Quote:
|
Originally Posted by KevinH What are you using today that gives you Exchange-like features? Your first post said you don't want to consider Exchange but I'm curious what solution you have in place today that gives you the feature set you require? |
My company is currently using a program called FirstClass and, no, it does not offer anywhere near Exchange-like functionality. I abhor it and will gladly let my company switch it out for anything BUT it. We're a small company (less that 100 employees) and although our overall revenue is alright we simply haven't had the budget to consider upgrading our mail server to something better. This has been going on for the better part of a little over a year. Management wants Exchange or, as they would say, "Outlook! We want Outlook!". We're predominantly a Windows network...except our mail server is on a Mac! Go figure! So, my thinking is that we can greatly reduce our TCO by moving our mail server and even our file servers to Linux boxes. We can still keep some of the core Windows services on a separate box for things like Active Directory, SQL databases, print services, and such...just keep the really heavily used stuff on something more stable and reliable. At the moment, this is a losing battle...there is likely to be very few things I can do to convince them otherwise, which is ironic. They really want to save money and encourage me to find ways to do so...and yet they don't mind spending more money on a couple of new Windows servers for file and mail services. Go figure!
The figures that biztux posted are what I would expect. I'm guessing that here in the States, the figures are somewhere likely to be around 50% for businesses that still use Office 2000 and XP...that's quite a bit! So, without an Outlook connector that works for both Outlook 2000 and XP you're looking at a niche market of roughly anywhere from 15 - 20% of all small business users...still pretty good, but your market would be way better if you did have a multi-version connector in place.
Ok...so let's do the math on how much Zimbra would cost my company as opposed to going with Exchange 2003. To be liberal, Exchange is likely to cost us around $1200 plus $35 per user. With 75 users, that amounts to around $3825. Granted, it could be more...but I'm just estimating. Now, let's look at the cost of Zimbra. For the Small Business Edition, it's $2900 for 100 users. Great price! However, let's add in the cost of what the upgrades would be for Office 2003. Again, let's be liberal and say that the cost is around $150 for Office 2003 Standard upgrades. That would be around $11250; added to the licensing cost of Zimbra and you have a grand total of $14150! Hmm...quite a bit of a difference there. Plus, I'm not even estimating the cost of Office 2003 Professional upgrades in the mix either...which we would need a few of. So, on that note, would you say that it would be difficult at best to convince the management of my company to upgrade Office for all users and go with Zimbra? To them, because Exchange will already work with Outlook 2000, they could save money just by buying into it. Sorry guys...but it looks like I won't be able to get my company to consider Zimbra instead of Exchange right now. Once they buy into Exchange, that's pretty much it. Sigh!