SBS 2003 R2 Released to Manufacturing

Received a note from the SBS Community Lead this evening that SBS 2003 R2 has been released to manufacturing effective today! I guess we better start looking for it in the pipeline now.

Here's my take now that the beta is closed and it's RTM'd. I think this is a slight upgrade but a necessary one. If you already have SBS 2003 SP1 installed on site with WSUS installed as well, I doubt you're going to see a need to spend the dollars to upgrade. Although having the green check in the email sent out from the server is a nice thing I doubt it'll be $$$ nice to most businesses.

We've been rolling out WSUS more and more in the last month. The reason? Everything gets patched and we get a report to show to the boss. Not just critical patches but we install Windows Defender on platinum clients and those definitions roll out with WSUS. We update the outlook email portion and it rolls out with WSUS. We update IMF in Exchange 2003 and it rolls out with WSUS...getting the idea? It just plain works.

Here's the kicker. Although you can opt to have items stored at off site locations be careful because many small shops will cry for space once they realize how WSUS sucks up the disk space and their data partition is slowly eroding.

I've been working with the SBS product since version 4.0. Man what a change. Security wasn't even thought of back then. Just trying to get NT 4 to run right with the proper drivers was pain enough. Now we've got patches under the hood. You've come a long way baby!