SBS2008 Premium WILL Contain a FULL Version of Windows Server 2008!
This is some great news coming out of the product team that is worth sharing.
Yesterday, we closed on a change to the POR for Small Business Server 2008 Premium Edition:
Instead of including Windows Server 2008 “Small Business” Edition, SBS Premium now includes Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition.
We will be shipping the exact ISOs that Windows Server RTM’ed. The only noticeable difference to the end customer will be the label that’s printed on the disc itself as part of packaging. Additionally, Standard Edition does not contain technical enforcement that requires the 2nd server to be joined to the SBS domain; However, the customer will still legally be required to join the server to the domain as part of the EULA.
This is a great thing for the SBS ecosystem: it makes our end customers scenarios around virtualization and app compat stronger, and it’s also a big win from a long-term engineering strategy.
This change is driving the following changes into the product -- all are in progress and will not affect our RTM date.
- The core EULA displayed in SBS Server #1 is changing (that’s going into tonight’s build)
- We will be adding a paper copy of the EULA into Premium box (that happens during manufacturing)
- The Product Use Rights (PUR) agreement is changing (kicked off this morning; will be complete before the PUR goes live).