Microsoft announced that the public preview version of Microsoft Small Business Server Version 7 (SBS7) is now available for free download. SBS 7 is targeted to small businesses and organizations with roughly 25 to 75 users.
“We call them previews,” says Michael Leworthy, senior technical product manager for Windows Server SMB, Microsoft. “We recommend people run this in a testing environment, not for a production environment. It’s a testing build for us — it’s pretty much feature-complete, but there may be some feature or functional changes between this and the final release. And testing includes community feedback, of course.”.
Similar to how Microsoft Office combines and integrates a set of Microsoft office and Internet user productivity applications, Microsoft Small Business Server is an office-oriented server suite, including a Microsoft server-oriented operating system and several of the server tools useful to small business network environments. According to Leworthy, “We currently have about one and a half million SBS users across the various versions.”