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."

Comments

Have You Accounted for User Preference?

[rsmith84]

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?

Re:Have You Accounted for User Preference?

[Lumpy]

"The problem with solutions other the MS Office is that you will have issues with interacting with people outside your company."

This old lie again.

No you dont. WE have been on Open Office/Libre Office for over 3 years now here and have ZERO problems "interacting with people outside your company". WE can save as office format and read office format.

In fact we have less problems than one of our customers who is still on Office 2003.

zimbra

[Anonymous Coward]

Zimbra I believe does most if not all of what you are looking for.

If you'd like to stay with Microsoft

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

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.

Re:Google for Business?

[Dr. Evil]

If you're not in the U.S., putting your data under U.S. jurisdiction *can* be an unacceptable risk.

Protections for non-citizens, non-residents are pretty slim.

Re:Google for Business?

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 My company switched to Google Apps for Business about six months ago and it has been great so far, especially considering how incredibly affordable it is. Administration is easy, tons of additional services you can choose from, and did I mention how affordable it is? Plus, most users are already very familiar and comfortable with Gmail, and Google even has a neat tool that will migrate existing Outlook .pst's (email, contacts, even calendars) to a user's new Gmail account.

Been here multiple times

[vanye]

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.