Gotta love Global Warming, Dallas is 64 at 6 am and expected high of 83 in December.

I wanted to share something exciting with you as this marks the second time I stepped back from the fire, put down the napalm and the rocket launcher and restrained myself. You see, the other day I said the naughty 5 letter G word and the floodgates opened - partners, press, competitors, Microsoft… why Vlad? why not Office Live? what, why, how.. So I figured, let me sit down, explain myself, detail the 5 year plan and our statistics and KPI and..

.. and then I thought: who would this benefit? My competitors, who are at best three years behind us, guys with fiber and static IP in their garage with an eBay server in the colo, disaffected Microsoft partners who are too lazy to put up their own blog?

And as I sat there trying to tone down my post to the point that there still may be one Microsoft employee willing to talk to me, I looked at my constituency above. Then I looked at my feeds, who else is talking about this? And as I sat there puzzled on whether I a just a brilliant visionary who is seeing how all this will play out or just the dumbest guy to speak on behalf of those who choose not to speak out.

Then St. Bradley herself popped up, and St Dansey and reminded me of my post about the SMB needing a new messiah.

So I did nothing.

Welcome to the grownup world where opinions and guidance matter. I happen to run a company driven on feedback and my partners and customers tell us every time we make a mistake. I do not know how Microsoft disaffected you and frankly I dont care. If you say nothing, do nothing then nothing happens and you get exactly what you deserve - nothing.

But you are too busy to blog, right? Good news on that front. The world is changing, fast, and if you arent talking about it, you just might find yourself with a whole lot more time on your hands than you used to.

Remember, Microsoft people arent evil (except Dave Overton, who kills kittens and makes USB thumb drive holders out of their tails) but without the custmer guidance in the open they will continue down the path set by someone far up, or far out of touch. Just how do you think that company works? Do you really think some entry level person at Microsoft you talk to is going to march into their bosses boss and bitchslap them and tell them they got it all wrong and they should listen to some lamer that cant even figure out a blogger account but thinks he can dictate the direction of multibillion dollar product line?

Come on.

Yes, come on. You dont matter. But if you cant stand up for yourself you never will. Nobody else is gonna do it for you.

Lot’s of people want to keep track of what I am up to but do not have the time to read every word, every day. I also get plenty of items that people would like to bring attention to, but not the full scale Vladville storm of traffic. Things like beta products and free conference passes, swag, Microsoft surveys and other benefits that are in the small supply and can’t be blasted over the front page.

So for all of you looking for a more exclusive, focused Vlad, here is a newsletter.

Click here to sign up. It’s free! I will even spell check it.

Little bit of business, little bit of tech, lot’s of SMB insight and hair..

Pardon the bucket, just testing.

info@owndemo.com

mapstiab@owndemo.com

postmaster@owndemo.com

Rock on.

Don’t you just love it when you post something that’s meant to help people but it just backfires with even more questions? Such is this morning, woke up to a dozen emails about last nights post.. by the way, thanks to emailing them directly to me instead of following the proper support route (support.ownwebnow.com) or posting a blog comment where someone other than the CEO of the company could help you. Real considerate.

But, as a public service, here are a few background pieces that I hope help the spectators:

Why not just always use ISP’s SMTP server?

Because it gets hard to manage and its even worse in multihomed offices. Nowadays very few roles in business are tied to the desk, people are mobile and they rely on more mobility. They are two different things, allow me to explain. People tend to be more mobile, meaning they will do the work from home, from office, from the production plant, from the client site in Hong Kong, from an Verizon Wireless link and so on. They also rely on mobility, in terms of devices and gadgets that receive email. Yesterday we had a support ticket from someone that wanted to receive email alerts in their car because they spend most of their day driving from site to site dropping off equipment and they needed the settings to bypass port 25.

As people become more mobile, and rely more on mobility products, single desk, single ISP and single IP address rules go out the window.

Why not just use RPC-over-HTTP?

