The best software is always the software you never think about, because it just works, day after day, month after month, year after year. One of the best pieces of software to come out of Microsoft was SBS2003. Recent cloud offerings has made the cloud a better solution for some small business type users - particularly not hosting email on premises for a small number of users, especially as Exchange 2003 is very disk IO hungry compared to latter versions, and relatively difficult to restore if it goes wrong, along with attendant downtime.The cloud email version is much easier to deploy across multiple devices once out of the office and there are no (relatively expensive) certificates to buy or manage.
But file, print and domain resources are still handled very well by SBS2003. The cloud generally does not handle large file sync well on the most popular cloud storage providers (Dropbox excepted, which only syncs the changes, an excellent feature, and has local LAN sync) and uplink bandwidth is usually a major problem unless you are using eg VDSL like BT Infinity. If you can script a decent backup on SBS2003 using ntbackup.exe to say a swappable local USB disk that gets taken off site you will be home and dry. Chances are you will never access it anyway, especially if you were enlightened enough to make sure you had a decent backup in the first place - those that make the most backups that are viable need them the least I have always found. A quick scheduled robocopy /mir of the files on the server to another workstation on the domain of the working files (which change very little) to go with the .bkf backup file and you have a very simple and robust setup that Small Business owners can understand for minimal cost and access files in an emergency without any 3rd party assistance.
Once the Small Business (or more likely a third party) has configured SBS2003 to your liking it just works, and works and works.You can look at the cloud at your leisure, or maybe not as SBS2003 support ends next summer (2015). It will indeed be a sad day as SBS2003 servers (almost always on real hardware in that era purchased from Dell etc) are shut down to make way for a 'better' solution. Performing a migration to a newer 64 bit windows platform is relatively costly and complex, and provides few benefits that I can see, except being on a supported platform. Having just installed many 2012 R2 servers during a hardware refresh I just can't see enough advantages to warrant the change for many small businesses as the cost is relatively large, especially in 3rd party time.
I can't help but think that some small businesses are going to pay more overall for their IT solution than before and be left with a worse solution. I might look at other solutions before going totally cloud depending on the circumstances. One solution is to take say a mirrored disk NAS (QNAPs run very well) and use that with file access from the cloud where required. Only you will know the best solution. For SBS2003 that are never accessed from the internet I would be reasonably happy to run them without any more patches, although I can almost guarantee that there will be issues with new Clients (eg Windows 10) running 100% with them, which will force their obsolescence.
Maybe it's time to look at that SBS2003 sitting in the corner and get some of the caked on dust off it, clean it up and think how much service it has given in the last few years for such little maintenance. You won't be seeing it much longer...
