Does anyone know if there will be an R2 version of Small Business Server 2008?

Most of our customers fall into the SMB category, with the emphasis on Small. Our organization pretty much functions as the complete IT department for these companies. Because of cost and features, they are all running one version or another of Microsoft Small Business Server and almost all are currently running on SBS 2003 R2. RWW has been a godsend for solving server and desktop problems and offers reduced costs to the customer and better time utilization for our staff. Definitely a win-win situation for all of us. We plan to be doing upgrades to the SBS 2008 platform for most of them over the next few months. But we do not want our customers to get stuck with the non-R2 product if an R2 version release is imminent.

In our office networks in both offices, we are running instances of SBS 2003 R2, SBS 2008 and the full version of Server 2008 R2, both in stand-alone modes and as virtual servers on a single Hyper-V R2 platform. The 2008 products are most impressive but as of yet, there is no R2 version of the SBS 2008 product (at least as far as we know) and therefore some of the features provided in the full Server 2008 R2 product are missing in the SBS 2008 platform. I have been unable to determine if there ever will be an R2 version of SBS 2008 and if so, when. MS has been less than forthcoming with this information, so I’m hoping that someone such as you guys might have better information sources than those of us who are merely selling and supporting those products. Any information that you could provide us would be most appreciated.

Jim Sheehy

 President United Channel, Inc; Sequel Data Systems, Inc

Reno, NV; Anaheim, CA

jsheehy@unitedchannel.com



Software/Hardware used:
Various MS Server products on our own AMD Quad Core & 6-Core Serves