use the granted product upon availability.

Q37. If I have Windows Small Business Server2011 Premium Add-on with Software Assurance when Windows Server 2012 is released, which editionwill I be entitled to receive?

If you have Software Assurance on Small Business Server 2011 Premium Add-on edition, you will receive one Windows Server 2012 Standard edition license and one SQL Server 2012 Standard edition license.

This grant will be reflected upon your agreement renewal; however you are entitled to use the granted product upon its availability.

//Bart

May 18

Experience Windows Server 2012 – june 7

By choosing to attend the “Experience Windows Server 2012” event you’re preparing yourself and your organization for the future. During this one day event you will discover how Windows Server is going beyond virtualization by scaling and securing workload, how it will enable the modern work style by giving people access to information and data regardless of the infrastructure , network, device or application they use to access it. And you will discover the power of many servers with the simplicity of one by efficiently managing infrastructure while maximizing uptime and minimizing failures and downtime.

Attend this event and be amongst the first to learn more about the new capabilities in Windows Server 2012.

During this 1 day event we will cover following but not limited to topics:

  • – New Hyper-V Virtualization Platform
  • – What’s new in Active Directory
  • – Storage and Management Improvements
  • – Clustering Improvements
  • – And much more

 

Reserve your seat today and join us for this free event.

Apr 22

Presentation: Introduction to Group Policies

At COMBELL, we held our second technine user meeting. One of the speakers: yours truly. As promised, you can find the powerpoint presentation here . Enjoy reading, and feel free to comment or ask questions!

 

Apr 21

Communityday 2012 – utopolis Mechelen – june 21

Get ready for the Belgian community at its very best!

The Belgian community is organizing the sixth edition of Community Day! Community Day 2012 will take place on June 21st 2012 in Utopolis Mechelen.

17 user groups will outperform themselves to bring you their view on Microsoft products in 30+ sessions and panel discussions. With the upcoming releases, a lot of the talks will focus on the things you’ll learn and use tomorrow. We even have a full track committed entirely to Windows 8. But, just as always, we aren’t forgetting about the present and the things you use today either in our several best practices and deep-dive talks!

The Microsoft Community Day 2012 is powered by:

  • AZUG
  • Belgian C++ user group
  • BESUG (soon PIRAD)
  • BIWUG
  • CLUG
  • IT-Talks
  • Pro-Exchange
  • SCUG
  • SQLUG
  • ACCB.net/VBIB
  • Visug
  • WinSec
  • XNA-BUG
  • DotNetHub
  • MyTIC
  • Wiphug
  • Technine

We hope to see you on June 21st!
The Community Day Team (Gill – Davy – Alexandre)

Practical event details
Location: Utopolis Mechelen (Map)
Address: Spuibeekstraat 5 2800 Mechelen
Event date: Thursday June 21th
Start & end time: 8.30 – 19.00
Add Community Day 2012 to your agenda: Outlook *.ics file

Social
Community Day on Twitter: @ComDayBe

Apr 13

next event 18 april – Combell offices Gent – subscribe !

Second  in-person event will be held in the Combell offices on April 18 -from 18h00 -till 21h00

SBS 20xx(x) -integration and interop

Six SMB Pro’s tackle some common issues while maintaining  SBS 20xx.

Subscribe by clicking Here

Apr 05

Join the Private Cloud Roadshow in Brussels (25 April) and Ghent (26 April)

Join the Private Cloud Roadshow in Brussels (25 April) and Ghent (26 April)

Join experts Kurt Roggen (MVP) and Mike Resseler (MVP) for the Private Cloud Roadshow.

In this half day you will learn more about private cloud infrastructure setup and how you can monitor this. Learn how to create your private clouds and how to deploy standardized applications or services into these clouds. And as a final session you will learn how you can provide automation in your private cloud.

There are 2 options to attend (same content, different location):

 

25 April 2012 in Brussels

 

26 April 2012 in Ghent

 

This TechNet event is free of charge and Microsoft will be giving away one Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone in each location.
Detailed agenda:

13:00 : 13:30 Welcome & Coffee

13:30 : 14:30 Building your Private Cloud Infrastructure
Learn how to build your Private Cloud infrastructure, by dealing with Fabric Management (Compute/ Hypervisors, Storage, Network), which will serve as the basis for the Private Cloud that you will be creating. We will discuss how to deploy, configure and manage each of these different elements in your datacenter.

14:30 : 14:50 Break

14:50 : 16:30 Creating, Monitoring & Operating your Private Cloud
Learn how to create your private clouds and how to deploy standardized applications or services into these clouds. Learn how to monitor your clouds and how to can handle change requests. All this key area’s will be addressed to give you an idea of what is happening in a private cloud after it is up, running, and into production.

