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

[Bryan O'Neal]

Thank you very much for the update on Asterisks! I have always had a soft
spot for it and am exited that it is expanding into the market nicely :)  As
for maintaining my servers, with cornerstone I was the director of IT but
their was never a desire to higher another sysadmin so I spent almost 20% of
my time "touching" my servers in some way. With my salary that is
significantly more then $2K, however I never broke down how much was truly
"development" that I just categorized as maintenance.  however, this
includes regular system audits and other functions that would be performed
no mater what the server OS.  When you say you don't spend $2K a year I have
to ask, do you not maintain your servers or do you have some incredibly
inexpensive sysadmin :)  At speekback.com I spent closer 10 60% of my time
doing sysadmin work, but we were in the midst of a fast development curve.
As for support they will continue doing critical support with regards to
upgrades and patches for free even after the support contract expires,
however if you just want some new funky module that does not effect you
current base system (say you wanted the ability to upload your own custom
rings onto your phone in mp3 format) you have to pay for it.  This really
was something that came up after our contract expired.  As far as the
support of Linux vs. Asterisks in house support it is just a matter of
additional workload.  If you have follow resource it is not a real expense,
however if you resources are already close to max, you must consider
employing a new person to handle the additional workload...  Or pay your
current people more, or run the risk of them getting burnt out.