OT:Exchange good? - And the flame wars begin (Was:Re: new hotness?)

[Bryan O'Neal]

True Office can be expensive.  When purchased OEM it typically drops from
$200 to $60 (or free depending on how desperate our Dell rep was that day)
But we are just looking at outlook, so $30 is about rite.  As for kind of
licensing I did users, since we had about 1.25 machines per user.  You don't
need MSSQL to operate exchange, but if you get the SBSP edition it comes
part and parcel.  Licensing compliance is a sunk cost if you have to set up
and maintain the licensing for any product including the OS and any core
products used to run the business, such as the accounting software,
production management, warranty service, etc., etc.  So while it is a real
cost, it should be one most medium businesses have already incurred.
However, if not and it is not required then it really does need to be
considered in the Exchange purchasing decision.

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Jason
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 6:13 AM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: OT:Exchange good? - And the flame wars begin (Was:Re: new
hotness?)

On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 23:48 -0700, JD Austin wrote:
>          And for cost I can put an exchange system in for a 70
>         person office with all the clients and servers licensed from
>         scratch with AD
>         and everything, including the server and my time to set it up
>         for less then
>         $1500. 


Windows Server 2003 (Standard) to get AD: ~$600.00 (Can be $400.00 when
doing OEM...sometimes as low as $300.00...depends on the salesman you deal
with.) 

CAL's for 70 users to connect to AD/Exchange: Independently is $30/user,
with office suite is $200.00/user. Either way you want to look at it, you're
well over $2100.00 in just user access. You could do "CPU"
licensing, which *may* bring you into the $2000.00 range for unlimited
connections. 

Now, you can bring the argument of MOLP licensing. Even *then*, you're over
2k. 

And don't forget you MSSQL database purchase, which is over $1000.00 there.

I haven't administered a large enterprise, myself. So maybe I don't "know
what I'm talking about". However, I have done several research reports for
my school papers and have dug deeply into MS's *published* pricing models
that allow as much freedom as possible. 

You will find steep discounts at a large corporate level. But a 70 user site
is hardly any company that MS will give a large corporate level discount to.


So, maybe I just don't have the "real world experience" that people want to
try and rely on. However, I do have the legally published prices and
academic research to back my claim. That claim is that a 70 user site with
Active Directory and MSSQL backend will take you into at least the $2500.00
range.

And don't forget to add in your costs for figuring out the licensing
structure and administering license compliance. That can get to be higher
than you think....than most people think, actually. 



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