While RPC over HTTP is a technically valid solution to the SMTP problem, it is a feature of Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office, something that most companies cannot afford and even if they can, they do not have the means to justify the expense. Yeah, I know, I know - the productivity, the scheduling, the TCO bull can pour through the chimney on this argument, we are talking about companies that spend less than $120 a year in TOTAL on their email infrastructure and communications and that includes filtering and A/V. Could they benefit from Outlook? 50/50 - some of these roles are simply correspondence roles where minimum wage workers just crunch through the sales and fulfillment.

Remember, premium solutions are there for premium problems. The ability to just send and receive email reliably and securely is not worth a few hundred dollars a year for a vast majority of companies out there.

Why bother with SSL/TLS?

Every time you receive email from a POP3 server you are passing your username and password in clear text. Yep. You read that right. Most people stick with just plain login/pass because its easy and requires very little effort.

Same goes for webmail. We provide secure sockets on all our services but most people don’t use them. When we tried to redirect to SSL sites automatically we faced a huge backlash from partners and customers who did not want to see our hostname in the address bar. I suppose having people read your email is more appealing than seeing mail1.ownwebnow.com instead of mail.ihaveaverysmallpenisandliveforvanity.cc

ISP filtering traffic, I am outraged, where is the news coverage?

ISP’s own the network, you just buy the right to use it. A right that they can at any time restrict. In a very big way, I support the ISPs right to filter their network traffic. Most of the SPAM nightmares come from zombies on cable/DSL connections that do nothing but spew SPAM. If they were policed effectively by the ISP there would be no need for port 25 restrictions, however, I’d rather see the providers kill SMTP access and force people to migrate to secure SSL access on alternate ports.

How can I find out if my ISP is filtering my SMTP traffic?

Just telnet to mail1.ownwebnow.com on port 25. If you get the connection with our banner, you’re open. If you see anything else, or if  you get an error or a timeout or a refused connection, your ISP is filtering SMTP.

Is SMTP AUTH mechanism important?

Not really. You can either authenticate explicitly using SMTP Auth or you can just use the POP3-before-SMTP mechanism that is native to the way the mail agents operate. Basically, when you hit Send & Receive, your client first connects to us and authenticates with the POP3 server to download email. Once authenticated, the IP address is programmed into the relay for a preset amount of time, meaning you can relay mail without explicitly authenticating to the server. Pretty easy.

Now, lets say you had a copier on the network that was also sending scans to your desktop or remote office. In this scenario SMTP authentication is required and must be set explicitly because there is no POP3-before-SMTP mechanism in place for the copier, it just sends mail and expects it to go through.

What about IMAP and IMAP-SSL?

They are both supported and as a matter of fact, our new webmail (https://mail1.ownwebnow.com/webmail2) relies on the IMAP protocol to manage folders and such. However, in the field only a tiny percentage of users relies on IMAP and I did not feel that was a big enough of a cause to document completely. Same goes for IMAP as for POP3, always use securely, always use SSL, blah blah.

What is the deal with 2525 and 25252?

They are just random ports we chose to bind our SMTP server to in case your ISP is not prohibiting SMTP traffic specifically, but just using the port filter on port 25. In this case, just changing the port number from 25 to 2525 without making any other changes will do it. While you should definitely implement everything I mentioned in the guide, if “it worked yesterday, it’s broken today, and we didn’t make any changes” (if I had a penny every time I heard that lie) then just a change from 25 to 2525 or 25252 will likely do it.

Why are you using TLS for SMTP in Outlook and SSL in Windows Live?

Let me take my MCSE hat off. When I tried it with SSL in Outlook, the connection failed. It was late at night and I really didn’t want to find out why it didn’t work.

Earlier this week Microsoft released Microsoft Essential Business Server and the name itself has caused a little discomfort among the people that don’t understand the midmarket customers and the dynamics beyond the box. So, as a public service, let me explain to you what its like working with midmarket customers in hopes that you don’t apply the flawed SBSer strategy and fail miserably with this new product suite.

What is Essential?

Essential, in a word, is the set of bare neccessities that a business will need to rely on in order to build their network infrastructure.

Quick, whats essential in a single office with 20 workers? Your answer is probably file sharing, email. If you think harder maybe you’ll come up with the domain controller, centralized security, remote office access? If you’re pushed for it maybe you can say mobility or a firewall? Given enough time you can probably name every single component of a modern computer network, both physical and logical, and at the end of it all start a spork fight with a coleague over what the meaning of “essential” means.

So again, essential as a term means the bare cornerstones of a network. If your network consists of four PCs and two Windows Mobile phones, your essentials can be squeezed in a tiny appliance. Grow a little more and maybe you’ll need SBS. Grow a little more and perhaps you’ll need a second server. Grow a little more and get an LOB and maybe you’ll need a SQL box. Grow a little more and maybe you’ll have to hire an IT guy to just run around and keep track of it all. Grow a little more and your SBS box needs a transition pack. Grow a little more and open another office. Grow a little more and now running your IT infrastructure change management is not as simple as nailing a sign on the bathroom door that says “Make sure you login to DC2 instead of DC1 starting Monday!”

Now, whats essential? Essential is something that you can’t live without and perhaps in a more relevant view, it is something you don’t want to spend time maintaining, managing, fixing and tweaking to get up and running.

That (Microsoft hopes) is Microsoft Essential Business Server.

Susan, and I imagine many SBSers, that exist out of a “single box with 2k3std accessories” are not going to see these things as essentials. And if you ever hope to serve these customers you need to understand that they are not just a supersized sbs-in-a-box just shipped in three boxes. There are dynamics, office politics, investments, legacy software and hardware, set processes that people will resist changing because whoever came up with the broken process had it embraced by the entire company that can not think of doing anything else.

If you are an SBSer, you need to come to terms that not everything can be fixed with one box and you need to come to terms with the fact that your sales cycle will be longer, much longer. Allow me to explain both points:

Researching Essential Business Server Opportunities

Midmarket clients are very unlike the smallbiz clients in that they have already adopted technology - just very, very poorly. You might be dealing with dozens of servers, multiple domains, multiple offices and tons and tons of little LOBS all setup in their own peculiar way.

Most of your midmarket sales cycle is actually going to be a research cycle. Identify if the customer wants to work with you and get paid. Immediately. This isn’t a Managed Services bangup of let us clean up your crap because we have a dozen customers just like you, this is a long process of identifying what the company has, how it interacts and how to consolidate it and plan for its growth.

Midmarket customers are infrastructure consulting opportunities, they are not managed services opportunities.
Midmarket customers are not problems that need to be fixed by an upgrade or a Zenith agent with monkey in a bucket banging at the event log, they are broken process and application implementations that you will be bringing back into spec for years.
Midmarket customers are not business owners that need a server, they are IT managers and accountants that can’t explain the costs or how everything plays together.

So get the consulting contract out, explain what you are going to deliver in a nutshell, provide detailed reports every 40 hours (or every $1,000 dollars) with the true project completeness and documented details. Then sell the server.

Selling Essential Business Server “Essentials”

Selling the software is the last step in the process. After you know what you have, after you’ve spent days or months bringing the process together, virtualizing servers and getting rid of legacy hardware and software (no, they don’t need that 96 DOS fax “server” from Packard Bell), documenting the LOBs and bringing the network back to spec, you sellMicrosoft Essential Business Server-s.

Mark my words - this will be the least expensive part of the process.

If you are any good at all, the documentation and process you leave this company with and the training you can provide to that IT person or team thats left minding after the things surrounding the essentials is whats going to keep you and your workers swimming over the six figure salary.

Thank you Microsoft

I am biting my tongue on this one, but this suite and direction are whats going to return the premium and technology consulting back to the world of SMB technology. And you have nobody but Microsoft to thank for it.

