How much would exchange cost for a school with 750 students and 80 staff?

[reggiep]

One of my goals for next year is to improve our email system and introduce shared calendars. At present we have an LA provided solution which is a bit clunky. for the staff and zimbra running internally for the students.
I am thinking about exchange but I'm worried that the costs will be rejected by the powers above.
Can anyone suggest what the best licensing model is?

Thanks

[kmount]

Do you have servers in place for this and seeking purely licensing costs?

Can I ask why you're not considering expanding the use of Zimbra?

[nephilim]

Zimbra would be my suggestion. Expand it to incorporate the staff, but have them on a seperate section.

[reggiep]

@kmount.
I think it is more worry than anything else on my part, I think if exchange went belly up I could probably (only probably) sort it out. If my zimbra went I might struggle.
I am currently backing up zimbra nightly to an NFS share but If the system went down I'm not sure I would know exactly how to get it going again, whereas if a windows server crashed I could restore it and reinstate backups. Don't get me wrong i do like the zimbra and all the students love it!

[reggiep]

Zimbra would be my suggestion. Expand it to incorporate the staff, but have them on a seperate section.

When you say a seperate section are you talking about different domains?

[coquet636]

We use zimbra successfully here and aren't that skilled in Linux. We are currently testing loads of Linux distro's and slowly building up skills to the level needed but i wouldn't let worry put you off. There is loads of help on forums and this on has proved invaluable.... Go for it i say and just think you may actually learn more about Linux and can only be good to add experience of it..

[kmount]

The other thing to consider is that if you do go down the Moodle route (versus Uniservity) integration with Zimbra is possible via Pre Authentication (so kids don't need to log in again) if you wanted to build it in together.

[reggiep]

@kmount
WOW you have my attention now. Moodle linking in with zimbra! When you say Pre authentication is that implying they could use the same username and password? I have a test moodle set up with LDAP intergration but I never could get zimbra linked in. Prehaps I could give it another go.

Could you maybe give a bit more info or some links.

@coquet636
I'm in a similar boat to you, i think. I have 5 linux boxes , 3 under my desk. they are running moodle, mahara, zimbra, fog and xibo. I have just follwed this forum and other linux forums and taken note of the key commands. It is amazing how quickly you can pick some stuff up, but some stuff just seems beyond me!

[kmount]

Two ways to do it reggie.

1) Set both moodle and zimbra to authenticate over LDAP so you could log into each system with the active directory username and password. (Which you probably already have working.)

2) The above, and also a link on the moodle for each user which has their username and some other variables encoded with a secret key which creates a special url that zimbra interprets and allows the login 'seamlessly'.

Preauth - Zimbra :: Wiki

[Disease]

To bo honest it should not really cost you more than a couple of hundred pounds to have exchange through your organisation, that is bearing in mind you have a schools agreement with microsoft. Under the schools agreement you get the core CAL pack which includes:

Microsoft Windows Server,
Microsoft Exchange Server,
Microsoft Systems Management Server,
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server

So the CALs themselves cost nothing, then all you need to buy is the Exchange software which is around £200 maybe less.

[Tricky_Dicky]

I've just had a quote in for Exchange prices are:
Server 2008 £89.69
Exchange 2007 £133.04
CALS:£1.27 each

This is purely what I have been sent from a supplier so you might fair better/worse and it did come with hardware so a discount might have been built in some how.

Rich

[nadeem]

You could use Microsoft Live@edu (now branded Outlook Live) for free, it's already running on the next version of exchange after 2007

I'm using it at the moment for around 1000 accounts (mostly students, but a few staff)

[gaz350]

or google apps education version is another option
Staff use docs and calendar heavily here and we are looking at moving towards using mail next!

ofcourse we dont rely on a RBC so have alot more control over out net connection choice so reliability hasn't been and issues for us!

[maf_001]

Hi,

I run a hosted exchange 2007 solution for schools, it would cost you £1100pa to host all you email accounts with my company.
You would get unlimited storage, outlook connectivity, SPAM filters, bully and sexual preditor filters, and the system intergrates with SIMS and CMIS so if you run either of them it would grab your school details from the management system.

You can manage most of the features online too, it would be cheaper than getting the licenses from MS yourself and hosting the box in-house and save you the time and effort of setting upu al the features yourself.

Just an idea if you dont mind you email been hosted.

Let me know if your interested.

Mark

[eean]

You could use Microsoft Live@edu (now branded Outlook Live) for free, it's already running on the next version of exchange after 2007

I'm using it at the moment for around 1000 accounts (mostly students, but a few staff)

Is this only webbased or can you use it with Microsoft Outlook? (not just throuigh IMAP, but like an exchange server?)