Options For Good (Not Expensive) Office Backbone For a Small Startup

An anonymous reader writes "I recently joined a startup, we have about 10 people altogether in various roles / responsibilities, and I handle most of the system / IT responsibilities (when I'm not in my primary role, which is software development). When trying to price licenses, I'm finding Microsoft offerings require quite a bit of upfront cost, so I'm trying the alternative solutions. LibreOffice and Google Docs work fine for the most part (we also have some MS Office users); however I'm having trouble getting a good / cheap / free solution to email, contacts, calendaring and user management in general. We have some Mac users, Windows users, need desktop clients for most of these uses as well — and there doesn't seem to be a solution that satisfies these myriad combinations." (Read more, below.)

Our submitter continues: iCloud doesn't natively support non @me.com addresses (workarounds seem prone to breakage so far), Windows Live Mail doesn't support Google's CalDAV, there doesn't seem to be anything that can provide a company-wide Contacts support, etc. Ideally I can deploy a solution that has the following: Sharing calendar (or look at other people's calendar), Company-wide Contacts Address Book, Add new employee / consultants and take them offline too (in terms of user permissions, access), Clients available on Windows, OSX, possibly mobile, which support the calendaring / meeting invites / contacts list set up. Maybe I'm just out of my depths here — can Slashdot provide some direction as to what I can look at? Or is a Hosted Exchange the cheapest option? Disclaimer: I did come from a company that uses Exchange / Outlook — but the costs seem high."

Have You Accounted for User Preference?

[rsmith84]

What's the global consensus? Is everyone open to outside-the-box solutions? Or do they want the "comfort" and "warm fuzzy feeling" of Microsoft familiarity?

Google Docs

[C_Kode]

You said Google Docs works fine for the most part, but the Gmail / Calendaring portion doesn't work?

We are a startup (about 25 employees) and Google Docs works fine for Email and Calendaring.

I'm not any sort of IT/implementation guy but...

[Bourdain]

...in terms of real cost, my guess is that even if you buy whatever licenses you need/want from Microsoft for whatever software you have a need for, it won't really be that expensive compared to irritating your users (also, just use hosted exchange as $10/month/user should be a non-issue).

Before making any decisions, I'd consider asking your admittedly tiny user base what software/suites they need/want instead of just making blind purchasing decisions

Easy -- Google Apps

[blahbooboo]

Just use Google Apps. Provides email, calendaring, etc all integrated and very inexpensive.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Google for Business?

[Dr. Evil]

If you're not in the U.S., putting your data under U.S. jurisdiction *can* be an unacceptable risk.

Protections for non-citizens, non-residents are pretty slim.

Re:If you'd like to stay with Microsoft

[NewWorldDan]

Professionalism.

99% of my customers run Windows and MS Office. That's the standard business environment. By sticking with it, I have fewer problems exchanging documents with my customers. That's a business expense that has to be accounted for. If your staff or customers can't open a spreadsheet, they're wasting their time and they drag IT into it, wasting more resources, and on top of that, you have angry, frustrated customers.

Personally, I like Outlook as a mail client. However, Exchange is awful to deal with. It's just not geared towards the smaller business. I would definately recommend either outsourcing the mail server or using something less complex. What you ultimately use will probably be dictated by what type of phones your employees carry.

Re:Google for Business?

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 My company switched to Google Apps for Business about six months ago and it has been great so far, especially considering how incredibly affordable it is. Administration is easy, tons of additional services you can choose from, and did I mention how affordable it is? Plus, most users are already very familiar and comfortable with Gmail, and Google even has a neat tool that will migrate existing Outlook .pst's (email, contacts, even calendars) to a user's new Gmail account.