Exchange Replacement

[sidethink]

Its also worth reiterating that there are many different ways to pay for your software from Microsoft these days.

You need to speak to a specialist in MS licensing at a reputable supplier and look at spreading the total costs of your licensing over a period of time.

Also as someone has already pointed out, if you have 400 users but some/most of them hotdesk, you can signifcantly cut your costs by looking at licensing per device rather than per user.

Again, speak with a trained MS licensing redeller.

 

[Caged]

15 grand is the price of one car (ish). If they say they can't afford this to provide email to everyone in the company, then they are having a laugh.

You really need to sell Exchange to them - Microsoft will be more than helpful at aiding you with this, they have case studies about Exchange all over the place:

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/casestudies/default.mspx

Why do you want to be stuck with having to support using Outlook with other email servers and dodgy connectors, when for under £40 per user you could license them for Exchange?

 

[m4cc45]

Also you may want to point out that the Total Cost of Ownership (i.e. less downtime, less administration, etc.) is a lot lower with Exchange than the other solutions mentioned.

Also with the combination of Exchange 2007 and Office 2007 the users can setup there e-mail accounts themselves where-as with 2003 you really need to know what server and your user account (most users won't know this).

Now go sell!



M.

 

[The_KiD]

Wow thanks for the advice and all, but I am still going to look at alternatives


....woah dont shoot me just yet, but in my experience it doesnt hurt to have options when approaching the board for money.

Also I should have mentioned that email is not a business critical application for us, so clustering is not something I will be lookng at. We already have spare licenses for OpenView Storage mirroring too, so I could get 2 servers put the mail server software on one and have it replicate to the second for redundancy.

Excahneg may be all singing and all dancing, but MS are complete rip off merchants in terms of their licensing...sure I can have clustering...but it must be paid for....sure I can have this fetaure and that function...but they are all paid for. First you must pay for our software then you must pay to use our software and should our software break you must pay us to fix it.

£999 for 5 phone calls??? is it bill himself who answers?

 

[M0KUJ1N]

Also you may want to point out that the Total Cost of Ownership (i.e. less downtime, less administration, etc.) is a lot lower with Exchange than the other solutions mentioned.

Also with the combination of Exchange 2007 and Office 2007 the users can setup there e-mail accounts themselves where-as with 2003 you really need to know what server and your user account (most users won't know this).

Now go sell!



M.

Wouldn't the Office 2003 Resource Kit hardwire these settings in Outlook so users dont have to manually configure things.

Good point about TCO though. You could go down the route of a FOSS solution involving Cyrus, Postfix, Spamassassin, LDAP (for the global directory), Squirrelmail/Horde (for webmail) and a webdav server for calendars. Using an all-in-one solution like Zimbra or Opengroupware would probably tick off a few of these boxes.

However, to do this properly in a way that just slots into your current infrastructure would probably take a skilled UNIX admin (at about 35-40K / yr) about 3-6 months to set up, and then another 3 months to implement it onto people's desktops. And then of course there is the issue of any re-training of staff that may be required (shouldnt be too much as most of the functionality will be available directly through Outlook but it will still be a factor).

All in all, it doesn't take a PhD in maths to work out that the total cost of this venture would either equal or exceed the amount you're paying for exchange currently and it will cause some disruption for the company itself. Or you can pay the same (or less) and stick with Exchange with zero disruption to the company

 

[zetec452]

Excahneg may be all singing and all dancing, but MS are complete rip off merchants in terms of their licensing...sure I can have clustering...but it must be paid for....sure I can have this fetaure and that function...but they are all paid for. First you must pay for our software then you must pay to use our software and should our software break you must pay us to fix it.

£999 for 5 phone calls??? is it bill himself who answers?

You pay for what you get.

Go open source and then let some monkey fix your server.

 

[JUMPURS]

£999 for 5 phone calls??? is it bill himself who answers?

You know how much the hourly rate is for a call out for someone to come fix your exchange? i don't think £200 per incident will get you far
It's not 5 phone calls but 5 incidents, so if it takes them a couple of days to fix then its all the same price. And it is for every microsoft product under the sun, not limited to only 5 calls for exchange, use them for every bit of MS software you have.

A major high street chain has tech monkeys to fix your problems at £399 per server, but that excludes:

Non-Intel based servers, non–Windows based servers
Servers with three or more processors or three or more hard disk drives
Servers containing removable or hot-plug devices. i.e. hard drives power supplies etc
Accidental or malicious damage, or cover for normal wear and tear
Consumable parts
Calls not related to specific problems, general tuition on how to use software is not included
Telephone support for software problems relating to accounting software
Configuration of user settings such as file shares, user accounts, views, wizards, printer drivers etc
Data or application recovery

But hey, it's your headache not mines

 

[knowlesy]

mdeamon


use at work atm its crap for advanced fntions and the like but it does the job .... just run it of a basic server or one you have already

 

[Burnsy2023]

I'm with a lot of guys here. Exchange really is the best option and it'd be a false economy to really seriously consider anything else.

As for the pricing, the company is big enough to look at an Enterprise Volume Licensing Agreement with MS. You can spread payments over 2 or 3 years and I'm pretty sure it'd be less than £15k. Talk to a decent Microsoft reseller.

Burnsy

 

[knowlesy]

exchange is the way to go btw we will be upgrading to it at the end of this year

 

[m4cc45]

Wouldn't the Office 2003 Resource Kit hardwire these settings in Outlook so users dont have to manually configure things.

It would do, yes.

But if they have no office (which I don't know) or older versions which don't support Exchange then having Office 2007 makes life easy especially if you don't implement roaming profiles and have people hotdesking (why people don't I have no idea but we deal with around 30 companies like this).

It's just something out of the box rather than having to configure.



M.

 

[zetec452]

You know how much the hourly rate is for a call out for someone to come fix your exchange? i don't think £200 per incident will get you far
It's not 5 phone calls but 5 incidents, so if it takes them a couple of days to fix then its all the same price. And it is for every microsoft product under the sun, not limited to only 5 calls for exchange, use them for every bit of MS software you have.

I can testify for this with an incident today. Customer previously had somebody hack and botch together an SBS box (before our time of course ). As MS gold partners we call MS they dial in and spend 6 hours fixing the server for us with a one flat fee. The support is top notch too.

 

[m4cc45]

Aye I get two incidences free with Technet (worth its weight in gold) so for £200 quid I get lots of 'free' software and two support incidences!

Can't complain!



M.

 

[JUMPURS]

Yeah it was using it with Technet that i first tried the support out, so it's just now a yearly cost we come to expect is the 5 calls, aswell as the technet ones.