First, let me explain why Windows SBS doesn’t deliver much value. Really its used for a few things - domain controller, file storage/sharing, hopefully backup, and sometimes Exchange and Remote Web Workplace. Domain controllers are nice to have, but not critical for small businesses. File storage/sharing can be accomplished by a NAS for far less than a server. Windows SBS’s built in backup is pretty subpar and doesn’t include the expensive hardware needed to backup. Exchange is useful for some, but is expensive, risky to maintain in house, and requires integration with third party antivirus/antispam - hosted Zimbra or Gmail for Domains is a far better value for most. Remote Web Workplace is cool, but rarely used and the same thing can be accomplished by an Untangle Firewall.

So if you’re looking for a small business server which actually works out of the box and includes really valuable tools to help you run your business - Windows SBS isn’t the product. This is why Lotus Foundations excites me so much - it takes everything a Windows SBS box does but integrates killer backup, security, and useful business applications in a far easier to manage package.

The great thing is while IBM Lotus Foundations is new, its also built on well established products. IBM bought Nitix earlier in the year, which made Linux-based small business servers for the past eight years. IBM improved the product, integrated Lotus Notes Domino 8, and made Lotus Foundations.

I’ve had a chance to talk to some IBM folks and they’re dead serious about taking on Windows Small Business Server and providing a better experience for small business. With the application platform they’re building and the marketing power of IBM, I can guarantee you’ll hear a lot about IBM Lotus Foundations in the next year.

One of the joys of Nitix is the core OS resides on a flash module called a DOM, meaning once the offending drive was removed and the server rebooted, the network was back up and we had full admin access to the server.

All the drives in a Mark I Nitix server are in removable cartridges, the primary drive(s) and backup IDBs are interchangeable. Upon checking the recent IDB was in good shape with current backups (hourly increments too), we had the client take the oldest IDB cartridge and replace the failed primary drive with it.

Not even thirty minutes later all data was restored. Nitix with IDB is truly the greatest server backup we’ve ever seen - our clients are back at work and I didn’t even have to get out of my PJs.

PDS communication is encrypted by default, which is a nice to see (not enough business apps encrypt communications). Of course since its an externally facing application, its important to ensure good passwords are being used by all employees.

The other important thing is backup - PDS uses an MS SQL database which requires a bit of experience to backup. We decided to use BackupAssist with the SQL plugin to push the files out to their Nitix server’s Intelligent Disk Backup.

But upon dropping off the drive he discovered the “local” offices are largely just dropoff points - they ship most drives to california anyway! He paid extra to have a local tech work on it, but when he gave up later that day, they sent it to california without notifying the client. More than a week went by and they claimed the drive was “difficult” and data recovery was basically impossible, the client demanded the drive back.

This time I got to take the drive to Ontrack. What I didn’t know was for functioning drives Ontrack has Remote Data Recovery (RDR) where they can recover a drive over the internet! What ADR said was impossible, Ontrack had done in TWO DAYS!

Without a doubt Ontrack is the right choice for data recovery and with local Ontrack Partners like us, you can still get local support.

1) Groupware flexibility - Microsoft Exchange only supports Outlook and Entourage for groupware (email, calendaring, etc). With NitixBlue Outlook users can continue to use Outlook and won’t notice the difference - and there is cross platform support by using the bundled Notes for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

2) Webmail for everyone - Microsoft’s Exchange webmail works great…on Internet Explorer 6 for Windows. NitixBlue’s webmail works not just on Internet Explorer but Mozilla’s Firefox - which is free and runs on every major platform.

3) Security - NitixBlue is secure out of the box, unlike Windows Small Business Server. Company emails can be encrypted with no additional setup, all email server communication is encrypted, every message can be logged, and antivirus and antispam come ready out of the box.

