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

[Bryan O'Neal]

I apologize for not having more time, perhaps to dig up some of my old data.
However the methodology went something like this.  Equipment + Install +
Configuration + User time cost + Time cost for upgrades, maintenance, and
expansion/changes.  Assuming you have an average size small business.  In
that small business you have ~40 phones and 50 employees.  Each employee
gets their own did.  ~5 phones are "executive" (fancier model) and you have
two which are for receptions.  The receptions will monitor one of three
"main" incoming lines and will need to know which one has been dialed before
they answers.  Similarly you will need 3 different dial by name directories
which may or may not have some overlapping people.  Each person needs to be
able to switch between 3 preprogrammed settings on how their calls are
handled. Integration with their business calendar so the phone system
automatically switches between several settings depending on the individuals
availability (in a meeting, out of office, etc.) is a big plus (ShoreTel
does five settings as a base and was expandable but their was something
about the expansion that I can not remember. ShoreTel also did the
integration with Outlook, Lotus, and a half dozen other applications
calendars out of the box, but since they publish their API you could program
your own if you wanted) The business has 10 remote sites to manage.  About
10 users will require custom soft buttons. You hotel desks so that one
physical phone may be used by several people during the course of a day so
people need to be able to login and out of their phones easily. People also
need to be able to quickly and easily record phone calls and manage those
recordings.  Voicemail must be integrated into email.  It also needs to be
trivial for people to mange DND exception lists.  And you need to assume you
will change out about 15 employees a year.  You also require 10 departmental
voice mail boxes that are integrated with a personas individual mail box for
people who are authorized for that public box. In addition all equipment
must be warranted for ten years. (etc. etc. etc.)  This is what I remember
of the PBX requirements Cornerstone Homes had back in 2005.
 
Running this sort of system the cost of having some one set it all up, train
local non-technical staff on how to maintain this, and provide support had a
total cost of about $20,000 for equipment, install, and training.  In
addition training cost was about 15 min per employee plus 45 min for the HR
department who managed the systems operation.  I originally estimated this
at about $2000 of cost for employee time.  In addition I estimated and
additional $2000/year of operational & maintenance cost.  In fact cost less
then $5 of my HR departments time to set up a new user and a new phone with
custom soft buttons, voicemail, phone call handling (when should it ring,
when should it roll to an assistant, when should it go to voice mail, which
voicemail greeting should it give, etc), the companies directory, personal
directory (usually integrated with their pim, but it could be via a text
file too) and automatic updates (if using pim integration).  Now the phone
cost about $150, and with licensing and the estimated cost to house and
maintain the equipment required for voicemail.  Of course both those costs
are fairly typical when compared to Asterisk and are moot if just replacing
an employee.  Professional support was free for 2 years with 4 hour service
guarantee and $6K per year their after, but no one I interviewed ever
renewed support since the equipment had a lifetime guarantee and was so easy
to set up and maintain. Professional support was $75/hour for remote support
and $150/hour for on premises support up to 6K/year (at which point you
purchased a support contract) if you needed it after your first two years
was over.  Equipment is warranted for life.  All upgrades, patches, etc. are
also free and done by ShoreTel professionals.
I wish I had my information from when I was looking at Asterisks, but if I
recall correctly, the numbers I got from the one asterisk vender came in at
about $18,000 for equipment, install, and configuration.  No training and
$150/hour for support; but the first 5 days of support was free.  They did
not offer an inclusive support contract at the time.  While interviewing
asterisks owners I got to an average estimation of about 20 hours a month by
in house technical staff to support the users and maintain the system, plus
about 100 hours of education per tech/year to keep the system updated,
secure, and providing advancing service for the users.  So if you have two
qualified people (so one can take a day off some time) then you are looking
at about  440 hours.  Lets call it 400 hours or about $14,000/year of in
house support cost.  Now this may seem like a large amount of time, however
it was the average from the people I interviewed. Though I only included
groups that had not had an outage in the last 2 years.  The cost per hour of
telephone outage in the middle of a work day for my employer at the time was
calculated to be approximately $10,000 and one call center I interviewed
averaged 4 hours a year of outage; so I just tossed their estimation of
maintenance time out.  Although it was really inside the range of others,
but they were also a larger institution having about  200 phones attached to
the system in three different call centers (funny thing is they shrank to
less then 40 in three years, funny economy)
 
So, I have a two year cost of ShoreTel as $26K (actual cost was actually
about $35K including the fax system, but we would have plugged that fax
system into any phone system we would have purchased, save Avaya, which had
their own fax system) 
Estimated cost over two years for a Asterisks system was about $45K or
almost twice the cost.  This is not to mention I could not find nearly the
refinement of productivity tools or PIM integration.
 
