Microsoft made the Public Preview of SBS 2008 available for the general population yesterday. This was announced on the Official SBS Blog. To get access to the software, you will need to visit the Technet Evaluation Center. Before installing, make sure that the system you are going to evaluate on meets the basic system requirements identified by Microsoft. If you don’t have hardware that meets the basic requirements, you may be able to install, but you will encounter difficulties that will lessen your experience with the software.
And if you do take the time to download and test the software, please make the effort to provide feedback to the development team. This could include bugs, feature suggestions, or compliments on implementations that have been done correctly. There may not be much that can be done with the product in terms of changes at this stage, but if you do find something that causes problems and do not report it, it may not get reported by anyone else, and the team really does want that feedback. But whatever you do, please do not expect to use this version in production. If and when subsequent releases of the public preview are made, there will not be an “upgrade” process to move from one public preview build to another build.
More thoughts about SBS 2008 can be found at OnQ under the SBS 2008 category.