At last, small- and mid-size businesses now have access to the final commercial editions of Microsoft's pre-configured, feature-packed buildouts of Windows Server 2008 tailored for the needs of corporations smaller than, say, GM.

Starting today, Microsoft has available four buildouts of Windows Server 2008 especially tailored to the requirements of small business or mid-size business (SMB). As opposed to an "enterprise" deployment, an SMB deployment is designed to span from one to four server processors, with both the operating system and the applications (e-mail, Web server, optional database server) required to maintain the business' running integrity.

It's been a long road for Steven VanRoekel, the Microsoft senior manager who essentially created Essential Business Server 2008 -- the company's completely new WS2K8 buildout for mid-size business. That road could conceivably have reached its destination way back in February, but a number of factors -- most notably the long delay for SQL Server 2008, one of EBS' optional components -- dragged the development process on.

"I was employee number one on that [Essential Business Server] project," VanRoekel told BetaNews today. "I was the one that went to our executive staff -- Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, etc. -- and got it green-lighted, then started down the road to building out the development team and the marketing team."

But what he convinced Gates, Ballmer, and company to embrace was the idea of a certain class of server customer in-between the basic entry-level and the corporate behemoth -- essentially the auto dealers, insurance branches, real estate offices, retail franchise holders...nothing more than a sizable magnitude of businesses that didn't want to be patronized, but also knew that they needed help. So VanRoekel's very first task in building EBS, prior to testing any builds whatsoever, was determining just what level of help those customers were asking for.

"One of the things I did -- which was a unique opportunity for me to do -- was, I formed a 25-person customer advisory board and a 15-person partner advisory board. I gave them the mandate, 'You're going to design a product, you can grab from anywhere within Microsoft, you're going to tell us how this thing works.' That was super-qualitative, and we went through, even down to the level of having these guys help me write job descriptions for the program managers who were going to be building the product. I wanted that level of integration with these customers," he told BetaNews.

VanRoekel and other EBS team members literally followed the IT managers from companies the advisory boards found, in some cases with clipboards and stopwatches, as though they were taping a reality show for Bravo. The data they collected helped them to better understand just what processes IT managers in mid-size businesses perform every day. With that data, the team could construct an operating system around the idea not of making the OS easier to poke around with, or giving easier to find handles to OS resources, but rather automating the tasks that IT managers actually perform.

"What's a Monday morning like when they come in from the weekend? What's a Friday like when they close up shop? And we really started to learn, there's lots of similarities across IT managers in mid-market, and what do they spend their time on that's very common?"

Some of those IT managers -- maybe to Microsoft's shock -- explicitly asked them, "Please don't make everything into a wizard."

"A lot of times when you go through a wizard in IT, the wizard may complete, but you're never really sure what it did behind the scenes," said VanRoekel, effectively preaching to the choir. "You don't know what it changed, you're not really sure if it actually completed successfully, things like that. So what [the IT managers] told us to do is something I call contextual fall-through. Fall through to the native application, but take me in the context of the place I need to go to get my job done...so I can have the confidence that, when I click OK, the task actually completed. We still wizard-ized a few things, but they're very common tasks that our customers told us to wizard-ize, like adding users to the network -- something where they don't want to go through four different consoles."

Both EBS and Small Business Server 2008 feature a completely revised reporting infrastructure that lets administrators choose how granular they want their reports to be, and to whom they should be sent. EBS goes a few steps further, however, by leading admins not through some wizard-ized scheme but by scripting their sessions through a specially crafted version of System Center Essentials, which ships as part of EBS 2008.

"We based that [EBS] product on System Center Essentials -- specifically designed for the mid-market. So as far as the technical depth [of the reports is concerned], we extract that out in our own console, and then where appropriate, we will drop you through to the right place in that product so you can get jobs done," stated the Microsoft senior manager. "You want to deploy patches to all your desktops on your network? You'll see a link on your console that says, 'It's time to deploy patches.' You click on that link, it will actually bring you right to System Center Essentials, in the place you need to deploy patches. It's very streamlined."

Two weeks ago at PDC 2008 in Los Angeles, Microsoft gave a brand name to its vision of Windows services completely in the cloud: Windows Azure. If Microsoft tailors Azure to small businesses, we asked VanRoekel, won't that compete with SBS and EBS on the other side of the campus?

It may be too soon to tell, he responded. From his perspective, much of the visionary goals of Azure as a product won't be realized for another six years; meanwhile, EBS is here today. What's more, SBS and EBS already provide cloud services such as built-in subscriptions to Office Live and built-in Web site hosting, so it's perfectly conceivable that a future EBS could be integrated with Azure-based cloud services down the road.

"As services come online, and as services evolve in the industry and in Microsoft," VanRoekel told BetaNews, "my team and I will be looking at integrating those services into our products in a way that answers the needs of our segments."