[SATLUG] SuSE Openexchange 4.1 and Windows 2003 SBS?

[Bryan S. Scott]

John Williams wrote:
> Question?
> 
> Why is there such a large price difference between these products?  Windows 2003 SBS is $480 - $500 and SuSE OpenExchange 4.1 is $1,400 - $1,450
> 
> Am I missing something, does SuSE's product offer something to the average small business that SBS does not?  I want to setup OpenExchange 4.1 put its a hard sell when SBS is about 1/3 the cost???
> 
> I have a lot of friends with small companies (5 - 20 employees) who don't need heavy iron...and don't want to pay big bucks for one or two small servers (mail/vpn/database access/etc).

Hi John,

It appears to me that the only major difference is the number of 
clients. I believe that you are limited to 50 users with SBS, but you do 
not have that limitation with SuSE. If you are going to be in the 
neighborhood of 5-20 users. I think SBS is the better decision..... sort 
of. Don't forget the cost of Anti-Virus for your mail server, the server 
itself and backup software for the your platform. I think that you may 
be able to use the built in backup to backup exchange and the OS. Also 
you may be able to write a batch to handle the SQL backup.

BTW, are you looking at the upgrade, or the basic package? I think that 
going that route will not get you MSSQL. If you go with the premium, the 
  cost is the same.

Thinkning of it from a different angle. It may cost more on the SBS 
platform in support and setup. Since the price difference is about 
$800-900, that's about ~8 hours of my time, not sure what you charge, 
but it is worth considering. I bet that they will take about the same 
amount of time to setup, but I think the SuSE box will require less 
babysitting.

Reading your last statement, you could build your own server. Grab your 
favorite distro, and you can do all the above things you had mentioned 
(except the true integration of Outlook and some Mail server). But for 
pretty much the cost of hardware and your time, you can build a great 
server. Oh yeah, you need a firewall for your SBS server too, so you may 
need to figure that in the cost. So after relooking over this, cost 
wise, unless you need the functionality of shared services in 
Outlook/Exchange. I would just build it myself. :-) I hope this helped.

Also you may want to check out the SME server project. I thin kit works 
great I have two clients using this on a standard desktop w/ UPS uptimes 
in 100's days. http://www.contribs.org


-Bryan