Do we need the Standard or Premium edition of Windows Small Business Server 2003?

Of course, it goes without saying that we need to be confident that our VPN is secure, especially as remote users will have read-write access to a lot of stuff.

Thanks leew. Will it really be that slow? Given that everything's having to go through a 512 kbps pipe anyway, will it really make that much difference? Also, many of the files needing to be accessed will be on the Windows Server machine anyway, so that machine can't avoid being involved.

VPN is noticeably slower than non-VPN.  How many users will connect at the same time?  512 is not much.

Run with Leew's comments, the savings between Standard and Premium SBS will offset the price for the hardware VPN solution. They want SBS *just* for the VPN? What server OS are you running now?

I think it's first important to know what you are planning on running via the VPN.  It's important for you to also realize that SBS must be the central core of your network... essentially, if you only want VPN, then you don't want SBS.

However, if you want true mobility functionality that supports users from home accessing their computer at work, users that have laptops and users that have Mobile SmartPhones or PDA's then SBS would be a good thing to do and you would NOT want to use a hardware firewall because of the ease of integration with SBS.

Take a look at the other features of SBS though and make sure it's right for you:  http://sbsurl.com/features

As for the needing ISA?  That's a decision you have to make yourself... I only have two clients out of 16 that I currently manage that have deployed ISA.  SBS on it's own is pretty secure if you configure and manage it properly... unless you are a company that has highly sensitive data (or need to be HIPAA compliant or some such thing) then I'd go with Standard at first, you can always upgrade for just the difference in price.  See http://sbsurl.com/security 

Jeff
TechSoEasy

Thank you all for your comments. Here are some clarifications.

    The firm is a very small consultancy, which runs single-processor simulations to address clients' problems. We currently have a Windows XP machine (note, not Windows Server) that sits underneath a desk; we call this the 'file server'. It has a mirrored pair of 200 gb hard drives. Most work is done directly onto the 'file server' using Windows File Sharing; everybody has full read/write privileges. This setup is simple and works very well indeed. We simply want to be able to access the files on this machine remotely, via a VPN connection into the office network. The company only has about 8 employees; the 'file server' probably serves around 100 mb/hour, although there is the occasional large database that gets thrown around. This really isn't that much. The 'file server' is probably only being ACTIVELY accessed 10% of the time.

    At the moment, there is no remote access, so it doesn't matter that the 'file server' isn't running any flavour of Windows Server. We want to put SBS onto this machine and setup a VPN so that when working from home or on-site with a client, we can easily access our data.

    So, to directly address your comments: yes, we want SBS purely for the VPN. Although, Exchange Server will no doubt prove to be useful, and we are approaching the Windows File Sharing limit of 10 simultaneous connections to the 'file server' machine.

    Let me know what you think!