"You're crazy," observed one friend who knows all about servers. "Microsoft Exchange is a dark art," said my brother, a Linux networks manager for a City merchant bank. Which was not the encouraging response I was hoping for when I told them I'd been asked to install the latest version of Microsoft's Small Business Server, SBS 08, with Microsoft Exchange email, at home.
I'm a freelance journalist who works half the time at home and the rest of the time in newspaper offices, and so I need a good email solution with remote access to my Outlook folders, as well as push syncing to my mobile, a Palm Treo Pro running Windows Mobile 6.1.
Going down the server route is overkill for a one-man business, but, says Gareth Hall, product manager for SBS 08 at Microsoft, "one of the challenges was to make it as simple as possible."
So just how easy is it? Well, I've got it up and running at home, although — since I work a fair bit for Guardian Technology — I am both confident and competent with technology.
It's not scary: the home screen is as user-friendly as it could possibly be. Microsoft has made a point of designing the process so that you can configure the set-up via a series of wizards. In practice, these are great … when they work. When they don't, they leave you high and dry.
For example, I already own my domain name, katebevan.com: the SBS wizard can handle your domain settings for you, but it requires that you register the domain with one of just three partner companies.
Although I'm confident with this stuff, I decided to let SBS manage the domain, and promptly ran into a rats' nest of transferring the registration, getting authorisation codes sent to and from my former registrar to the one I'd chosen, paying the new registrar etc. In the end it took a week for the domain to be transferred. Obviously some of that is outside the scope of the SBS wizard, but a warning that transferring a domain is a slow, annoying process would have been welcome.
While reasonably confident with home networking, I felt out of my depth with the network setup. SBS wants to take DHCP management away from your router, and wrestling with this gave me a difficult afternoon trying to get my network (which includes a Vista PC, a Mac, a networked hard drive and Apple Airport Express Wi-Fi) talking to the server. Eventually I realised that while the server wants to manage DHCP, you don't have to let it, and I handed that back to my router.
Microsoft Exchange itself was surprisingly easy. Once the domain was transferred and the server was online, it just worked automagically: the Outlook Web Access client was available via a web browser, and once configured with my existing Outlook setup on my Vista box, Exchange was syncing happily with Outlook, the Mac (which runs Entourage) and with my Palm Treo phone.
Perhaps the biggest barrier for small businesses is the cost of the hardware: SBS 08 is a 64-bit operating system, which means you can't just use any old PC — as you would with Linux. I'm using a new Fujitsu Siemens Primergy server (http://bit.ly/SBS01), to which I had to add a further 2GB of memory (SBS 08 requires 4GB), plus a second hard drive for backup.
The big question: is it worth it? It's certainly do-able, although I must confess I've had help from one extremely geeky friend — a programmer and a reseller of webhosting on Linux servers. He reckons that I'm pretty capable, but I was glad to have his help. At one point, for example, he was using Linux tools on his Eee PC netbook to diagnose network issues that the wizards and my knowledge couldn't solve.
Finding the time
There's also the time factor: I'm getting to know my way around the server and the software, but would most small businesses have the time and the inclination to do so? Not everyone will want to maintain a server, and will get a small business SBS consultant to do it instead. There are lots.
Hall says: "I'm not surprised you ran into a few issues. We've tried to make it as simple as possible, but at the end of the day it's still server technology."
He points out that most people get a specialist in to install and maintain this kind of system, adding that I'm in the second, much smaller group of users: "a tech-minded small businessperson who likes a challenge."
Microsoft has certainly succeeded in building a system that can be used by non-specialists. But is it worth it for a very small business?
Hall reckons it is for a business of five people or more. "That's a sweet spot," he says.
So, if you're confident and competent, there's no reason you can't do this for yourself. If nothing else, there is a warm glow of geeky satisfaction: the server is up, running and dealing with my email. I'm really pleased with it and myself — and my brother's impressed as well.
Kate Bevan has blogged in detail about setting up SBS 08 and Exchange at stuffandthoughts.wordpress.com/category/sbs.
