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I went to a Microsoft training session on SBS2008 yesterday. Was very good. I am super excited about some of the cool new features and functionality coming and can’t wait to get my hands on it. We will definitely be doing a server upgrade and switching over to SBS 2008, Exchange server 2007 and Sharepoint Services 3 when we are able to later this year.

Wayne Small, the SBS MVP taking the technical presentations yesterday, posted on his blog that there is a free Visio plugin available that will create a schematic of your network. The Solarwinds LANsurveyor Express plugin is free until 30 June only.

Here are my before and after diagrams. The before is one I made myself, and doesn't include a client PC that is now in my network that was picked up by the auto map maker.

While the automatic one is quicker to build it doesn't include some information I need to know about my network and doesn’t discover the unmanaged switches. My own map also takes into account the physical topography of the house and it is laid out in a way that is logical to me in relation to the various locations in the house that networked devices reside..

My hand built map

Auto Map