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I enjoyed Mark Smith's article Small Business Consultant: "Provide Value-Added Systems Management with SBS 2003" (May 2004, InstantDocID 42267). I use a lot of Microsoft products at work but have realized the potential for Microsoft solutions in small businesses running Small Business Server (SBS) 2003. I just applied for my business license and am looking into becoming a Microsoft reseller. I'd like to come up with creative cost-effective business solutions to offer to small businesses.

One paragraph in Mark's article struck me: "With SBS 2003, small businesses can also gain a superior backup and recovery system that promises 99.9 percent uptime. This is possible using the remote replication, failover, and message-level recovery features of high-end storage management software. Again, a small business probably couldn't afford such enterprise-class services on its own, but a consultant can offer these features at a reasonable price by centrally managing the services and spreading the cost over many clients." This is a really cool idea. Can Mark elaborate and offer some product examples?

—Peter Simkins http://www.lockedpc.com

Many Windows & .NET Magazine readers must support remote offices from a central location. One thing you can do is use a sophisticated replication tool such as NSI Software's Double-Take to replicate changes in real time to a central location. Then, you simply back up the replicated data at the central location. Likewise, you can use CommVault Systems' Galaxy Backup & Recovery to back up remote-location data to a central location. With Galaxy Backup & Recovery, you can back up message-level changes in Microsoft Exchange Server.

As an SBS consultant, you have to make a choice. You can treat all your customers as standalone sites, or you can think of them as remote sites linked to your central office. If you choose the latter scenario, you can use some interesting utilities that an enterprise supporting many remote offices might use. The centrally supported remote-office scenario lets you choose a sophisticated tool and run it from your central office.

You'll have to have enough customers to be able to afford the more expensive enterprise editions of any given software product, but the idea is to charge a recurring service or monitoring fee for the high-value service you provide.

—Mark Smith

Distributing Registry Changes Without AD
I have a question that I hope Windows Client columnist Ed Roth can answer. My Windows XP Professional organization uses a Microsoft Software Update Services (SUS) server. We have a problem pushing updates to the client side, however, because we don't use Active Directory (AD).

To work around this limitation, we created a registry key with preset options to install when users log on via a login script. However, our users have Power Users credentials, and XP won't accept the changes the login script initiates. Any ideas about how we can solve this problem?

—Daniel Rust drust@tycoint.com

If you have a Windows NT domain, you can use a custom .adm template to distribute internal applications and registry changes, including SUS registry entries. You can find information about using .adm files in Kathy Ivens's article "Distributing Registry Changes" (April 2001, InstantDoc ID 20047).

If you don't have a Windows NT domain, you can try Windows scripting to effect registry changes for users with heightened credentials. I haven't used this method, but you'll find a wealth of information about this type of scripting at Microsoft's TechNet Script Center, at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/scriptcenter/default.mspx. Good luck!

Ed Roth

"Cool Things" Is Cool
Thanks a ton to Michael Otey for his article Top 10: "Cool Things to Do with Netsh" (January 2004, InstantDoc ID 41111). I had no idea that Windows XP and the Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit both contain this tool. This article is by far the most useful yet!

—Marc Casillo frashii@frashii.com