My company has been using old Office 2000 and is in the process of a major IT overhaul that includes migrating a local server to a hosted solution, new personal hardware/workstations, and software upgrades.

We do not have a resident IT guy but are working to contract with a technology solutions company but in the interim someone else at the company is seeking my advice on the below topics.

We have upgraded a few computers to Office 2007 and purchased a few computers to replace dinosaurs. We are also a franchise based company where we have a dozen corporately owned offices and 100+ franchise locations.

My question is two fold:
1) We would like to get all of our corporate staff/employees on updated Office 2007 software. We have been purchasing individual end user licenses for anywhere between $250-$300. Since we are looking to roll out at least a dozen more copies, what would the best way to purchase these be? Most users need Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and OUtlook. We would also like to offer a volume pricing discount to our franchise units which then could be in upwards to 100+ copies. Is there volume pricing on this stuff? Who do we go to? Direct or reseller?

2) Pretty much same thing for replacing ancient workstations. Is it better to lease? Anyone had experiences with leasing vs purchasing PC's? I know "it depends" but throw some pros and cons on the board.

Any help would be appreciated.

11/24/2009 10:01:20 PM

license?

11/24/2009 10:18:53 PM

1 - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/suites/HA101080191033.aspx

11/24/2009 10:37:16 PM

^Yep. You just need to call a Microsoft rep about volume licensing, and they can work with you to find a program to suit your needs.

Quote :

"2) Pretty much same thing for replacing ancient workstations. Is it better to lease? Anyone had experiences with leasing vs purchasing PC's? I know "it depends" but throw some pros and cons on the board. "

Since you said you don't have a resident IT guy, leasing is a VERY attractive option. You should really contact a rep at Dell or HP about it. I have nothing but good experiences from working with Dell's Premiere staff.

11/25/2009 12:02:26 AM

if you end up doing legwork on this, do you mind sharing what you find out from a pricing standpoint with the volume licensing?

11/25/2009 8:59:52 AM

I'm not a fan of leasing, since you can't the same discounts you can buying, but I don't know how much cash your company has on hand. Does any of this hardware need to be mobile (laptops)? If not, with a concurrent license model I would keep the existing machines you have now and invest the money in a virtual back end. I'd use something like xenapp to present applications to people as they needed it and whatever hypervisor you wanted to host the OSes. The benefits of going this route are numerous:
-Fault tolerant desktops for those that need it
-More secure and easily backed up storage
-Easier IT management (especially with linked clone VMs)
-Pooled computing resources that can be delivered on demand rather than segregated at time of purchase into each box you buy
-You remove the need to upgrade end user hardware as it just becomes a viewer

I could go on about this for days. I've rolled out a few setups like this and architect systems like this (or way more advanced) every single day. If you inked any deals, send me a PM.

11/25/2009 9:09:36 AM

^ not a bad model for desktop-only environments as long as you never hit the point where all of the licenses are used up and someone can't open an office product.

11/25/2009 9:12:05 AM

^^^except you just completely ignored the fact that they have no IT staff. Virtualization is great as long as there's someone like yourself there to keep it up and running smoothly.

And have you ever done leasing? The discounts you get can very easily beat purchasing, even in a virtualization environment. There's a reason that thousands of institutions do it, strictly because it ends up better for their bottom line.

11/25/2009 10:21:17 AM

Yeah, I did leasing at the first company I worked at and transitioned from leasing to purchasing at another company I contracted with. It really depends on your lease length, the needs of your users (in terms of updating their hardware), and the volume of computers. It worked great for my first company as they had a lot of developers and thus needed to move along with the tech curve. At the second, they were just too small a company and since all but 3 of their computers were only used for basic word processing, email, and browsing the 18month upgrade interval was absurd and caused more harm than good in transitioning their data.

They don't have an in-house IT guy, it sounds like they contract with someone. For mostly persistant VMs, there's no more daily work than physical machines, in fact there is less. There are also self service tools like vmware's lab manager that can be used to offset the administration load.

11/25/2009 11:58:04 AM

We did a 3 year lease on 300+ Dell SX280s. Lease ran out about a year ago and now we got an extended warranty from Partstock that covers another 3 years because we had a lot of the units dropping motherboards from blown capacitors. HDDs also fry in those when its dirty and not getting enough airflow.

Only upgrade we are doing to these units is doubling the RAM from 512MB to 1GB. It teacher units, so they are mainly surfing, doing mail, and a few are hooked to their Smartboards. We really liked leasing but places like Partstock sell offlease units with a 3 year warranty, so you can get Dell stuff for $cheap and have it covered for 3 years at no extra charge.

11/25/2009 5:35:19 PM

you spelled a title word wrong, i do not know how to spell it either but i know that looks wrong

11/25/2009 11:59:13 PM

no s in the beginning

[Edited on November 27, 2009 at 11:13 AM. Reason : lol]

11/27/2009 11:10:00 AM

Were still researching best prices for MSFT.

Just finished migrating to a hosted server and all terminals are accessing via virtualization. Has been great so far.

12/10/2009 8:47:19 PM

gg. nice to hear successful modernization stories

12/10/2009 8:49:43 PM