Re: exchange - opengroupware cost comparison: do you think you are competitive?

On 17.01.2004, at 13:27, solo turn wrote:
> helge, in a mail in december you mentioned, that zidestore is not by 
> skyrix and therefor the price is so high, but you anyway felt  that 
> the price is competive.

You mean ZideLook, the Outlook connector. The reason for the pricing is 
not only that it is developed by someone else, but because we think 
that it is competitive (please no discussion on that ;-) We somewhat 
oriented the pricing on the pricing of the Ximian Exchange connector 
(the other way around ;-), which is $70.
US residents are also somewhat hit by the currently strong Euro - bad 
for exports, some months ago the 5 NU price was something like $45 per 
NU (so much cheaper than the pricing of the Exchange connector) ...

> how would you argue to get your boss to use opengroupware, if he says:
...

Most issues you mention are pretty generic "why I shouldn't use 
Microsoft products", "why I shouldn't use Windows on the server" and 
"why I shouldn't use Exchange" questions. You should search Google for 
answers, I'm not really motivated collecting reasoning for not doing 
the wrong thing.
(maybe someone else is interested to step in ;-)

> - paying licenses for TRYING an opensource solution:
>   you are crazy!

Well ZideLook is actually not an OpenSource solution and only users of 
proprietary clients are hit by the licensing cost.

> and the decision was: exchange. it has a nice calendar, and webmail.

True. Exchange has its benefits, I'm certainly not someone who tries to 
trash other products just because they are from a different vendor.

But eg the web client of Exchange is only really nice if you use it 
with Internet Explorer (as one would expect ;-)

> i have to admit, i ran out of arguments. arguments on the pro side 
> were:
> - we anyway have a linux box
> - server is free
> - web-client is free
> - there is no free client, but an outlook plugin
> - we want to support open source by using it

Except for the "web-client is free" the reasons are not very 
convincing. Search the net for advantages of OpenSource and Free 
software.

OGo also has a lot of functionality out of scope of Exchange and which 
would require you to buy something like the MS SharePoint Portal Server 
(also quite expensive).
There are loads of other reasons.

> so ... now i'm wondering:
> - who makes zidestore?

ZideLook is developed by a partner company of SKYRIX.

> - how do you define "competitive"

With regards to the target audience, which is companies that do not 
want to run Microsoft software on the server yet need to support 
Outlook on the client in the best possible way.

If the target company has no objectives using Exchange on the server 
and wants to use Outlook as the clients its pointless. Its almost 
impossible to compete against that setup.
First step is to convince people why Windows on the server is a bad 
idea - and this can't be the job of OGo. Next step is convincing people 
not to use proprietary Linux groupware solutions, this is the job of 
OGo ;-)

> - what is the biggest (number of users really using)
>   opengroupware installation

Not sure, I don't have an overview of the current customer base, I 
guess something around 800 users. I know that there is a customer in 
the queue with 5000 NU, not sure when (or whether) the project starts 
though.

> personally i think if you have a free zidestore-connector until it 
> really works, and promise that you don't charge more than 10eur per 
> user if it really works, than i guess you get very soon a huge user 
> base and are in every government project.

Hardly. On the other side, if some government buys 20.000 licenses or 
something in a bulk way, the pricing is subject to negotiation and can 
probably drop to EUR 10. Hard to get a contract like that ;-) In 
addition enterprise style licensing is certainly possible and not 
necessarily bound to price lists.

regards,
   Helge
-- 
I'm describing in a paragraph what took 14 hours to figure out. You may 
want to sniff glue for a while, then reread this when you get out of 
rehab. [aLa]

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