MS Windows Network costs

hi all,

This is the deal, current company has:

A HQ in my town, 60-80 staff members, 4/5 different teams
A small satellite office half a mile away with 4 staff members
A second call centre in Stoke (20 miles away) with another 30-40 people
An office in Leicester with 5 staff members and growing.
250-300 remote sales advisors/consultants/financial advisors

They are talking about a third call centre in south Wales.

They currently use cpanel for email using pop3 (a few use Imap), it's a mixture of laptops and desktops running win 7 home to win 10 home. couple of mac's and a couple of linux laptops.

it's cheap, it's a mess and it's making administration of the system a nightmare, lots of minor issues like sharing calendars etc.

I've come in with limited knowledge and I've been problem solving, googling and troubleshooting my backside off to stay on top of it, which isn't easy as there are no procedures and we take on 30 new staff members every 6 weeks. The IT team is just me. We have a technical director who writes our software and managed Azure/websites etc.

What kind of price range would you be looking at to start from scratch, implement a proper enterprise microsoft solution? Server, email whatever else is needed?

I've just started learning MS Server certs on virtual academy so I don't know enough to speak with confidence.

I know there's not a great deal of detail in there but ideally, email and calenders/server first then we can start on the individual workstations.

You could just use o365? or Google apps?

Since it relates to business software I'd suggest you post this in Servers and Enterprise Solutions. (Or RTM your own post to have it moved.)

Lots of outlook/office/exchange/google threads in there (have a search) and you'll get better expertise.

If you're including the 250-300 remote users, "classic" MS licensing is going to be a big bill (assuming Windows Server, Server CAL, Exchange Server, Exchange Server CAL). A Windows Server CAL + Exchange Server CAL for each user is, off the top of my head, about £110 per user. Hardware wouldn't be cheap when factoring in some redundancy or geographic separation. You'd also need to consider what inter-site communications you have if you're putting more services at the HQ.

As above, this sounds ripe for Office 365 to get rid of a nasty POP3 setup.

Long term plan needs proper consideration - if you've 10s or 100s of desktops running Home editions of Windows, you've got a big issue getting them to Pro (or Enterprise) to integrate properly with Active Directory.

You probably want to be speaking to 2 or 3 IT resellers/MSPs about your requirements.

Other than the FA's the remote users all supply their own laptops etc and software is up to them, I just manage their technical support so I'm not sure they'll need anything. Our Financial Advisors however do have laptops supplied to them.

Our call centre guys only use email, chrome (internal websites, Easycontactnow) as well as a SIP program called Xlite.

Active Directory and group policies however would have saved me a load of time recently limiting websites and changing DNS settings.

It turns out, one of the top managers has spoken to a company called Softcat but I have no idea about what, he's playing things close to his chest which is extremely annoying seeing as it's me that has to administrate everything and I need to start plugging knowledge gaps asap.

AHarvey said:

Other than the FA's the remote users all supply their own laptops etc and software is up to them, I just manage their technical support so I'm not sure they'll need anything. Our Financial Advisors however do have laptops supplied to them.

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If these remote users are using anything hosted on a Windows server on your site, you need to have a user CAL for either them, or a device CAL for every device they use. As #Chri5# pointed out MS is really pushing their cloud offerings, traditional licensing for on premises stuff is getting progressively more expensive and if you're coming into it new is very hard to justify.

Also the upfront costs to do on prem will be hard to stomach for a small company, I fully expect a cloud based solution is in your future.

It sounds like the wheels are turning, just keep in with your technical director as he's likely to hear murmurings before you do.

Sounds like you need to contact an MSP (Managed service provider) I happen to work for one but there are plenty in the area.

We generally go in and sort out businesses like yours with everything they need and generally take on the IT Support side of things or atleast an escalation point to the on site IT Dept and for project work etc.

This all comes at a cost, sounds like cost is an issue to you guys.

Softcat is an IT supplier but do offer MSP services (they outsource a lot of the complex stuff to MSP's like us)

For a business which grows like yours Cloud based Office365 for email, and on prem for any applications.

You should have Active directory implemented and all machines should be windows 7/10 pro so they can be joined onto a windows domain, this makes central administration a doddle.

Thin clients may also be worth a look as these can also be centrally managed if your only using websites and basic apps.

0365 is a great place to centrally managed everything.

The company I work for migrated last year, with myself as the 'Lead'. Management is so much easier, we also use WDS to deploy new systems.

Agree with the above. We just migrated from an old Linux based IMAP setup to O365 and after the dust has settled it's so much easier to manage.

I'd highly recommend O365 for at least Exchange, however their OneDrive online storage system is beyond a joke. The 20k item limit is impossible for the vast majority of businesses, I don't know why they quote 1TB when you can't physically reach that capacity unless you're storing huge files.

Liquidfox said:

I'd highly recommend O365 for at least Exchange, however their OneDrive online storage system is beyond a joke. The 20k item limit is impossible for the vast majority of businesses, I don't know why they quote 1TB when you can't physically reach that capacity unless you're storing huge files.

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Because it sounds good in the marketing and to lure people in that don't read the small print

Also that limit is only for sync (although that limit has gone with the next gen sync client), I would try to avoid syncing thousands of files to workstations unless they really, really need to take them offline.