Cost of installing SBS2008

Slime101 · 17 Mar 2010 at 11:33

Can anyone give me a rough idea of the cost of installing SBS2008 onto a small network of 4/5 pc's, 1 server - currently all working fine but feel the benefits of SBS are well worth moving to.

So, if i pay someone to come in and do it, how long do you expect it to take, and how much should it cost?

Slime101 · 17 Mar 2010 at 12:19

Exchange isnt needed at the moment.

Not much data to move and i can do that myself.

Slime101 · 17 Mar 2010 at 13:56

We dont need the hardware, it will go on our existing "server" machine hardware.

I dont particually care about exchange, we dont use calendars and emails are hosted with our domain and for so few users it seems overkill, when we gain more staff they are going to be xmas temps as we have changed the structure recently.

The things we want from it are roaming profiles, remote working capabilities, decent backup options and possibly SQL server although this depends on the new version of our bespoke software and what the programmer decides to use as our current one is written in foxpro (from a very long time ago!)

Slime101 · 17 Mar 2010 at 14:22

I remain to be convinced - when i worked in a 2500 person organisation people used calendars, and it was hit and miss because not everyone put things in them, not everyone had enough access etc etc.

In our company, none of us are out of the office, we are all "office" based and dont travel to see clients - we are essentially a manufacturing company rather than a service industry.

Also the problems of running our own exchange server are that our internet connection is limited to ADSL (not even ADSL2) and we cannot have any other service where we are, the connection has its reliability problems and BT dont care about the crap equipment in the exchange because its only a small village!

Slime101 · 17 Mar 2010 at 14:33

We only have 4Gb RAM in it, processor i dont know but its not that old so will be x64.

With the exchange thing could we still host the emails with our current hosting provider & webspace, and them pull them to the local exchange server, thus if the connection is down it will queue them as per your example?

Slime101 · 17 Mar 2010 at 15:54

How much ram does it need?? The server really doesnt do much?

There are also rarely 5 active users at any one time, you are more likely to find 2 concurrent users due to the other things people do!

Slime101 · 17 Mar 2010 at 16:40

There is no difference between a dell branded box, and what we use....except ours didnt cost the earth!

Slime101 · 17 Mar 2010 at 20:05

Raid 5 with PERC 5i controller.

Dells are only cheap for vanilla boxes, you want a decent spec, more ram, an OS or god forbid a raid controller and the prices are far from cheap for what you get.

Slime101 · 18 Mar 2010 at 13:14

Roaming profiles is a must, as is decent remote working ability.

We have various stations at work, places where orders are input and customer service queries are done, then there is the print room with a mahcine for controlling the print operations and a dispatch area, all have different requirements and the people using the stations need their own desktops, files, emails etc for ease of use. Spend our lives swapping desks and at times when we are busy its handy to be able to jump on any free machine and work on anything.