OK, Small Business Experts, help me out here! Maybe I am too used to the Foundations server environment where upgrades and recovery takes literally few minutes only. Is this how low expectations are in the Microsoft world?
Please help me understand what Microsoft Essential Business Server Press release is all about,
“We used to spend 15 hours a month doing upgrades,” said Tom Goddard, director of Information Technology for Lee Company. “Instead, with EBS, this is down to two hours a week (That’s still 8 hrs/month). That alone saves us $11,000 per year and allows us to spend more time thinking strategically about our business.” (Microsoft.com PR)
So, let me get this correctly — Microsoft admits that they used to make YOU waste 15 hours a month on upgrades and bug fixes alone, which if you had a good engineered product — would not be there to begin with. Now, with the launch of SBS 2008 and EBS 2008 today, MS folks are happily promoting the fact that the environment will still cost you 8 hours (2 hrs/week x 4 weeks) a month of unnecessary labour and down time in patch fixes.
I am confused. As a small business owner, I am looking for maximum uptime and minimum IT headaches. Small Business owners cannot afford to have downtime, they don’t have backup data centers in place nor they can afford to have in house IT guy to constantly upgrade the darn server.
Should I even talk about the fact that Microsoft’s own case study on Essential Business Server deployment outlines deployment time reduction from 4 months to 1 month. That is right, a month to setup a small business server? Lotus Foundations takes 30 minutes.
Lee Company installed Windows Essential Business Server 2008 in less than one month. “It would have taken us three to four months to deploy the individual programs,” Goddard says. (Case Study Link on Microsoft.com
I am confused. Help me out? Any small business owners and consultants? Please advise. I need to figure this all out. It’s bugging me too much ;)
