SBS 2011 Essentials : Update Rollup 1 Releasing 23rd August 2011

You may have seen the tweets and posts that SBS Essentials (and the other two Colorado products) will be getting their first Update Rollup (UR) on the 23rd of August.

But what does it do?

It will address and resolve some of the more prominent bugs that have been reported since the release of the OS, as well as tie in some other updates, but this is not a security update. You will be able to read about what it is does in full when the KB is published here.

I will update with a link to the Download and the KB when it goes live.

EDIT – The KB is showing the UR is available through Windows Update. If i find a link to a standalone download i will post it here.

There are at least 11 Fixes contained within UR1, but i am not going to talk about all of them.

RWA Wizard SSL and .co.uk Domains

The first issue that is fixed, and i can confirm that it is FIXED in UR1 is the issue that many of us here in the UK have hit, which is the inability to use a second level root domain with the RWA Setup Wizard. I blogged (some would say extensivley here & here) on this subject a while back and the pain it was causing to setup a .co.uk domain using the RWA wizard, it was just plain broken.

Good news is, when you apply UR1 – this is no longer the case, you can use a .co.uk or any second level root domain.

Special Characters in Domain Admin password

Some special characters (eg of special characters %^&*?~¬ ) characters in passwords were causing issues when using the /connect site to join a computer to the Essentials domain, this is also now fixed.

RWA/RDP Failure when using OpenDNS

Some people were reporting seeing odd behaviour and failures in RWA when they were using OpenDNS as a DNS provider. This is issue is now resolved in UR1.

Improvements to Server Alerting

Issues were being reported whereby the server was seemingly ignoring someone’s responses to Alert Notifications, This is now improved in UR1.

Dashboard Management of Users

We were seeing issues in Dashboard when a user account was edited, or deleted, also a lot of issues were reported in the forums where people who had migrated were having problems managing user accounts via the Dashboard.  The behaviour here should be much improved and in most cases will solve issues with Users and the Dashboard.

(nb. i am not going to say it is 100% fixed because, well, anyone can do a migration and make all sorts of wonderful things occur which probably wouldn’t be fixed by UR1)

Hopefully this is enough to explain what is going to be in UR1, as i said there is at least 11 fixes and i have mentioned 5 of them. These 5 are the issues i have seen mentioned or personally experienced.

Don’t worry if an issue you have is not mentioned it may well be included, if you find it isn’t, why not open a bug on the connect site?

You will need to visit this page.. http://connect.microsoft.com/directory/accepting-bugs find Windows Small Business Server in the list and Join, make sure you are signed up with a Windows Live ID and then have fun submitting bugs.