I love all-in-one server appliances for small businesses. The best provide the greatest benefit for most businesses for the smallest amount of configuration time.

The new Taurus from Procom Technology improves on the IT-100 from EmergeCore I tested in early July and was less than satisfied with. The Taurus includes wireless support, the print server worked, and it was easier to set up.

Procom should be further down the road than EmergeCore because it bought orphaned technology from Celestix. The company took that hardware and server framework and complemented it with an excellent manual (274 clearly written pages with lots of pictures and easy steps, and plenty of depth, if you want it).

The Taurus easily hurdles the first barrier for non-technical folks adding a server appliance: how to get the server network IP address to match that of the network. When you already have a network and add a server, you must tell the new server what IP address to use. The Catch-22: You must network the server to add the server to your network. That means you need to change your client's static IP address, connect to the server, set the server's static IP address, then change your client settings back. The Taurus' front-panel LCD lets you set the server's static IP address to match your network quickly and easily. This is a big benefit and speeds installation considerably.

Meant to fit between a small company's internal network and an Internet connection, Taurus, like other all-in-one servers, requires you to use its internal file server as your external firewall and Web server. This design relies heavily on the included firewall to keep your file server safe. For that reason, I wanted more management detail about the firewall and more configuration flexibility than Taurus provided. The company could do better. This also means you will have to keep your Taurus software updates current to help maintain a strong barrier against outside hackers.

Once you configure the Taurus' IP address, installation between your network and the world takes only seconds. In my lab, I placed the Taurus between the Comcast cable modem and my internal wiring hub. When I turned on the box it automatically grabbed the Internet information from Comcast and translated my internal IP addresses through network address translation to match the Comcast IP addresses. In less than one minute, internal clients were surfing the Web.