SIMS Just became super expensive :S. help??

[greenfieldsupport]

Weve just recieved an e-mail saying that sims will no longer run on the free SQL server. and we have to upgrade to SQL server 2005. This means we have to pay £150 for a server license then £15.50 for each CAL.

 

Not only that, but it seems it wont run without office 2003 anymore.

 

That means we now have to pay for office 2007 licenses, as nowhere sells office 2003. these are about £35 each.

 

In short, its going to cost us about £10000... To use software, WERE ALREADY USEING!!??!

 

Were in the process of explaining why we need £10000 for no actual upgrade at all.

 

What are the other schools doing about this???

 

Im thinking capita have an agreement with MS where they get a 20% cut or something, because openoffice will handel all the XML that SIMS needs!

 

 

*is sad*

[Guest metalmonkey]

SQL 2005 Express is free as long as your SQL DB is less than 4gb.

 

It also allows unlimited connections. So you might find you'll be ok.

 

But it does limit the CPU untilisation to just 1 CPU and 1GB of Ram (PC's with more than this will work ok, but SQL will only use 1gb ram and 1 cpu)

[localzuk]

It shouldn't cost you anything near that price.

 

Office licenses are ~£14 each, and we were paying around £1 each I believe for SQL CALS (when we didn't use SQL) and £30 for the server license.

 

This is under a MS School agreement. Do you not have one? It may be time to look into it.

[Disease]

Use SQL Express and it will run on 2003, the problems are related to 2007 not 3.

[russdev]

right the sql thing is can use the free version but it got lot of clients it will start to become no use as it slows down or runs out of space.

 

You have a while before major changes but then your sims support should of told you this 3 months ago.

 

So you could do budget planning for it.

 

Russ

[CyberNerd]

Im thinking capita have an agreement with MS where they get a 20% cut or something, because openoffice will handel all the XML that SIMS needs!

 

There an MS partner company, what do you expect. The job of MS partners is to sell MS stuff.

[greenfieldsupport]

As our school could never guarentee the available funds for a school agreement, we have to buy everything per machine.

 

also can you define what you mean by "lots of clients"

 

would 30-40 teachers usings sims be classed as lots of clients, my guess is we will have at most 30 on at the busyest times, normally about 10, if that.

 

However they were looking into electronic registration and such like, guess they will have to abandon that idea.

 

Also were waiting to find out whats happening because it looks like our county is to become centralised... and all the machines / software bought from a central local etc.

[MkII]

It shouldn't cost you anything near that price.

 

Office licenses are ~£14 each, and we were paying around £1 each I believe for SQL CALS (when we didn't use SQL) and £30 for the server license.

 

This is under a MS School agreement. Do you not have one? It may be time to look into it.

 

They cost us £30 under select - how come so cheap?

 

Schools agreement - you mean that one where you pay an annual site licence for the whole school at some ridiculously inflated price??

[greenfieldsupport]

Lol, i agree with mark

[zag]

You don't have to use sims remember there are other options.

[TechMonkey]

Also compare the number of clients needing SQL client licenses with the cost of a Processor license. With a Processor licencse you can pay for just the server and that is all done, plus you are covered for more clients as you add them. May bring the cost down.

[localzuk]

I've just double checked and the price we paid for SQL CALS/server was £42 for the server license and £2.87 per CAL through the MS Schools Agreement.

 

Why do you say it is over priced? We pay ~£4200 for 160 computers with Windows, Office, Encarta, 5 2003 servers and 1 ISA server. That seems a good price to me, and it saves a lot of hassle.

[greenfieldsupport]

My school goveners cannot agree that we will have £4000 to give to microsoft every year.

 

we normally give them about £800 ??

some years we give them £0

This year we have to give them about £8000 (thanks for that information about the 1 processor license techmonkey)

but that will do us for another 6 years till either:

a. office 2007 needs replacing because sims says so.

or b. sims needs a new version of SQL.

 

either way the sum total never comes near £4000 each year if you spread it out. and we have 250 machines.

we only have 3 windows 2003 servers, and were working towards having less .

 

Can i ask why you need 5 windows 2003 servers?

[localzuk]

We have a SIMS server, a file server/print server/application server, an ISA server, our master domain controller/dns server/dhcp server/staff file server, and one which does all my bits and pieces (ie. testing new Windows bits and pieces, testing SMS server + software packaging + hosting my linux VMs). We also have a 2003 Storage server (but that has its own license) which serves as our backup server.

