A lot of businesses that have grown from one or two people to 4 or more people have a computer system that stops them from sharing important information. This is normally because the computer system is the same as it was before but more computers have been added quickly and without planning.

So what are your options?

If your business wants to:

• share files securely, particularly financial and wage information,
• share calendars,
• share emails,
• share contacts,
• save as much workstation data onto the server as possible,
• hotdesking, where anyone can move to another computer and start working with their own data (email, contacts, bookmarks) straight away,
• streamlining your backup so everything is backed up at the one time,
• integrate emails with Outlook and allow workstations to be controlled from a central point of access to help reduce maintenance costs.

Then Microsoft's Small Business Server 2003 might be for you. It provides all of this functionality and more.

In particular, hotdesking is important. For an office without a proper server like Small Business Server, if an end user's workstation were to fail, that end user could not go to another workstation and start doing work straight away due to the data being stored on the old workstation. This data includes internet favourites, desktop items and My Documents.
Hotdesking saves this data on the server and it follows the end user around not matter what workstation they are logged in at. So if one workstation fails the end user can simply move to another workstation and continue to work. This is needed to ensure productivity of end users.

It can also do more complex things as well. If your business has more than 10 staff on email then you can also use Small Business Server 2003 (SBS) as an internal email server. It can act as a fully functioning mail server so you can be independent of your Internet Service Provider's mail server and your email host provider (usually the guys that do your website also host your emails and you simply download your emails to your computer via Outlook or Outlook express).

To implement an internal email server properly, anti-spam and anti-virus software would need to be installed on SBS to reduce spam and virus emails. This is needed because the previous external email host provider looked after this.

It is also recommended that a dummy email server that initially filters spam and virus be setup to further reduce the risk. PDKM recommends that the dummy email server use free anti-virus and anti-spam software. Once email is cleaned by the dummy email server it is forwarded to the SBS email server and therefore reduces the risk.

Any users who need remote access to email, contacts and calendar can use the Outlook Web Access (OWA) feature of SBS. This has a cut down interface of Outlook that can be used via Internet Explorer. It can also be setup with the same security that banks use for their websites. It's main drawback is that some advanced Outlook functions have been removed from OWA, particularly being able to send emails as two different users from two different companies (eg. Send emails as This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )

The only drawbacks are that it can only handle up to 75 users, it does need specialist installation, special software for anti-virus and should be checked more regularly than a basic workstation.

SBS also needs a Uninterruptable power supply (UPS). A UPS is needed to protect all critical servers from power failure, power sag, power surge, over voltage and under voltage. In the event of an extended power failure, the UPS can also automatically shutdown the servers properly.

We also recommend that the SBS server have redundant hard drives. Hard drives are the most common thing to fail in computers, next to power packs. If there was a second redundant hard drive that mirrored the data in the first hard drive, then if the first hard drive fails, then the second hard drive can continue to run the server. This is known as mirrored RAID or RAID 1. It allows you to keep running your server during business hours even if one of your hard drives has failed.

You must do a full backup of SBS on a daily basis, and store this backup offsite. To do this cost-effectively, a minimum of 3 USB external hard drives are needed. These are like normal hard drives but come in cases so that they can be connected to a computer easily, just like a small USB pen drive. USB external hard drives are self-contained (you don't need a tape drive to read them like you would a normal tape), they are fast enough to backup large amounts of data overnight, they have large storage capacities and are much cheaper than an equivalent tape drive system for smaller businesses.

If you would like to discuss the possibility of using Microsoft's Small Business Server, please call PDKM on 1300 139 434 or email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it