What do you believe a modern cost of installing and maintaining this sort of
system would be today for Asterisks?
 
I know, this is really short and not a full analysis, and I also understand
the number of people supporting asterisks in the valley has increased so my
numbers may be a bit off.
 
By the way, if you already have an experienced ShoreTel person on staff and
purchased ShoreTel equipment off of eBay today from small and mid size
companies that have not survived this economic downturn, then your looking
at about $5K in equipment and licensing costs for the same install.

  _____  

From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of JD
Austin
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 11:48 PM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: OT:Exchange good? - And the flame wars begin (Was:Re: new
hotness?)


Why do you think TCO of an Asterisk system is HIGHER than shortel or Avaya?
--
JD Austin
Twin Geckos Technology Services LLC
jd at twingeckos.com
480.288.8195x201
http://www.twingeckos.com


P. J. O'Rourke  - "Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people
who have them." 


On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Bryan O'Neal <boneal at cornerstonehome.com>
wrote:


Craig, I think you are missing the point.  So, not to call you out on the
carpet here but have you ever managed a large enterprise?  If so could you
please explain your ideal concept of how you manage to keep productivity
high and cost low without use of any non-free or non-open products?  Take
Asterisk for example.  I love it but the total cost of ownership is
outrageously high in comparison to systems like Avaya and ShoreTel.  And
that is without the incredible ease of integration of systems like ShoreTel
have with outlook. You bag on Exchange but offer no comparative substitute.
You complain about the fact it uses AD and how much it costs even though it
is included free in several flavors of Exchange distribution.  You complain
about mailbox implementation but seem to think it is the only DB your
company would be running.  How do you back up your Oracle, MySQL, DB2, or
Postges systems?  And again with the scanning, it provides it's own free
scanning system, however it is idiotic to be dinging the bulk of your spam
scanning on the mail server.  By the time it reaches your server the cost of
resources expended to handle it far outweigh the cost of third party
scanning.  And the fact that Third party AV scans can be integrated easily
is not a bad thing, saying so is like saying postfix sucks because you can
use spamassisen and calmav.  In fact I can use clamAV but it does not
provide the same level of service for the same maintenance cost of better
products like Avast.  That said you say the only client is outlook, so my
question is what server/client system do you have that provides anywhere
near as much to the party as exchange/outlook?  If you have one I would
really, really, love to try it out!  But I have not found one.  Certainly
Cyrus is not it.  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.  In addition each users outlook costs only $40 and that also includes
all the other MS bundled stuff we have not talked about (Share point, etc.).
And while there are far better solutions for nearly all of it (especially MS
SQL Server) Tell me now.  Can you purchase a server, provide a integrated
collaborative PIM suite in a single interface providing mail, contacts,
basic CRM, takes, notes, and journal com tracking for the same price?  If so
I really would like to see it because I have bee hunting for this for almost
10 years!  I hold fast that Exchange is one of very, very few MS products
that has a very high ROI.  And, have you every had to integrate a BES with
something other then Exchange?  Or are you some one who has never managed
more then a handful of mobile devices.

Now if you're a single person or a company of 5 it is stupid to implement
exchange. Use Google.  If you're a fleet of sales people who never talk to
each other and have an independent sales management application, then again,
Exchange is not your option, but for most small campus based businesses that
employ a group of average people who need to communicate easily with their
teams exchange is your answer.  In the real world your business needs and
the bottom line dictate the solution, not your personal feelings.  And time
and time again, for medium business after medium business, Exchange has
provided.  If you really want we can conger up an average small company
prototype and each deliver a robust communications plan.  But I think your
average CFP will pick the exchange plan every time.

And yes one of my three home computers is MS, and yes I run outlook on it
(Evolution and thunderbird on the other two)  But Outlook is my primary PIM.

I find on lists like this I have the fringe voice of pay/proprietary
software, just like in the business world I am the fringe voice of free and
open source.  So, I get flamed from both sides.

-----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 Craig
White
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 10:24 AM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: RE: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new hotness?)

