[Samba] Samba AD-DC in the cloud

[Sven Schwedas]

On 27.01.20 18:03, Gregory Sloop via samba wrote:
> Just witness Office 365. $8/mo/user for forever, or $200/user for a perpetual license. In a couple of years using 365, you've paid for the perpetual license. In ~7 years, you've spent ~$1000 more on the 365 license. But it's amazing how many people line up to pay the "small monthly fee."

The license is only perpetual if you don't need any patches for security
vulnerabilities, which is /extremely/ optimistic in the case of
Microsoft Office. :)

Version incompatibilities also tend to make it infeasible to exhaust the
full support life span of any Office version in a business setting. Pure
coincidence, I bet.

So realistically the calculation is $1.7 (best case) to $4 (if you
interact with other businesses who update more often, or are on 365) for
the 10-year-supported license vs. $8 for 365. Oh, and if any of your
employees switches to a Mac, you need to buy them a Mac license.

Microsoft also made administrating large Office deployments harder
starting around Office 2013, where using anything but the even more
expensive volume licensed editions is a massive pain in the cloud and
keeps your staff busy doing nothing but license management, which drives
up your costs even more… If a tech support employee has to spend an hour
per decade per license debugging activation issues that just made the
license $0.50 more expensive, and that's /very/ optimistic.

Microsoft is nothing but efficient at leveraging their monopoly to make
you do what they want. :)

So for us, the final estimated cost was about $6/mo/u for new offline
licenses vs $8/mo/u for Office 365… so we went with LibreOffice and
Thunderbird. I'm getting too old to deal with Microsoft's games.

> But that's outsourcing hardware.
> 
> Sven seems to want to outsource the Samba expertise. That seems a much harder solution to create. 

Cloud services give you both options, just like traditional data center
hosters do, rent the hardware vs. full managed service. But from what I
can see most companies are more interested in the latter.

> Part of the issue is that each client will be doing different things and the way it can fail or have problems is so varied. It would be hard to build in enough margin into the service to pay for the stand-by expertise of a knowledgeable Samba person. It would seem better to develop a relationship with a good consultant, and perhaps a retainer relationship.

From what I've seen in large (Fortune 500-ish) companies, bureaucracies
are often so encrusted that it's much easier to get 2*n (or 3*n) budget
in subscription expenses than n budget to hire a new employee. Employees
are somehow considered more "risky", presumably since you can't sue them
for as much money if something goes wrong…


-- 
Mit freundlichen Grüßen, / Best Regards,
Sven Schwedas, Systemadministrator
✉ sven.schwedas at tao.at | ☎ +43 680 301 7167
TAO Digital   | Teil der TAO Beratungs- & Management GmbH
Lendplatz 45  | FN 213999f/Klagenfurt, FB-Gericht Villach
A8020 Graz    | https://www.tao-digital.at

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