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

[Jason]

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.