Microsoft is positioning Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 as a one-stop technology solution for the small-business market—ideally, companies with 75 or fewer workstations. Within this market, SBS wizards are fine-tuned to address common business needs, such as connecting to the Internet with or without a firewall, running a local mail server, providing remote email access, preconfiguring an Internet-accessible company Web site, and providing local and remote access to a variety of HTML-based collaboration resources. In August, I tested the SBS 2003 Standard Edition release candidate (RC) to determine the product's security strengths and weaknesses and to see how well the product meets the goals of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative.

The standard setup procedure installs, configures, and activates Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0, Windows 2000 Server Terminal Services, Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, and Microsoft Database Engine (MSDE—the desktop version of Microsoft SQL Server).

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