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Options For Good (Not Expensive) Office Backbone For a Small Startup
An anonymous reader writes "I recently joined a startup, we have about 10 people altogether in various roles / responsibilities, and I handle most of the system / IT responsibilities (when I'm not in my primary role, which is software development). When trying to price licenses, I'm finding Microsoft offerings require quite a bit of upfront cost, so I'm trying the alternative solutions. LibreOffice and Google Docs work fine for the most part (we also have some MS Office users); however I'm having trouble getting a good / cheap / free solution to email, contacts, calendaring and user management in general. We have some Mac users, Windows users, need desktop clients for most of these uses as well — and there doesn't seem to be a solution that satisfies these myriad combinations." (Read more, below.)
Our submitter continues: iCloud doesn't natively support non @me.com addresses (workarounds seem prone to breakage so far), Windows Live Mail doesn't support Google's CalDAV, there doesn't seem to be anything that can provide a company-wide Contacts support, etc. Ideally I can deploy a solution that has the following: Sharing calendar (or look at other people's calendar), Company-wide Contacts Address Book, Add new employee / consultants and take them offline too (in terms of user permissions, access), Clients available on Windows, OSX, possibly mobile, which support the calendaring / meeting invites / contacts list set up. Maybe I'm just out of my depths here — can Slashdot provide some direction as to what I can look at? Or is a Hosted Exchange the cheapest option? Disclaimer: I did come from a company that uses Exchange / Outlook — but the costs seem high."
What's the global consensus? Is everyone open to outside-the-box solutions? Or do they want the "comfort" and "warm fuzzy feeling" of Microsoft familiarity?
Zimbra I believe does most if not all of what you are looking for.
Have you considered Google Apps? It is free for up to 10 users. You can use Thunderbird with a couple of plugins to handle the desktop client or just have your people use the web apps which are very good.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/pricing.html At $5/user/month, it's decently priced.
Become a Partner. You get pretty much all of their software for 10 desktops and a couple of servers for less than $500 a year.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I would recommend checking out Sogo. This would provide a good groupware solution. In their upcoming version, 2.0, it will have some goodies like Exchange Server emulation so it will integrate well with those using Outlook. For collaboration, you can check out Alfresco. As for a common identity management solution therein lies the trick. If you are brave, you can check out using Samba4 and configure all of your clients to authenticate against their version of Active Directory. The Samba wiki has some good instructions on that. I know that there is an open source software package that helps integrate Linux with Active Directory but I cannot remember its name. It does get packaged with Ubuntu, however. Hope this helps some .....
If you meet the requirements, why don't you do BizSpark?
Pretty sure Google Apps for Business also meets your requirements, but it's around $50 per year per user.
You said Google Docs works fine for the most part, but the Gmail / Calendaring portion doesn't work?
We are a startup (about 25 employees) and Google Docs works fine for Email and Calendaring.
...in terms of real cost, my guess is that even if you buy whatever licenses you need/want from Microsoft for whatever software you have a need for, it won't really be that expensive compared to irritating your users (also, just use hosted exchange as $10/month/user should be a non-issue).
Before making any decisions, I'd consider asking your admittedly tiny user base what software/suites they need/want instead of just making blind purchasing decisions
I've only used mine (and that's a Snow Leopard Server, not Lion) at home, but it would seem to support a lot of what you are asking for, including, I believe, workgroup management for Windows users. You'd need to find clients which would talk to the various server-side applications, and I'm afraid I've no experience of that.
Again from memory, and I may be wrong, my recollection is that Lion Server does not require client licences, so, once you've bought the box, and installed the software, you can connect as many people as it will handle, which might help keep costs down.
Also look at Kolab and Citadel. They do what you need.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Just use Google Apps. Provides email, calendaring, etc all integrated and very inexpensive.
This program is designed for small business/startups. Check it out, gives you internal use of almost the entire Microsoft lineup. http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/community/mpn/pages/microsoft_action_pack.aspx
Definitely this. The web clients are the best out there, plus Thunderbird + Lightning is less annoying than Outlook and works on everything. And I seriously doubt you could find a mobile device that doesn't support Gmail + Google Calendar.
Does this method have a good way to handle company-wide contact lists though? I guess you could setup your own LDAP server but I doubt Gmail's web interface will use it.
Thunderbird works fine with LDAP, and you can use the GMail IMAP facility so you never really need to use GMail webmail.
Get an office365 subscription.
Hosted exchange + the full office suit. Honestly it's a decent way to do this until you decide to roll your own infrastructure. If you ever do. (We have it scaled across 15 companies and ~1200 users)
And we all know what the 365 in the name means : it's down every February 29th
Avoid the MS tax, always buy I.B.M. PC's (I Built-it Myself)
As a founder of two startups we're been here multiple times. Here's what I've found.
Google (email and docs) works okay for very early stage (engineering only - no sales/marketing people - little need to communicate outside of the company).
As we got closer to launch and hired more outbound people we moved to using Hosted Exchange (Intermedia.net). Outlook is the driving force here, I have code to write and don't want to spend my expensive time fixing email/calendar/desktop support issues.
For Office applications we joined the Microsoft ISV program where we get 10 licenses for all their office products for about $400 per year. That also includes MSDN access so engineering can use Visual Studio.
Engineering does not use Office, all internal engineering documents are on the hosted Wiki (Atlassian) - but the hosted Exchange comes with an Outlook license so developers use that. I will neither help or hinder the use of anything else.
Everyone uses Windows on their laptop - using VMware Workstation to run the Linux VMs used for development.
We run the entire business on hosted services (Intermedia, Atlassian, JungleDisk (backup) and VirtualPBX). Our monthly bill is ~$600 for a 25 person startup - core engineering is now about half the company.
We have ~60 servers - but all are for dev and test, there is no "IT overhead"
The issue is not that you can't make it something else work - but why ? Unless you're developing an office or email software its just not a good use of your expensive (unique) resources. The goal of your company should be to efficiently sell more of your products to people that are likely using Microsoft products (at least the decision makers). So for maximum interoperability and profession appearance use the products your customers are using.
(I use a Mac, but I cannot use it for anything for external communication (PowerPoint, Word etc) - somethings just look different to the Windows version (fonts, text positioning etc). Not all the time, but enough to make it unusable from a professional appearance point of view.