Why? Because these midmarket companies are dominated by arogant and overworked IT managers and staff that have to deal with the decisions their bosses made in the long long ago and they cannot break the cycle. So in order to get things done, they need an external influence to help them keep their jobs and not get fired for things that are constantly falling apart, something they can’t fix because they are constantly putting out fires.

Enter Microsoft. “Hey, midmarket company, heard of Business Essentials Server? We can show you how to do XYZ with it, are these your pain points?” and then you’re in. Your first friends should be the IT staff, even if you’re dealing direct with CEO and CFO they will still ask their IT people to give their nod of approval. At least thats been the case in every midmarket situation I’ve ever been in. So if you patronized them, if you come in as the holy grail that will fix all the problems overnight with a single solution without even understanding the problem (SBSer mentality “You need a server!”) then don’t expect to hear back from them. On the other hand, if you’re really going to be there for a few months to not just fix but establish process and training not only are the IT people going to love you but you will have a gig for life. Then sell them the managed services The managed essential services

This works for us, hope it can work for you.

The secret to success is having no shame and not following the lemming marketing tips.

Turns out, people are so fed up with traditional SPAM assault and they would rather do business with people they can read and understand the whole agenda.

Got an email the other day that, between the lines, asked the following question:

How can you be so mean and be so beloved and respected at the same time?

It’s really pretty simple to tell you the truth. Last month this blog had 1.2 million visitors and thats excluding Google bots and RSS hits. On the adverage I get two dozen fanmails and one death threat a day. People just don’t like to login to comment I suppose. However, I am about to let you in on two secrets:

I am not mean..

Many people self-identify themselves in my posts. Even a blind man can tell that I have no advanced literary training, so how do I seem to write such potent blog posts that seem to hit all the buttons? Easy, because all of the little pokes and huge stabs are the pain points I personally experienced while building this company. You get to see them all the time.

The secret is in not sugarcoating it. Not posting it like a total retard. Not trying to lie about whats going on. It’s there, it’s clear and at times it sucks. However, you’re never left to wonder just where I stand.

I’m a leader..

… and in case you’re wondering, you’re not a “leader” just because you like the title, but because you try to do something new and you deal with the backlash that causes. Sometimes decisions are good, sometimes they are bad but you never know if you don’t try. And that’s the point.

People identify with what I go through because I do not bs about it. They see me overcome things, they see the mistakes that they may be making and of course they get deeply hurt by them. Nobody likes to be called as “too small to get a loan” or “too irrelevant” – so they do one of two things. They close the browser and never come back, continuing on their chosen path, or they look at the situation and decide that the only way not to be looked in that light is to lead themselves out of what is actually causing them to feel bad about what they do.

The point is that it’s not about me, it’s about  you. Nobody would think twice about what I think or feel. If you asked 1,000 people if they cared what I thought, 999 would say no (1 would say “WTF is Vlad?”) – but that “Vlad is mean” and “Vlad sucks” thoughts you may feel are not what causes change, its that little insecurity we all feel about what we may be doing and that someone out there just may have figured it out.

…

So I talk about my life, I state my opinion and this is my personal outlet. People seem to appreciate it and follow it and they write in every day to try and get better. I am here because I had wonderful people that helped me with every step of my career and my company, so I feel the least I can do is to pass it on. So I give entrepreneurs advice, I give corporate employees guidance, I talk to sr. management about trends and attitudes in SMB, I talk to startups about the problems they will see, I write, I talk, I record, I blog and I write.

And people seem to like it. Life is what you make of it and recoginizing that you have the choice and are in control of it is what makes you go further. It also helps being smart about what is irrelevant, who doesn’t matter and when you need to quit.

You will not learn anything new from this post, everything about it is common sense. On the other hand, there are a lot of smart people out there with no common sense at all. Then there are a lot of people who either have never worked in a real big company or worse, got out of a real big company and had marginal success with their little business that they lose perspective of how big companies and more importantly, how big company employees work. The longer that marginal success lasts, the unhappier the little company becomes with the love it gets from the big company. Why?

