I’ve been playing with Microsoft Online Business Productivity Online Suite for the past 3 months now.. Playing is definitely not the right word; in comparison to Lotus Notes, I've been “Productive”. :) “It just works.”
For those of you who don’t know what BPOS is.. BPOS is a Cloud hosted version of Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communication Server (instant messaging) and Live Meeting (MS WebEX competitor).
The next challenge is find out if BPOS was really the right solution.
Microsoft quote on their website that the complete BPOS solution is $15 a user per month. However there are some things you still need to consider.
- Internet Bandwidth increase (in Australia, per MB download rates are relatively high) – as the service is in the Cloud, you are not paying just to receive emails from the internet, your bandwidth is used for internal emails as well. (Although this is still very quick)
- Level 1 Helpdesk – Microsoft only supply level 2 & 3, web/phone support, so you still nee somebody to do the level 1 monkey work. “Did you turn it off and on again, yet?”, “The power button is the big one in the middle.”
- Migration Costs – Microsoft offer some free tools to do the migration, so if you are on a supported platform these may be low. If your not, or if you need to get a partner to help, these costs should be added to a per user calculation. (If you can try and spread these costs out over a larger period say 36 months)
- Archiving – If your in a regulated sector, you may be required to have legal archiving. (Microsoft Offer this at an extra cost)
- Excess Storage – for when a user goes over their mailbox limit, although this is relatively easy to bill back to the
abuses users Business Unit (if your company allows that)
In my calculations these costs added approx another $5 per user.
To understand the finical benefit of BPOS, try and get a baseline of your current email environment determine the monthly cost for the following items (these should be similar for most companies.)
- Software
- OS Software
- Email Software
- Gateway Protection (Anti Virus/Spam)
- Server Hardware - try to work out a monthly cost over the life time of the hardware – either leased or deprecated
- Storage Hardware – (include the continued risk as email capacities increase)
- Backup – Hardware / Media / Software /
Monkeys.. Operators
(The next items are monthly staff costs if you are not outsourced IT shop)
- Monthly Mailbox Management cost (per user?)
- Monthly Server Management cost (per server?)
- Monthly Storage Management cost (per TB?)
- Monthly Service Desk cost (people who answer the phone :) )
Add all these costs up and divide by the number of users on the system to get a baseline per user $ figure.
I’m not sure what an industry standard is for a Per Mailbox Per Month fee (if somebody know, please fill me in), but most calculations I’ve done, its been less than $30.
The REAL benefit of BPOS (especially the way the economy is these days) is the ability to scale up or down but keep the same per mailbox per month fee. Consider the following for an in house solution, (where they budget per user).
- A company has 1000 employees and it’s fixed costs (servers, storage, gateway, etc) are $15000 per month – which works out the per user cost is $15.
- If the company grows to 1200 users, the per user cost goes from $15 to $12.50pm. (should your system be able to scale)
- If the company downsizes to just 800 people, the per user cost will increase to $18.75pm
BPOS on the other hand, stays the same no matter the number of users on the system. (its Microsoft’s problem, not yours).
I hope this helps in determining if BPOS is of benefit to you.
