The Hidden Costs of Microsoft's Free Office Online

Michael_Curator writes "Despite what you've heard, the online version of Office 2010 announced by Microsoft earlier this week won't be free to corporate users. Business customers will either have to pay a subscription fee or purchase corporate access licenses (CALs) for Office in order to be given access to the online application suite (Microsoft already does this with email — the infamous Outlook Web Access). But wait — there's more! A Microsoft spokesperson told me that customers will need to buy a SharePoint server, which ranges from $4,400 plus CALs, or $41,000 with all CALs included, if they want to share documents created using the online version of Office 2010."

Comments

Software licensing is cheap

[hattig]

It's nothing compared to the cost of hiring a team of people to get sharepoint to do what you want it to do, and plenty of companies are happy to pay for them. It's also cheap on a per-user basis - remember how many tens of thousands you are paying them each year - not that this logic extends to buying them a decent computer.

Some software just works. Other software unnecessarily requires over the top maintenance and setup costs. I've never read anything good about sharepoint apart from the people who got wooed by the salesman over golf/dinner/piss up to buy it. Sadly these people are who controls decision making.

What's a good free sharepoint alternative, in a single package?

Re:Ranges from $4,400 plus CALs, or $41,000?

[UnderLoK]

"People" don't pay it, businesses do. It just shows how clueless you are about software costs in the Enterprise. I guess you just assume that since you can download a copy of XP or Vista Enterprise off of a torrent it must be "cheap". Check into pricing for ANY of the major Enterprise apps, 41,000 for all of the CALs isn't shit.

Glad to be off that treadmill

[HangingChad]

A Microsoft spokesperson told me that customers will need to buy a SharePoint server, which ranges from $4,400 plus CALs, or $41,000 with all CALs included, if they want to share documents created using the online version of Office 2010."

I am so happy to be working in an office free of the MS strangle hold. CALs always struck me as the most insidious of their macabre licensing circus. First you pay for the software, then you pay again so people can use it. What a racket. For the $41,000 you're paying in CALs I can cover an employee salary for 8 months (that would be one of the lower level people).

We don't have any problems getting our work done at the office without Microsoft. We have corporate Gmail and use GoogleDocs, so far with zero problems. If we have super sekret corporate information we can't trust to Google, we can store them in the truecrypt file container. We can send out pdf's to clients and customers, everyone can read them and they format just fine.

Plus I really like that we don't have to fit either our business processes or development processes to MSFT models. It's a lot more open and a lot more productive. You don't realize how much time you spend dancing on Microsoft's string until you get away from them. And, as an extra bonus, I can blow your ROI and TCO numbers out of the water. Just about any metric you want to use. And I never have to make the painful choice between layoffs and new servers. We can upgrade on our schedule, patch on our schedule, work the way we want to. If we need more capacity, we just stand it up. If we don't need it we can turn it off and it's not wasted money sitting there doing nothing.

And it's not just a small office. If you set it up right, you could do the same thing with almost any size organization. The only consistent pain in the rear problem we have regularly are those damn webinar programs. GoToMeeting and crap like that. Many of those are Windows only. That's kind of annoying.