4) Backup - anyone who’s ever had an Exchange Server crash will tell you its a painful system to recover from backup. Unlike Windows Small Business Server, NitixBlue comes out of the box with a fully equipped backup hardware/software solution. Furthermore NitixBlue’s backup can take snapshots of your email system as often as every hour - narrowing the window of data loss. Furthermore NitixBlue’s recovery is fast - we average two hours for a “bare metal” recovery.

5) Less maintenance - ever seem like your Exchange server needs an expert babysitter? NitixBlue is smart enough to self-manage most tasks and delivers only the options small businesses need - most of our clients actually handle adding and changing users themselves!

Reviews

One of the hardest things to know about technology is how it will hold up and be supported over the years. I’d like to share two of my favorite resources - PC Magazine’s Reader Survey and Epinions. PC Magazine each year compiles information about brand satisfaction by product type (printers, desktops, cameras, etc), support quality, repair rates, etc. Some of the results will surprise you - for example Brother’s black and white lasers repair rate is 1/4 of HPs! http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,1874,1626131,00.asp

Epinions is a user driven review site, reviews are overwhelmingly useful and the review quality is well controlled. Epinions has reviews of almost anything - computers, electronics, household items, books, and more.

http://www.epinions.com/

Vista No More Secure

CRN’s recent testing found that Windows Vista and Windows XP are equally at risk of viruses and exploits - even though Vista was supposed to be more secure. We’re still trying to find what Vista is actually better at - in the meantime I can’t keep reminding people enough that Vista isn’t ready for business use and has seemingly no advantages over Windows XP.

http://crn.com/software/199701019

Mozy for Mac!

One of my favorite online backup services is now Mac compatible! This is great news as the Mac has been short on online backup options. Mozy for personal use is free for 2GB of storage and $5/month for unlimited storage (Mozy Pro, the business version, isn’t out on Mac yet) - so there is no excuse for not backing up! Don’t forget though unlimited storage is limited by your internet connection’s upload speed - backing up tens of gigabytes will take days if not longer.

https://mozy.com/mozy/macmozy

Free Voicemail Special

I’m sure everyone who’s called in lately has heard our new phone system, Talkswitch. This month we have a great special on the 240vs Talkswitch system - a free one hour voicemail upgrade ($100 value)! The 240vs handles two inbound lines, four local extensions, ten remote extensions (cell phones), and with the upgrade has 1.5 hours of voicemail all for just $695!

Tech Word of the Month - Whitelisting

With SPAM continuing to come in at high levels, most companies have tightened junk email filters to keep inboxes clean. Inevitably some “false positives” will occur where legit email gets filtered out. Any filter should give you a regular digest of filtered email or show you a separate spam box, however to prevent recurring false positives whitelisting can help. Whitelisting is a feature every spam filter I’ve seen has, simply saying to always allow specific emails/domains through (the opposite of a blacklist).

A few tips to prevent your email from being filtered out:

1) Don’t use free email sites or ISP emails (aol, hotmail, etc)

2) Don’t use excessive capitalization, punctuation, etc

3) Put in a subject line and message body in every email

1) Cable and DSL have no SLA (service line agreement - an uptime and performance agreement). Though more expensive, a T1 can be be worth it.

2) If you run an in-house mail server, a backup mx record is a must to ensure no mail gets lost.

3) Knowing where each network device is located and how to power cycle/reboot it is important. I fixed many networks today just helping people reboot the right device.

4) Battery backups (UPS) can help for a while but ultimately a generator is needed if you want to stay up a long time with power loss.

5) Have an alternate location to work from. I went to the Columbia Tower Club to recharge batteries and get online the two days I was out.

6) Have a great back up system, many disasters cause data loss and losing data is far more expensive than just being down a few days.

Using Windows SBS is basically a guarantee that things won’t be done right or will blow the budget, neither of which was my goal as a computer consultant. So I went looking for an alternative which “just does the right thing” - and I found Nitix. Nitix is a autonomic Linux derived server designed from the ground up for small business.

