Small Business Server 2003 – Introduction to Server Manager

Following on from: Small Business Server 2003 – Post Install Tasks

With most of Microsoft’s products. Small Business Server 2003 uses a management console. However, the SBS03 console is very easy to navigate and sort through. The SBS03 console is broken down into two main sections.

Standard Management
If your not an IT pro or want to complete basic tasks like creating users, groups, printers, etc. This section is fairly safe, meaning that you cant cause too much damage here other than mistakes. The other thing you can do here is changing the settings that are set up during the Post-install configuration tasks.

Advanced Management
Here you have access to the bare bones services that are installed on SBS03 such as Microsoft Exchange, group policy, and active directory. This section is mainly used for custom and ‘advanced’ tasks. Here you need to be a little careful as you can easily damage SBS. Remember that SBS sits on-top of other Microsoft products such as Exchange or Active Directory so making changes here that SBS does not expect can cause SBS to get rather upset. For example, one thing that I have done before that upsets SBS is renaming containers in active directory. This causes the SBS console to break because it cannot find anything in AD.

Next Article: Small Business Server 2003 – User, Groups, and Templates

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