Ok so i am playing around with the Trial version of Server edition on a couple of machines which are on the same workgroup and obviously on a same subnet.
Downloading and running the Server Manager on machine A works fine but if i point another machine B to the IP address of machine A e.g. 192.168.1.1:8080, it doesn’t work 
the machines are able to ping each other and both have the .net framework 4 installed.
Am i missing or doing anything wrong here?
Windows has by default quite restrictive firewall policy. Try to temporarily turn off the firewall on that Windows machine which acts as a server to see if it’s because of firewall. If it is, all you need to do is to add new policy to firewall configuration which will allow connections to port 8080.
I did try doing that but on the machine B, I get the following message when I try to open the host IP address (machine A):
/usr/local/cache/files/block.html;403
Quick Google search indicates clearing IE cache could solve the problem. That doesn’t make sense to me but the error you are getting is not from Manager.
There is something between Manager Server on machine A and web-browser on machine B blocking the connection. Try turning off firewall, antivirus or anything on both computers until you can make it work. Then you will know what is causing it.
Jst tried deleting the IE cache couple of times and it did the trick.
strange why would it give this message in the first place but nevertheless thanks 