Let me tell you a story of a guy from a few groups I read, a guy who had obviously ended up where he is at because he couldn’t get along with his coworkers and didn’t keep his skills sharp enough to get a new job when everyone got fed up with his incompetence and arrogance. This guy ended up somewhere on the bottom and crawled just high enough to reach a keyboard so he can spend his days in front of a monitor whining about how nobody loves him, how his Action Pack isn’t arriving on time, how his Action Pack didn’t come with all the CD’s, how Microsoft is unfair with the SBSC program, how Microsoft with $50 billion/quarter in revenues needs to spend a lot of it to make his $120/quarter-in-licensing-business more profitable, how Microsoft doesn’t love him, how nobody loves him.. sniff.

Almost brings a tear to our eye, doesn’t it? Ok, no, it doesn’t, but its the similar line of thinking that diludes a lot of people into thinking that because they are hard working and visionary gamblers (maybe risk takers sounds better?) that everyone else is. That because they are willing to drop everything to help and even bend their rules and policies for a greater good, everyone else ought to, too! Or, if they are a tad more reasonable they adopt the “change influencing feedback” and talk to the wall for years because they don’t understand big company dynamics, employees and motivation.

How are BIG company employees different from Entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs are willing to forgo the immediate gratification and safety for a big payoff in the future.

Employees are seeking the highest possible immediate payoff with the least amount of hassle.

There are thousands and thousands of ways you can over-analyze the difference but at the end of the day thats all there is to it. Employees take no risk and they know all the returns. Entrepreneurs take (sometimes) calculated risks for an unknown but hopefully huge returns down the road.

How do you get huge returns? By being flexible, open to change and ideas, optimistic, through sacrifice, hard work, self-motivating, etc. You put in long hours, you deal with people you probably wouldn’t deal with if you could, you’re willing to work under different conditions day in and day out, you accept, embrace and cause change. You keep on trying, and trying, and trying to find the change that will get you to the big payoff faster.

Now, if you’re a BIG company employee, how do you get huge returns? You don’t, you’ve got two numbers you need to hit: one to keep your job, the other to get a bonus/promotion. Thats it. No need to change. No need to sacrifice. No need to get to the payoff faster. You just mind your place, your performance and over time you move up higher up the chain. And if you don’t, you get another job.

The Core of Employee

Big company, small company, it doesn’t matter. Let’s talk about employees alone. They are in it for the now. They get the security that their job will not change day to day. They get the security that their pay will not change week to week. They get the security of knowing what their health insurance coverage is, what their pension plan will be, when they will be able to afford a new iPod, when to take that next vacation with the peace of mind that they can be away from everything and not a thing will go wrong while they are gone.

So their incentive to go against the grain and challenge the policies, their bosses or other peoples bosses is slim to none. Their incentive to work harder than they ought to hit their numbers is not there either, sometimes it even works in the opposite direction - “if I kill this month the boss will up my goal for next quarter and there is no way I am going to be able to hit that number, let me defer this deal”;

Motivation? Management? Over 50 years ago Abraham Maslow published the Maslows Hierarchy of Needs, which tries to explain the motivation and how workers can be motivated differently depending on how some of their basic needs are covered. Ironically, he did his research on rhesus monkeys..

So what does the pyramid say? Well, it looks at the needs a person has as they go from the very basic biological and physiological needs for survival (food, water) all the way to self-actualization, finding the meaning of life, etc. It stands that at each stage different incentives can be offered to help the person reach that next stage in life.

So what motivates corporate employees? Well, there are your basic needs such as free soda and occasional company lunch. Then there are safety needs, that is likely a cubicle with three walls - so here they are motivated by having their own office. Then there are needs related to belongingness and love - being on a successful team that takes care of each other, that is respected by others, that gets some cohesion. Then we climb into the esteem needs, the corporate awards, promotions, big titles for even the most unessential of employees (ever notice how companies call their riff-raff sales people “product, project, business development, managers even though they manage essentially no one?). Step up to the final stage, that of realizing your potential (shooting everyone in the office, burning down the building, etc)

Thats at least the theory. So, what motivates that lowest of an employee who though his or her inexperience has the unfortunate misery of dealing with your whiny butt? To get as far away from you as possible, of course. How? By making you as happy as possible so you hand over as much money as possible so they can get as quick of a promotion as possible! It’s that simple. In corporate environments everyone starts at the bottom. Very bottom. If they have any brains, they are promoted, quickly.

