New Article: SBS At Home
I've had this love-hate relationship with Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) for years. On the one hand, I agree to a large extent with Tom Shinder and Tim Mullen that SBS makes security compromises that in many, if not most, businesses are imprudent. It combines all services onto a single system, including (horror!) the firewall that is designed to protect them all. It also exposes a lot of things that you may not want to expose, but that the user base may not know enough to disable.
At the same time, SBS is a wonderful product, for the target market that it is designed to serve. A small business, which does not handle information that requires advanced protection, and which cannot justify the expense of designing a secure "Big-IT" network will find SBS an adequate risk management tradeoff. It is probably far more secure than anything they could build by putting the pieces together themselves. They simply cannot, or will not, for whatever reasons, pull the resources together to build equivalent but more secure functionality. If they were to try, the outcome in many cases would likely be significantly less secure than what SBS makes them.
Then it turns out there is a secondary market for SBS: geeks. If you are interested in building a home network where you want to play with all the different services, but you can't justify the budget to acquire several servers, OS licenses, application licenses, and the time to build it all SBS may represent an attractive option. The usual security caveats about co-locating everything on a single server still apply, but if adequate steps are taken to protect the SBS server from the Internet then it gives you a lot of functionality in a single, relatively inexpensive package. To discuss that further, my friend Matt Clapham and I wrote an article for TechNet Magazine on the topic.
Oh, and Thor, the mere fact that you have an "infrastructure" to flay means you are already out of the target market for SBS. 