Small Business Server
Windows Small Business Server
Windows Small Business Server 2011 and Windows Small Business Server 2008 (SBS) are integrated server suites from Microsoft and is designed for running a small businesses internal and external IT infrastructure.
We’ve found hosting a company file on SBS with multiple AccountEdge users connecting to it results in poor network performance. Although some editions of SBS comes with SQL Server to host databases, AccountEdge is not SQL based and cannot take advantage of SQL Server.
Although based on the same server technology, Small Business Server is a different product than Windows Server 2008. SBS contains tightly integrated server technologies to offer small businesses solutions to cover many small business IT needs.
Built on Windows Server 2008 R2, SBS 2011 Standard includes Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 SP1, Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010, and Windows Server Update Services.
The idea is that as a small business you can have a single server take care of your email, security, web site hosting, control your domain, users, collaboration with Sharepoint and more.
Unfortunately due to all of these services running, using SBS as a file server to host an AccountEdge file is not a good fit and is currently not supported.
Windows Server 2008 R2 (or later)
Currently Windows Server 2008 R2 is a supported platform for hosting company files where we do not run into these network performance issues. We believe this is due to how Server 2008 R2 does not come pre-configured with all of these services tightly integrated. Although they can be added on, if the server was being used to run Exchange, SharePoint, a web server, a domain controller, SQL Server, and used as a file server which also hosts an AccountEdge company file, a performance hit would most like be seen in this situation as well.
To see current system requirements and support operating systems please visit this page.