16:30 : 16:50 Break

16:50 : 18:00 Automating & Delivering Services in your Private Cloud
Learn how you can provide automation in your private cloud. Discover also how your cloud services can be offered and consumed using different self-service portals and what their differences are.

18:00 : 19:00 Networking & Drinks

Apr 05

Pro Exchange – Lync User group event : Lync for SMB

Today a lot of small businesses hear good things about Microsoft’s UC solution, but they are wary of implementing it.  Decision makers or company owners don’t have hands-on experience and sometimes cannot rely on an independent technical user with experience in these products.  This session will give an overview of the options every SMB should be aware of, either on-premise (your own network) or in the cloud (as a service).

 

Pro-Lync is convinced that Microsoft UC can be a valid solution for smaller organisations, provided you size and configure your environment well.  Careful planning and design, virtualisation, intelligent licensing and the right choice of interconnections (SIP/gateways) can result in a solution that is suited for SMB’s while remaining competitive in comparison to other or legacy PABX solutions that are limited in features.   We also will tackle the extensive server diagram for on-premise installations and explain why such an infrastructure is not required for an SMB.

 

This event will feature limited technical content and is targeted to SMB owners and decision makers who are not experienced in Microsoft UC, but want to learn how their SMB might benefit from this new way of working.  To prove our point, we’ll be hosting the event at the first Belgian SMB customer (30 users) to rip and replace their PBX with OCS a few years ago.

 

Location:   Brepols Publishers NV – CCBK, Begijnhof 39, 2300 Turnhout.

Please set your GPS for the corner of  Sint-Beggaplein and Begijnhof and park in the surrounding area.  The location is a short walk from there, next to the church of this 13th century Begijnhof  where no parking is allowed.

 

Program:
18h30 – 19h00:                 Registration / drinks
19h00 – 20h00:                 Lync server in an SMB
20h00 – 21h00:                 FAQ & Demo

 

Speakers:

Ruben Nauwelaers: Ruben Nauwelaers is a consultant who works for Uw ICT Partner BVBA and is a core member of the Pro-Lync user group. His primary focus are Microsoft UC related projects in small and large organisations.

Wim Borgers:   Wim  is the IT manager of Brepols Publishers,  and a core member of the Pro-Lync community. He evaluated and decided to go for UC in his own SMB environment of about 30 users.  It was the first rip-and-replace SMB installation in Belgium of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.

Feb 15

Update Rollup 2 for Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials

Hi All,

Together with Update Rollup 2 for Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 Essentials,  Microsoft released an update for the Windows Storage Server 2008R2 Essentials as well.

No less than 15 major issues have been resolved with this Update Rollup, some of them being specific to the Windows Storage Server product, others being related to the Microsoft SBS 2011 Essentials product. Likewise with the SBS 2011 Essentials rollup, this update will automatically and silently deploy the client-side package of the update to its clients once the update has been applied succesfully to the running server.

Detailed information about the update can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2630436 – the update itself can be obtained via the Windows Update channel.

Enjoy!

Didier D’Joos

Feb 15

Update Rollup 2 for Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials

Hi all,

In a continuing effort to improve the quality and functionality of its products Microsoft released its second update rollup for Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 Essentials.

With this update rollup Microsoft decided to include the Office365 integration module, which was previously available as an additional download only. As explained by the Microsoft SBS team: “The Office 365 Integration Module is an additional feature that is available for Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2011 Essentials. This add-in feature simplifies the management of Office 365 by integrating the administration experience into the server Dashboard, which is the command-and-control center for Windows SBS 2011 Essentials.”

No less than 14 major issues have been resolved with this update rollup, greatly improving the quality of this newbee in the Small Business world. Although Most of the solved issues can ben found on server side, Microsoft released an update rollup for the client side as well which is automatically and silently deployed once the server update has been installed.

More information about this update rollup can be found on the following pages:

Please note that this update only applies to Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, this update cannot be applied to the Standard SKU.

Happy updating!

Didier D’Joos

Feb 04

Samsung Omnia 7 and bluetooth carkit

Hi Everyone,

Sometimes the most difficult, annoying and most bugging issues come with the easiest fix ever. That same is true for using my Samsung Omnia 7 phone together with my build-in car kit from BMW. If you’re fed up with the cracking noice while making a call over bluetooth, or with the lost bluetooth connectivity at the moment you’re ready to pick up your call, grab your phone while you’re reading this and do exactly the following:

– Unlock your screen and go to SETTINGS
– Switch off your WIFI connectivity

Et voila, it’s as simple as that…

You cannot imagine how long that I’ve been struggeling with this issue. I searched the internet for many hours trying to look for a fix, bluetooth update or that one little thing that would fix my issue. Fortunately I’ve got a colleague with the same phone who came up with this idea.

Didier D’Joos