LS08 BD DAY: Microsoft's Software Assurance

From what I learned and revisited in Lotusphere today.

I've written a few times about the Exchange side of the equation and even Sharepoint but I learned more today.
And now so will you.

Here's the premise:
Microsoft has offerred you or your client Sharepoint and Exchange for free.
And your client wants the same from IBM to stay with Lotus.

The reason is because they want to put you into an enterprise agreement which has Software Assurance(still an oxymoron). Software Assurance, if you do not know, allows for a company to receive "free" upgrades on their licenses IF new software comes out in the next 3 years or however long you commit to int he agreement.
You can also do this if you know you will be updating soon.
Of course you pay for this benefit...each year of the agreement.
And the cost for SA is about 1/3 of the total licensing cost. So not a small chunk of change.

So let's look at all the companies that bought into it in 2003 for example.
Name one product which you paid for an upgrade that materialized from the "Desktop Professional" or "Professional Desktop" or even the "Enterprise Desktop".

Windows upgrade from XP, nope.... Vista came out in 2007
Office upgrade from Office 2003, nope......office 2007 came out in 2007
Exchange upgrade from Exchange 2003, nope....Exchange 2007
Outlook upgrade from Outlook 2003, nope......Outlook 2007

So what did you pay all that money for in the first place?
Well, MAYBE you were on 2000 and you expected to move to 2003 someday. Fair enough.
What if you bought this in 2004? Same problem. 2005? You start to see a pattern of course.

If your company continues to do this, as one company admin told me today theirs does, not only are you wasting money, you are perpetuating the Microsoft arms in your company.
If you convinced your company to review the policy, you would see a huge reduction in licensing to MS.
Your company SHOULD care and reward you for saving them money. If your boss doesn't, go to his boss. Someone wants to pocket that budget money, trust me.

Of course Sharepoint(MOSS) is free to you, because Microsoft gets you to buy licenses for:
SQL(server and CAL)
Communications Server(server and CAL)
Groove
and if you used advanced options in MOSS you also need
Office 2007!
And more pieces I can't even remember.

Don't forget you also MUST be on Windows 2003 server and updated AD and Exchange 2007 which requires 64bit code and thus 64bit Windows Server.
PLUS the new hardware.

So Sharepoint being free is like when you buy a dining set and get the choice of seat cushion color for free.

If it's free it's for me, but in this case it isn't free and really isn't for me....or you.

You always have other options....think about it and look into it.

Sharepoint or how a rolling stone gathers MOSS 3.0

So I attended a microsoft Connections event this morning because one of my clients wants to review sharepoint and CRM 3.0.

Let's stick to Sharpeoint as it is much more interesting.
First of all, how many people know what is involved to install this application?

The presenter, Jeffrey Lin did an excellent job. Even answered some hard questions. Did a great demo. Now the part he didn't mention, although I asked one piece of it.

You need Exchange, SQL and (I love this one) Windows Sharepoint Server 2.0!
WHAT!? Some upgrade.

Now those of you in Lotus la la land who have let Sharepoint in to your organization now have a huge fight. Exchange is now available to anyone who wants it and you can see where that leads.

All because you did not want to push the Domino products? Quickplace was/is a great product, Quickr is even better. No limitations, no giant message store.

Now I can see Sharepoint looks smoother and more professional than Quickplace but functionality, out of the box, is what is important. Anyone can pay a development house to make your site prettier.
Microsoft goes out of their way to integrate it to Outlook/Exchange and use SQL as its repository. And then there is Live messenger added to if you want presence/IM.

So again you have to add all five pieces(Exchange/SQL/WSS 2.0/MOSS 3.0/Live) and services to get what comes in 1 Domino servers with a Sametime added on one and a Quickr server.

Now here is something from a report dated March 2006 done by the great state of North Dakota. Page 5

"In addition, the cost of providing access to SharePoint sites outside of State government is
prohibitive, so it is recommended that SharePoint be available only from within the
State’s firewall, thus VPN access would be required for external users, who would also
need an AD account and the associated AD CAL.

SharePoint’s history of upgrades has not been smooth. Each new version of the product
has been a wholesale redesign without an automated migration path, and each site would
be manually duplicated after a version update."

I could not have said it better. While this is from a year and half ago, some of this has not changed. There still is not path to upgrade well. But they got the repository in SQL so that is at least better news.
WSS 2.0 was like an odd file server the way it worked.

And hey, try attaching a few 100+MB files into your MOSS and see if it stays healthy.