Are they going to go up to their superiors and tell them everything they do is wrong - heck no, they don’t want to get fired. Are they going to violate their employment contract or company policy - and get fired? Are they going to try out different things for a few quarters, just to see what might really pay off eventually? Why? God willing things look good and I get to move over to that other team, lord just give me the strength not to kill the bastard in the next cubicle for four more weeks and I’m on the easy street!

And therein lies the core benefit of employment - that if you are unhappy for whatever reason you can with very limited risk find a different job elsewhere.

Entrepreneurs don’t get this.

Everything written above is an outright spit in the face of the entrepreneurial spirit. Entrepreneur does not and will not comprehend the lack of motivation, lack of incentive, lack of.. I mean, for the love of god, they do the same shit every single day and they don’t rip their heads out?!? I could never do th..

But just as you’re sounding that last word out, consider just how much stability YOU demand from the really big company. You never want them to change. How happy are you when the bank you rely on goes through a magical transformation that doubles your fees. Or when your phone company gets bought up and the service you now get falls apart. Or having to deal with another person where you already established a relationship with ….

Starting to get it now? Those are your safety needs, your reliability requirement so you can continue to grow your business without things underneath you constantly changing without your explicit consent.

So how do we work together…

The major cause of unhappiness between entrepreneurs and big company employees is in their lack of understanding for each other. Entrepreneur wants the big company employee to change their company so it can serve the entrepreneur better. The big company employee wants the entrepreneur to be the asset that makes their key performance indicators go up. The two are in direct conflict with each other, and frankly impossible.

So.. back to the agrarian society and bartering?

No, through tolerance. Through understanding what motivates each other and how to best form a relationship based on understanding. But, lets consider ignorance first - if the big company employee screws the entrepreneur, the entrepreneur will find another company to deal with. If the entrepreneur screws the big company employee they will get a new job, stop doing their current job to the fullest potential, take a 2 week vacation during the entrepreneurs busy season or put their entire focus on another entrepreneur who has their best interest at heart.

So.. how do we all win?

Through give and take. You like what that big company employee is doing for you? Understand their needs. Write to their boss and tell them what they have done for you. Tell others why they need to work with the big company employee. Understand where the big company employee needs to go and help them get there. Same goes for the big company employee. Understand your entrepreneurs needs and where they want to go. Try to give them the direction the big company is taking and how they can meet their need - the big payoff. When the really big company employee does something remarkable for the entrepreneur, that entrepreneur is closer to their payoff. So that entrepreneur better be cognizant of the fact that the big company employee wants to be happy too - so make them happy. Life is beautiful! Until there is a problem. Neither side can go far in either direction - entrepreneur can’t take the risk, the employee can’t get fired. So they lie to each other - “Oh, we’re going to get that done in FY08″ or “I have a huge deal I am working on” or “I’ve been in meetings all week to resolve that problem” or “We’re too swamped to look at that new offer you guys have” (because we’re trying to take all our business to the other big company)..

When companies (be it entrepreneur or big company employee) go out of their way to BS one another the whole system falls apart and neither wins. When companies work together, understand each others motivations and needs, everyone has a chance to win. The key is tolerance and understanding.

How ridiculously simple is that?

Ok, well, that was a lot of fun. I hope nobody thinks I’m insane (more so than usual) when I talk about mail systems but truth be told - I could not do what I do without Exchange. I look at two months ago, on Windows Mobile 5 and Exchange 2003 without a SIP PBX and just feel like that was a total stone age of technology I was basing my business on.

