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. --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss