SharePoint has unquestionably garnered a lot of attention from CIOs worldwide and has been called “nothing short of a phenomenon” by Toby Bell, Gartner Inc.’s research vice president. Now with advent of its new version Sharepoint 2010, the business collaboration platform, interest in Sharepoint has increased manifold.
However, most of the organizations are still struggling to calculate the TCO and ROI for the sharepoint.
Total cost of ownership can be calculated by including various costs like Software licenses, Server and SQL Server Licenses, Hardware and Infrastructure, IT staff for Planning, designing, Development, testing and Support, user training , Antivirus, 3rd party products and last but not the least indirect costs like having other MS products like Office, AD, Exchange, Live meeting, OCS, Groove, Performance point as part of your IT stack.
Calculating Software Licensing costs for Sharepoint itself is quite a tricky business. Only if your Solution Architect and stakeholders can answer the following questions with confidence, you can be comfortable calculating the license model:
- Do you understand the difference between the feature set of WSS, MOSS 2007 Standard and Enterprise Version and Internet version?
- How many users are going to use MOSS 2007 Standard/ Enterprise version? How many users will be using after 2-5 years?
- Do you want Sharepoint to act as ECM/ Collaboration tool for your public facing/ internet site?
- What is the existing content size in your organization? What is the content size expected in 2-5 years?
- Do you want to automate your business process? If yes, answer following sub questions: What is the complexity level of your business processes? Do you want to use Inforpath forms? Do you want to use 3rd party Workflow tool?
- What are the search requirements? Do you want to index more than 5,00,000 items?
- Which shared services do you want to use? Have you identified them?
- What are your integration points?
- Do you want to use Loadbalancing for your WFEs? Do you want clustering for the DBs?
- Do you want to manage Indexing in a separate server apart from Application server?
If you cant answer to one or more questions, I would suggest that you do your homework first and come up with the Logical and Physical Architecture. Calculating a ballpark figure for licenses would then be a cakewalk.
Next step would be to go the Bamboo solutions site and use the calculator. For your quick reference I am posting the following table for 3 scenarios
Option 1:100 users, 2 WFE, 2 SQL, 1 App Server
Option 2:500 users, 2 WFE, 2 SQL, 1 App Server
Option 3: 1000 users, 2 WFE, 2 SQL, 1 App Server, 1 Index Server
Sharepoint Licensing Ballpark estimate
The scenarios assumes that you would need to search more than 5,00,000 documents, all users would need Enterprise CALs, you need minimum of 2 WFEs and 2 DBs and you don’t want to have a public facing site.
Not to mention, if you are good at negotiating and if you are already into Microsoft infrastructure, you can get yourself a good bargain.
I will be talking about calculating ROI for Sharepoint in next post.
Till then have fun exploring the new features of Sharepoint 2010 and my new post on Sharepoint 2010 licensing