Here’s how Nitix handles the “core functionality” small businesses need:

File Storage and Sharing
Though Nitix is a form of Linux, its able to transparently network with both Macs and Windows PCs. Unlike Windows SBS, when you setup a user or group in Nitix, it automatically creates a directory, sets up proper permissions, and can setup mapping the share on login. That last bit is very important - mapping drives makes it easier for users to put their data on the server where its backed up.

Backup
Nitix comes bundled with Intelligent Disk Backup, better known as IDB. IDB automatically backs up your data to reliable and inexpensive hard drive cartridges in increments as often as 15 minutes. IDB eliminates nearly all user intervention - all that needs to be done is to hot-swap IDB cartridges once a week. But here’s the killer, IDB actually backs up everything by default - and I mean everything. If your system crashes IDB is able to restore the system to exactly the way it was in just an hour or two - instead of days or weeks with Windows SBS.

User Login Authentication
Nitix integrates smoothly with Windows desktops, so when the computers startup they are prompted for a username and password which validates with the server. This helps keep control over who can access network resources - Nitix makes this extremely quick and foolproof.

Calendar Sharing and Email
Though Nitix’s calendaring and email isn’t quite as advanced as Windows SBS, it does a great job. The nice thing is Nitix doesn’t have the history of security problems like Exchange and comes integrated with Vircom Antispam and Kaspersky Antivirus (optional, but we always include it). Windows SBS’s Exchange is so complex careers and magazines are dedicated to just this topic - Nitix’s email and calendars just works right out of the box.

Firewall/Remote Access
Nitix actually started out as a firewall product which grew into being a full fledged small business server. Without question its a secure product - the firewall self configures, is ICSA compliant, self defends, and its built on a hardened Linux core. By self configuring and self defending it eliminates the concern of technician error and need for constant oversight.

Nitix’s remote access is a cinch to setup, enabling the a remote user VPN is just two clicks. Easy, secure, reliable - no question Nitix wins here hands down.

No Integration Problem
One of the other joys of a Nitix Server is it comes from the box complete, tested, and ready to go - no need to install a tape drive, antispam, etc because its all integrated. Furthermore one company tests the whole package - meaning no concerns that an update to one component will interfere with another. Best of all Nitix supports the whole package - no blame game where vendors start pointing fingers - the rare problems with Nitix are easily solved.

Nitix also gives us more power when solving problems. Sometimes to solve problems efficiently we need to get the vendors involved - Nitix actually gives us personal attention from a dedicated support team included with your server. Small businesses simply couldn’t afford that kind of attention from Microsoft.

The Real World
Superiority really means nothing if normal companies can’t use this system effectively. In the last three years we’ve installed Nitix in a variety of firms - consultants, lawyers, mortgage, real estate, contractors, non-profits - and its worked great. Not only has it been able to fulfill their needs, the Nitix systems have required nearly no maintenance - meaning a low total cost of ownership and happy customers.

If you have .Mac service the Backup application that comes with it is great and can do online, CD/DVD and external drive backups.

iBackup (free) is an excellent backup program suitable for backing up to external hard drives.
http://www.grapefruit.ch/iBackup/

Apple’s Leopard (10.5  - coming in the spring) has an integrated backup called Time Machine, which is an automated backup to external hard drive. It has without a doubt the most intuitive interface I’ve ever seen and generally a seemingly good backup strategy.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.html

Lastly Mirra is a backup appliance which can automatically backup your files on multiple machines over the network. It can also sync files between machines.
http://www.selkowitz.com/dept.asp?dept_id=06

Mirra is a backup appliance, just plug it in the network, install software on your Mac or PC, pick folders, and Mirra does the rest. Mirra technically isn't perfect as the data is stored onsite, but the reality is few homes or small businesses back up and an affordable, high capacity, automated onsite backup is way better than nothing. 
Of course you can buy Mirra at selkowitz.com