Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Essentials OEM

I have small business and want to allow Quickbooks Enterprise from 3 remote laptops. Anywhere Access touts that there are three ways to accomplish this: Remote Web Access, Virtual Private Network, and Direct Access. It turns out that you will need the Professional or Enterprise Edition of Win7 or Win8. You can not just go into Best Buy to pick up a laptop, you will only get plain Win8. I has taken me working for 3 months, a Microsoft Engineer which I signed up for a $259 incident working on it for 6 hours and it is still not yet working. Broken certificates, etc. etc. this is not plug and play. What you get with essential is a file server for 25 people. Only two people at a time can access the computer desktop and run programs. Therefor only two people can run Quickbooks a time. Upgrade to 2012 standard requires wiping off the disk and fresh install. It is not an add in or overlay. You will need 2012 standard and buy a licenses for each user called a CAL. Then you will need to buy CALS for each Remote Desktop user also. That's about $1500 to $2000 for 5 people to access Quickbooks which must be a multiuser version. And about $200 for each additional going forward. And don't forget each user should have Win8 pro or Enterprise, then all the wizards might avoid the need for a Msft engineer. I have the Admin user running now and it seems quite fast like I am setting in front of the server but it is across the city. I have a Supermicro motherboard with IPMI so I can stop and start the server it remotely. The MSFT engineer is apologetic and says he is not charging me. Kudos to MSFT for that however, I think this is alpha testing where the consumer pays for it. It is consistent with my experience of MSFT going back to OS/2 Warp. IBM had the superior operating system but MSFT out marketed them by misleading advertising and made the improvements using the consumers investment afterwards. Not much has changed. Lots of promises of what the software will do. I am sure it eventually will work as promised after the consumer invests his money and time to sort out alpha and beta quality software. Quickbooks Enterprise also works with some of the Linux distros. Intuit says about 30-40 percent of their users use Linux. Linux is Free software, you will know if you are using stable or beta, no CALS. I will be setting up a test platform to migrate to that. I went with MSFT because I thought they would have it all worked out and maybe the quality will be better??? There are nearly a dozen ways to connect with a terminal (desktop) server using Linux. Oh, BTW once a user is connected to the desktop there is not much, at least on 2012 Essentials, to keep the user from dropping the Quickbooks program in the trash can. This is not possible with a Citrix server. That is about $100 per month per user to have a Citrix server administered and served by others (cloud) for QB and Citrix.Windows Server 2012 Essential is essentially a file server for 25 users. Music and videos are files too. There is no upgrade. it is uninstall and install whatever else like Standard in its place. It is not what you would call a Terminal Server or now the lingo is Remote Desktop server as it is limited to two people that can run and executable program.it would be nice if MSFT would have said what the limitations are clearly in the beginning, then maybe I would have started with the Standard version but then the complicated licensing would have gotten me. Now MSFT has a dissatisfied customer by withholding the facts and pushing the glitz. Makes them untrustworthy to do business with....Which they could have easily avoided by being upfront.

I ordered this, thinking it was an OEM installation disk. Nope - it's just a key card with a link to download the ISO of an evaluation copy. I sure hope that works OK, or I'll be returning it. At least it's Amazon, and I suppose that returns are easy, but I still feel cheated. Nowhere in the description do I see that it's "key card only."

MS advertises this software for the small business do it yourself type. Yeah, that's me... My business is a four person law firm. Its easy to load and really not all that difficult to figure out, but like most projects if you're not doing day in day out there is a learning curve. Beware of following the "wizard." It does not always lead down a yellow brick road, little red ridding hood's house, or Cinderella's castle. As an example it took a week to tweak remote access. The dirty little secret there is to open router ports the "wizard" didn't help resolve that issue.Keep in mind my server is being setup on a somewhat leisure schedule. I enjoy self builds, call it a hobby, stress reliever, probably more therapeutic than anything. My recommendation is for those who enjoy a self build, have no immediate requirement for a server, (my office has been and is still semi networked as we migrate to the server) and your business is on a steady growth path that will benefit, most definitely use MS Server 2012. All the other OS available, while I'm sure we can and would learn, from my experience there looks to be a larger learning curve more so than with WS 2012.Hardware: E3-1245v2, ASRock CW216 Moto, 1 x WD RE 500GB HD (load operating system on 500/320GB HD) 2 x 1TB WD RE (originally had two 1TB WD black) changed for two reasons efficiency 24/7 operations, the REs have intelli whatever its called so don't spin at 7200 at all times, and didn't realize that WS2012 des not like the operating system on the same drive as the company folders. I hear the debates about RAM types... Your guess is a good as mine, I use 16GB corsair but memory correcting, bla, bla, bla, the cost benefit factor didn't come down on the more expensive RAM. Total build costs with OS under $1000. Entertainment value, priceless... Seriously, this system is fast ,reliable, and the benefits of a server are too numerous to list. The prebuildsavailable, from my search and reviews, did not even come close to my system build.WS 2012 is for a small office build. If you do not have the time, knowledge, skill or desire to learn, build a system, migrate the client computers and a little patience, outsource your IT. I began my build a month ago, work on it a couple of hours a week, estimated time of completion (well never really...lol) let me rephrase, estimated time to full deployment another month.If you have any question please don't hesitate to ask.

Since Windows Home Server 2011 is not being upgraded, I decided to take the plunge with WSE 2012 even though it costs significantly more I wanted the ability to backup and restore UEFI based computers which WHS 2011 cannot (it backs it up without warning, just get an error restoring it). Installed smoothly on a Dell T300 as a clean install replacing Windows Server 2008 R2, without requiring any additional drivers during installation. I ended up installing it multiple times because I didn't plan my RAID 5 partition optimally and had no problem with activating it online 3 times the first day. Ended up doing a 80 GB OS partition and the remainder a data partition. Currently have 42 of the 80 GB OS partition still free. Does not support Hyper-V.

If you've become familiar with Windows 8, this will be a breeze. This is an excellent upgrade or replacement for any small business or home office server.

The program was missing a required element for the PID. The file had to be written and saved to the program in order for the download to work. It was a very lengthy ordeal. Once that issue was resolved, there were no problems.

Can't upgrade to R2 for some unknown reason. Same family of Essentials but won't download the R2 components or allow an in-place upgrade. Works good with Win8.

This is an OEM install disk. I installed it on an HP Proliant M310e and it works perfectly. Happy with Essentials! It's not such a pain like SBS 2011 to install and configure.