Hi,

 

I have built a fair few 2000 domains previously but coming into my new organisation, we have nothing.

 

Just 20 or so laptops (everyone travels) and a central standalone PC with shares working as a file server.  We have a 3rd party email host and just use pop and smtp.

 

I suggested that we go over to sbs2003 and have our own domain and host our own email.  Not a problem.  Promising shared contacts, calendars, workspaces etc but i am just not sure whether it is effective enough with everyone travelling.

 

With the laptops hardly even being on the local network it just doesn't seem effective to have the user log on to their local computer every time and then try and dial in to get the domain features.

 

I have a couple of users set up with imap at the moment on their outlook but they don't get any of the domain features (public folders etc) just the same features they had before with pop and smtp on our 3rd party.

 

Is it really worth all the hassle of setting up the domain when our users really won't have the benfit of it?  Pardon my ignorance if i completely missed some of the features of SBS or just got it completely wrong.

With the current setup, you have no central management of workstations, and company email is held in off-site, decentralised pst files. How do you go about backing these up, for instance?

 

Irrespective of whether you go for an SBS solution, you have all sorts of problems managing and protecting your IT resources.

 

Implementing SBS will certainly be a solution to the issues, but you might equally find that a hosted Exchange and hosted Sharepoint solution will also work for you. Having your own SBS gives you more control of the workstations, which you can manage through SBS's wizards, Group Policy and a (third-party) centralised anti-virus console. Importantly, you also get to store all data centrally, which you can backup properly.

 

Workstations can use Outlook with RPC over HTTP(S) to connect to the Exchange server wherever they are - they then get full access to Exchange's facilities (email, (shared) calendars, public folders, et al). I'm not sure what you mean by users having to 'dial-in' just to get the domain features - they need an internet connection to get the POP3 or IMAP email anyway, and there's be no extra requirements for Outlook/Exchange. In fact, the workstations don't even have to be domain-joined to use Outlook/Exchange in this way.

 

With Sharepoint they get collaboration features not available from simple file shares - it is accessed over a (secure) HTTPS connection, so they need nothing more on the workstations than they already have.