As we have said in a previous post Microsoft are ending the Small Business Server package.

This package was ideal, it was introduced so that small businesses with 5 to 25 users could have all the facilities that larger companies enjoyed the at a fraction of the price. This included exchange, SQL, remote desktop and various other packages and most businesses need.

It would appear that the entire reason for discontinuing an incredibly popular package is purely to increase revenue.

We recently provided a quotation for the installation of small business server in to a business. The owner decided that the time was not right due to lack of funds and he would put off the purchase into the new year.

We decided to look at exactly how much this delay would cost him. The difference was staggering, the delay would cost him over £5,000 more than if you bought now. If he decided to buy the entry level Microsoft server and use a system for his e-mail which was not exchange and to forgo SQL and it would still cost an extra £700.

Of course you can buy the entry level server from Microsoft and use the cloud to supply your e-mail system but over five years it will cost you an extra £700 if you ignore the fact that you will need to rent your software and hope that your Broadband is fast enough to cope.

To put this in some kind of context Microsoft small business server comes with everything you need, five user licences and SQL is a low cost add on. Microsoft standard server needs to have exchange, SQL and virtually everything else added to make it any more than just a simple file server. The real catch is in the licenses, each user will need a License to access files, to use exchange and to use SQL. This will cost over £300 per user and nothing is included with the original purchase, if you consider that the same user on small business server would only cost you around £60 and you can see that this soon adds up to a massive revenue increase from Microsoft by emptying your pocket for the same products.

So why is this news? And what’s the rush? That’s simple, when the current stocks run out, it’s a game over. There are only a few distributors of Microsoft Products and the one we use sold 10% of their remaining stock yesterday. If this carries on then your choices become extremely expensive in about a fortnight’s time.