 

The likelyhood will be that we will get another server too over the next year to make use of our old machines as thin clients.

 

Also, we will be getting some new servers to act as redundant servers for our new phone system. For 250 machines I would expect you to have around 6 or so. You shouldn't be reducing the number down that you have as this removes redundancy?

[DMcCoy]

My school goveners cannot agree that we will have £4000 to give to microsoft every year.

 

we normally give them about £800 ??

some years we give them £0

This year we have to give them about £8000 (thanks for that information about the 1 processor license techmonkey)

but that will do us for another 6 years till either:

a. office 2007 needs replacing because sims says so.

or b. sims needs a new version of SQL.

 

either way the sum total never comes near £4000 each year if you spread it out. and we have 250 machines.

we only have 3 windows 2003 servers, and were working towards having less .

 

Can i ask why you need 5 windows 2003 servers?

 

 

I Spend 10-12k on Schools Agreement every year.

 

This get me:

370 Windows Upgrade / Office / Server CAL / Exchange CAL

8 Enterprise Server 2003 (using the option to use 4 VMs from a license to run 20 VMs).

4 SQL Processor licenses

2 ISA

2 Exchange Enterprise

 

As a bonus I get Windows PE and Corp error reporting (not that useful - but ok) and vista MAK keys and KMS server.

 

 

Is it really that much to spend for a whole year for all the MS software for 370 machines, 20 server and 1100 users? Half of one teachers salary?

 

I think it isn't and it saves me an awful lot of time. I have 100 extra clients going in this summer, and have another 8 months before I have to license them again.

[greenfieldsupport]

We have more servers, just not windows server 2003 ones,

 

were porting more stuff over to linux these days...

 

I agree that 10K is not much to spend on that much software...

but when your whole IT budget is 10K a year...

and out of that we have to get toner + paper

 

i.e. we get 5K to spend...

 

spending 10k on software.. really... just isnt going to happen!! lol

 

we can hardly afford to replace machines....

 

hence,, why were porting more and more over to linux these days

[greenfieldsupport]

oh, and i ment we have 4 win 2003... not 3,

 

silly 3 key being next to the 4, how stupid is that.

[kylewilliamson]

If you buy 2007 under select, iirc you get downgrade rights

[MkII]

I've just double checked and the price we paid for SQL CALS/server was £42 for the server license and £2.87 per CAL through the MS Schools Agreement.

 

Why do you say it is over priced? We pay ~£4200 for 160 computers with Windows, Office, Encarta, 5 2003 servers and 1 ISA server. That seems a good price to me, and it saves a lot of hassle.

 

We have 300 PCs ~ at your pricing I expect our annual MS Schools Agreement to be in the region of £8k.

 

This year we need to buy the odd O/S licence and a few office licences for about $7k. We would expect those to last a few years before we spend as much again. New PCs come with licences that we can downgrade using our select licences, so no cost there.

 

No way is the SA economical for us. We also have a measly budget of £15K this year all in.

 

If you have a big budget and can constantly afford a lot of new machines; and can upgrade hardware to run Vista etc etc... then I think it may be worthwhile.

[Oops_my_bad]

Anyone know how you can find out the size of the SIMS database if you're using the SQL 2000 desktop engine? Need to know if it's worth getting the SQL 2005 or if the SQL express will cope for when we have to do the upgrade.

[Norphy]

You could download the SQL Management Studio Express program, you can use that to find out the size of a database and it will work with SQL 2000 and MSDE.

[Oops_my_bad]

thanks Norphy :oops:

[ajbritton]

Anyone know how you can find out the size of the SIMS database if you're using the SQL 2000 desktop engine? Need to know if it's worth getting the SQL 2005 or if the SQL express will cope for when we have to do the upgrade.

 

Look for SIMS.MDF. It's usually under MSSQL$SIMS\Data

[enjay]

Anyone know how you can find out the size of the SIMS database if you're using the SQL 2000 desktop engine? Need to know if it's worth getting the SQL 2005 or if the SQL express will cope for when we have to do the upgrade.

Express will be fine - I can't remember what the db size limit is in MSDE, but I know there is one and that it's smaller than Express' 4GB so if your db is fine in MSDE it will be fine in Express.

[Mr_T]

Been said before but the Microsoft Software we use in schools should be free as we are training the next generation of MS office users for them. I would love to send Microsoft packing especially after my recent brush with BSA. Big things are happening in the opensource world and if SIMS sort out integration with open office maybe soon it will be an option.