On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 09:45 -0700, Bryan O'Neal wrote:
>  I disagree... Mostly.
> > - Tough to backup
> Like any database it needs to be shut down for standard file backups
> to work properly.  This can be done via a simple script and is not a real
issue.
> However the use of back up programs like BackupExec make it a breeze
> to back up and restore.  However I will agree that if you never had to
> deal with it before and you don't have much space and you don't have
> something like Backup Exec it can be daunting to figure out how to get
> regular backups working.  That said I also like to run all the clients
> so they keep a copy of all activity locally.  Not only does this speed
> up the clients but it also ensures that if the server suddenly went
> belly up and the last backup I had was 10 or 12 hours old (if I was
> using a file backup system) I could restore everything up to the
> minuet for people who had their clients running.  If I thought it was
> worth the time I would have liked to virtualizes the exchange server
> and take regular snap shots of it throughout the day. However other
> projects provided a greater return for the time invested so I never got
around to it.
----
this is absurd - once you have used cyrus-imapd and all of the e-mails are
separate files you realize how antiquated and stupid the concept of an
Exchange mail store is. Oh, you can buy programs with Exchange 'agents' to
allow you to back up live or you can use some routine to shut down Exchange
to allow a backup but it's clearly a hostile environment, much like backing
up any database.
----
> > - Costly to integrate spyware, anti-virus and other content scanning
> I never had any issues and must totally disagree. I have always used
> the scanning built into exchange. This has been quite a nice feature
> since Exchange 2003 SP2 which is quite good at controlling spam,
> viruses, and generally enforcing corporate policies.  However, for
> less then $500 a year you can get a third party to spam scan all of
> your email before it ever hits your server.  If nothing else this pays for
it's self in saved bandwidth.
> If you are a medium size company initial spam scanning should be done
> by a third party, after that Exchange can be tweaked quite easily to
> help enforce corporate policies.  In addition integration with
> products like Avast make it easy to offer AV/Threat scanning.  After
> that exchange is easy to set up for limiting the kinds of files that
> can be sent or received, how big a email can be, and even who emails
> can be sent or received from.  And while I never did it, I am fairly
certain you can do key word scanning as well.
> Most of this this can be customized on a per user basses.
----
I think you just made my point...buying specialized software add-ons to
perform scanning - and of course, the 'Exchange Server' options.
----
> - Specialized client software (Outlook) You can chose what ever client
> you want, but some features may not be limited or not available. A
> fairly good webmail client is provided. You can use POP and IMAP for
> any client with regards to your email. With some server side add-ons
> colanders can be made available as well and global contacts can be
> driven via ldap.  While it is true if you want to use the advanced
> features you have to use outlook, but again, I have not found any
> other client/sere pair that provides these features, so it is not
> surprising that other clients can not use them when connecting to the
server.
----
good webmail is easily implemented as are LDAP client applications. OWA is
adequate.
----
> - Requires AD
> Yes.  However this is like saying that it requires an MS server to run
> so I really don't see your point.  I can integrate my Linux servers
> and clients seamlessly into AD using krb and some people indicate the
> opposite is also true.  It is an enterprise mail system designed
> around collaboration.  If you don't have an enterprise to collaborate
> with you probably are not looking at outlook.  If you believe it ads
> additional expense look at the small business edition.  The price for
> a fully integrated MS environment is very cheep these days.
----
My point seemed to be rather obvious. You're in for the penny, you're in for
the pound. The issue isn't about whether Linux or Macintosh can integrate
into an AD environment...of course they can.

The issue was about buying in and having AD dictate everything from user
accounts to machine access and all resource management. To use Exchange, you
have no choice other than to go the whole hog...there was no other options
after Exchange 5.5

The simple truth is that Microsoft didn't create the Enterprise environment
nor do they possess the only logical implementation. They have the marketing
muscle and the foresight to create artificial dependencies to use software
to dictate implementation.

Start tossing in curveballs such as IP Telephony integration and it becomes
a major clusterf**k.

The ultimate issue is that the only decent client for Exchange is Outlook
and thus the only decent OS to use is Windows and thus the vendor lock-in is
full circle.

Clearly as businesses tighten their belts, the costs of license 6 or just
generally the various licenses necessary to be purchased for client access,
whether to files or to Exchange Server or to MS-SQL server get to be absurd.
As few businesses have embraced the move to Vista, Linux options for the
desktop continue to improve and Exchange Server will see its value
declining.

Craig

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

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



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/pipermail/plug-discuss/attachments/20090223/d046a7fb/attachment.htm