The book you have in your possession is the culmination of a lot of work from thousands of people, from the original programmers at Microsoft to the team at Sybex that helped put it together. From the first days of Windows, Microsoft strived to create an easy-to-use and helpful program that would be available and accessible to anyone who wanted to use and own a computer.
Today, the person Microsoft is focusing upon is the small-business owner. For the small-business owner or the information technology consultant, Small Business Server 2008 provides an easy-to-use and exceptionally powerful platform that can do just about anything of which a large business is capable. If you’ve wanted to learn more about Active Directory, Exchange for Small Business, SharePoint, or SQL, then this is the book for you.
This book has been designed from the ground up to provide thorough coverage of Small Business Server’s many features and technologies so that you can easily use it in a small-business environment. The approach this book takes is to analyze each of the full-bodied features of Small Business Server and discuss how they’re implemented, as well as how they differ from the full editions of Windows Server 2008. Instead of focusing on a medium or large enterprise, this book is entirely focused upon the small business’s goal of ‘‘getting the job done’’ in the fastest and most elegant way possible.
Throughout this book, I’ve assumed that you are either a small-business owner or an IT professional consulting with a small business. In other words, the book is written from that perspective. It doesn’t spend a lot of time describing the intricacies of every system, but it does cover all the aspects of Windows Small Business Server in a method that will allow you to administer it easily.