Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Before giving any solutions, I have to speak about the elephant in the room – and this time it’s not Windows, it’s money.
SBS costs money. Linux doesn’t have to cost money. However, one criticism often levelled at Linux is that there is no support, or at best support is limited. In response to my previous stories SBS consultants have made the claim that SBS is a better option than Linux because if your server goes down you can generally find someone who can get it back up and running.
All of the solutions I will present provide support options. As you’d expect these cost money. That’s the revenue model for the companies who give away their product for nix.
This isn’t smoke and mirrors. I’m not saying “Hey, why pay for SBS when you could have Linux for free? Ok, it costs money, tricked ya!” We’re talking about support, which is different to the price of the product itself.
That said, some of the solutions provided do come in commercial versions. It’s a matter of choice whether you prefer to use the free edition or if you consider the commercial benefits valuable enough to pay for. This is also no trick: you can be assured that the pricing still beats out SBS – which, I’ll note, comes out of the box with a mere five user licenses. Don’t forget any SBS implementation has to take into account additional user client access licenses (CALs) and these are actually more expensive than CALs for the regular Microsoft server products.
Not only this but you don’t have to ever worry about the subtle ramifications of licensing by seat or by server, or by the impact multiple processors have on your pricing.
At the end of the day, depending on the route you go money could change hands. That’s ok. My whole thrust over the last week has been that SBS is a crippled bastard relative of its fuller Windows server products.
So here are some alternatives for the price conscious, without curbing your growth like SBS does. Here are some alternatives for the thinking consultant who wants to do the best thing by the client.
Page 1 – the baseline Page 2 - What I expect from a Linux solution
Page 3 – A word on the money side Page 4 – Option 1: ClarkConnect and reader feedback
David Bass
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