Get online

Does your email address mark you out as a small business? Do you spend too much money on multiple internet connections?

Is your dial-up internet access too slow for your business? Do you need to design your own website? The Internet is a powerful business tool – Small Business Server 2003 can help you make the most of it.

Get your own email address 
Most home users connect to the Internet using an internet service provider (ISP). They use an email address that is a combination of their name and the name of the ISP, for example j.bloggs@ispname.net. Some people use web-based email systems like Microsoft Hotmail ® . Either option is fine for private email but if you send out emails for your business it looks unprofessional and makes you look like a smaller company. It is much better to have your business name as your email address.

The solution is to get your own internet domain (‘yourcompany.com’) and set up a mail server that will act like your own private email ‘post office’. All outgoing email will use the new domain name – just like a big company – and the server will pick up incoming mail and route it directly to your employees.

SBS 2003 includes Exchange Server 2003 which is the same high-powered mail server used by multi-national companies all over the world. It will deal with your incoming and outgoing mail. You can also install, for free, Microsoft’s Intelligent Message Filter which blocks out unwanted junk email before it even reaches your employees.

Share a broadband internet connection
It isn’t very economical to pay for multiple ISP accounts to let different employees get online when you can pay for a single broadband connection and use SBS 2003 to allow everyone access to it. Think of it as a kind of telephone switchboard for the Internet. All your office computers connect to the server and it connects them to the Internet. Everyone can be online at the same time, but you only pay for one connection.

Not only that but the Standard Edition of SBS 2003 includes an effective firewall to protect all your users against virus infections and hackers while the Premium Edition includes Microsoft Internet Security & Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004. This combines the functions of an enhanced firewall with tools to filter and manage users’ access to the Internet and to cache frequently-used websites to increase performance.

Design your own website
Microsoft FrontPage ® 2003, which is included in SBS 2003 Premium Edition, will let you create and edit websites much like you edit documents in Microsoft Word. You can add custom pages to your intranet using SharePoint which is part of SBS 2003 but you will need a third party to host a public website. They provide the computer to run the web server and the internet connection that lets people connect to your site, but you can take control of the look and feel of your own site and update it as often as you like.

An extranet is a private website. Unlike an intranet you give access to trusted partners, such as suppliers, employees or important customers. It creates a forum for the exchange of information. Using SharePoint, it’s possible to create access-controlled extranets. Once you give someone access, they can see the site over the Internet using a regular web browser.