What’s a little more exilirating is that I can finally talk about all these features that the team has worked on so hard. It is hard to convey to someone that is not a developer just what a joy it is to have a concept, to take feedback, to design it and finally showcase it and have people “get it” in so many ways. I’d like to thank the almost 200 of you that showed up and I hope you can act on some of what I’ve been able to present. We are in a middle of the highest leap Exchange has ever made, I really believe that.

We’re no longer all about just having a decent groupware suite. We’re no longer about just having a stable messaging system. We’re no longer just about a reliable and secure messaging environment. We’re now all about business, how it communicates, how it shares, how it secures and how it transforms the communication medium - be it written, faxed or voiced in. Find someone to show you Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007 together. As I said, you don’t have to sell Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007, you just have to show it and people will want it.

As for the SBSer questions; I will answer as many of these as I can at the SMBTN summit, I am presenting this type of material there in March:

Can I use R2 expanded CAL rights to license an extra Exchange 2007 server in an SBS environment?
From Eric: No, they cannot because SBS R2 includes Exchange 2003, not 2007.  Exchange 2003 CALs can never be used to access an Exchange 2007 server.  SBS will not include Exchange 2007 until XXXX.  CAL versions must always meet or exceed the version number of the server it is accessing.  2003 is less than 2007.

Should I wait for Cougar/Centro/Tingyang?
Ok, so I made up Tingyang to illustrate the point that you should not wait. If you are apprehensive because you don’t think you’ll be capable of managing Exchange 2007, don’t worry, its very simple. I am of the opinion that with the new hardware demands placed by Exchange it ought to sit on a server by itself, sorry. Not just that but the logs and databases ought to be on different spindles and a spare database (LCR) should sit on a separate drive alltogether. You’re basing the core messaging functionality of your whole network on a single component, it is time you took it more seriously and stuck it on its own box - and this stands even when Cougar/SBS2008 are released, Exchange 2007 is beefy, give it as much ram as you can.

Will there be an easy migration path from SBS 2003 to Exchange 2007?
There already is one but it requires reading and comprehension.

Why are you talking smack about SBS?
Not at all. Listen, the whole point here is that messaging is no longer one of the cool components of the network. It is THE component that virtually everything else lives on. Messaging, CRM, Voicemail, Faxing, mobile devices, etc. The second that component fails is the second every employee at your clients company that has your phone number picks it up and calls you with an urgent, system down, we’re losing millions of dollars get here #@!%!@@ tone. There is nothing wrong with having SBS and a separate Exchange box strictly for the purpose of communication. Look, 10 site customers have no problem dropping $15,000 on a VoIP PBX - but they can’t afford more than a baseline Dell Celeron server and a $599 software package? Come on! As Jeff Middleton always explains “It’s a compromise. If you go down I could get you back up in about a day” - thats fair. Now ask a business owner if they can live with that. If they can, disregard everything I’ve said.

Is search really that good?
Aaaaaaaaaaaamazingly good. My mailbox is the 8,000lb gorilla and I can pull up anything in a matter of seconds.

Windows Mobile 6, availability?
Availability depends on the carrier, some (T-Mobile) have announced free upgrades on some of their devices and we already know that the current devices running WM5 are plenty capable of running WM6. Just a thought.

Is there really a 32bit edition of Exchange 2007?
Absolutely. However, it is for test/lab purposes only and it is not supported in a production environment. Not supported is a Microsoft term for “it works but when it hits the fan we’ll feel really really bad for you but we will not help you”

Can I upgrade to 2007 on a spare server in an SBS environment and then roll back if I don’t like it?
This question nearly knocked me out of my chair. God no, please, do not attempt this. Major infrastructure hops introduce many changes in the Active Directory environment and doing so as a weekend project… I don’t know who asked this question but I doubt that collective intellect of everyone on that webcast would be enough to execute that one properly. If you must use this in production prepare yourself for a proper migration. I cannot in good conscience tell you to do a weekend project or 2007 at all if you’re even considering a rollback.