Microsoft gets a hard time on a regular basis for the fact that they have about a million different SKUs in their product lineup for different products that do different things. This problem was particularly bad in Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2, which had Essentials, Web, Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter editions, each with different restrictions and allowances on things like the allowed number of users, allowed roles, free virtualization rights, and the amount of system resources that the OS is allowed to consume. It's even discussed on a lot of fairly popular Windows blogs. Windows Server 2012 reduced this number, eliminating the Enterprise and Web SKUs, and working harder to bring Windows Server 2012 Essentials to the forefront.
Windows Server 2012 Essentials is really interesting and it's both awesome and retrospectively somewhat painful to see Microsoft push it a little bit harder. It replaces three editions of Windows Small Business Server, Windows Home Server, and is meant to be an alternative to using desktop Windows 7/8 as a server or buying a dedicated network appliance like the Western Digital Sentinel. Microsoft Windows Small Business Server has been out since 2003 and is not always thought about when discussing Windows Server editions.
The gist of Small Business Server is that it's regular Windows Server, but after Windows Server installs, you continue to answer a few relatively easy questions, and then it installs and configures the ActiveDirectory, Windows Software Update Services, DHCP, DNS, files, and then it goes on ahead and installs SharePoint and Exchange.
Last year, even though Windows Server 2012 and its related products were on the way, I made the decision to install Windows Small Business Server 2011 "Standard" edition on TECT. Microsoft announced right after the 2012 products that a single integrated product with Windows, SharePoint and Exchange would no longer be available and the smallest businesses were encouraged to either move toward regular Windows Server and Exchange/SharePoint on different machines (or in different Hyper-V VMs) or move to Server '12 Essentials (or Standard) and use cloud services like Office 365 (or implicitly, Gmail/Google Docs) for e-mail and file collaboration/document sharing.
I'm not going to talk to the network throughput restrictions that many people against this action talk about. To be honest, I think that's preposterous and most of the people who have, say, a hundred users (more than any edition of SBS allowed anyway) on a site should probably be paying for a better network connection anyway.
The question I've got is whether or not it's good or important that Microsoft has such an integrated product that offers all of these services for inexpensive on premises deployment.
SBS' advantages really were that it is quite simple to deploy, it was very inexpensive, and that it was simpler for end users than having separate services for on-prem file/print services and hosted e/mail and other services. With the Premium Add-On to Small Business Server, you could even tie Line of Business apps (such as Dynamics, web applications, additional SharePoint instances, and other things) into your ActiveDirectory structure, creating a single sign on environment.
SBS was also cheap. You can get started with SBS Standard for $1100 (even today, it's still on sale as linked above) and add Client Access Licenses as you need them. It gets you a copy of Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard, which was spendy on its own, Exchange 2010, and a pre-integrated installation of the (free) SharePoint Foundation 2010 product. Under a normal deployment scenario, this setup would require three virtual machines (or three whole servers) with licenses and CALs for each server and each product. You could save money by using SharePoint Foundation instead of Server or Enterprise, and you could get away with Windows 2008 R2 Web for the SharePoint instance. The other two instances need to be Windows Server Standard, however, and you need Windows CALs for at least one, and Exchange CALs for the other one.
Windows Server 2012 Essentials improves on this situation slightly by not requiring CALs for use of it, and by being easy to set up for the "infrastructure/files/print" components. You still require a separate Windows 2008R2 or 2012 server for Exchange and SharePoint 2010, however. In addition, through small miracles and the magic of IIS (and everything being hosted by a single OS), the old SBS can provide the Remote Web Access, Outlook Web Access, and SharePoint applications through a single IP address.
I mentioned above that I am running SBS 2011 Standard on TECT. Due to the management, licensing, and networking complexity reasons listed above, this isn't by accident. I tried very hard to make this article about the technical merits of each product and not about how Microsoft clearly hates me, hates money, or is exiting the small business market. However, I'm a big kid and I know these things aren't true. What is true is that for my particular use case, SBS 2011 Standard is a better product than what comes after it, purely because I also want to run SharePoint and Exchange, ideally on the same outward-facing Web server.
This is sad because what comes after it really is a compelling product. WSE 2012 does away with CALs, supports bigger boot disks and bigger backup disks, and has the PC backup and Silverlight-based Web Music/Video/Photo playback and sharing functionality. Fortunately, for the moment, I can overcome most of these desires. However, I eventually need to answer the question of what to do when it comes time to migrate my current setup to newer software. Even if this isn't until 2019 or 2010, I one-day will need to make the decision to either give up on having on-site e-mail, pony up for separate licenses for everything, deal with having different web addresses, possibly buy some more external IPs, and or deal with having to choose between SharePoint, OWA, and Remote Web Access being available from outside the network.
I suppose part of the question is whether or not anything is better if it's stored off-site. My e-mail and some of my SharePoint stuff might actually be, although as always, it comes down to a preference for paying one large sum in advance, or paying for a subscription to a service. The hard part now is that even if you buy a piece of software and it is licensed to you for all of eternity, using it for that long might actually be a terrible idea. A great example of this is Windows XP, and anything else that came out in 2003-2005. You can use XP and Server/SBS/Exchange 2003 and WSS 3.0 (Ye Olde SharePoint), but Microsoft recommends you not use them on the Internet.
I would agree if you told me that cloud is where things are moving, but I'm not quite sure I agree that it's already the solution for everybody. The question I have is if it'll become "the solution" for smaller enterprises (and individuals who are running this as a home server) before the products that make up Small Business Server exit their support cycle.
It'll be interesting to see if, in the next few years, Microsoft improves pricing on the individual components that make up Small Business Server any. Windows Server 2012 R2 offers new functionality that gets you the simplified SBS console, PC backup, and Remote Web Access, but you still need to buy Exchange and one or two additional servers (or run it in VMs, I suppose) for access to the rest of what SBS offers.
Maybe this is one of those things that I need to let go of. I talk on a pretty regular basis about people who need to let go of the computing past. I talk about it a lot as being the bad old days, and thinking about it now, things like "configuring your own e-mail server, ever" is probably going to be one of those things that later gets classified as a relic of the bad old days. The problem is that SBS is as closed to no configuration as a mail server you keep at your house or in your office could possibly be.
As always: we'll see how it shakes down.