RE: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Costs of RM vs "other" options - advo cating a case for open source?

Greetings All A slightly different perspective here from someone using RM (and have for 3.5 years). I/We are not happy. When we had a small system (100 stations), things were not too bad, some useful tools, packaged nicely. Bought RM supplied hardware, few problems. Things are different now. Slightly larger network (350 stations) and Connect struggles. RM hardware has gone down in quality and up in price in comparison to better products. (Approx 20 to 30% more expensive per workstation). Licensing, £99.00 per station, this has already been discussed, for what? Annual support costs, just under £3000 for 4 servers. Quality of support? A typical example, we pay for support so if we get a problem which may not be obvious, we sometimes call. On this occasion, we called on a Thursday at 3pm with a problem. Knowing the quality of support, we decided to investigate and got 90% through the problem by home time. Finished the job off on Friday. Got a call the following Thursday with the stuff we had figured out on the first Thursday (one week from the experts, 2 hours from the locals). Hardware support, either sort it out yourself or don't buy new equipment until it has been on the market for at least three months. You want to use a proxy, exchange or print server sir? That will be £1800 for the RM modified operating system for each of them or they won't work with the connect system (Oh yes they do!!) and we will charge you to commission the boxes. Don't forget the increased annual support of about £500 per box. RM's solution, Connect 3, Windows 2k with XP desktop. Dress up the tools already there and charge us about £20,000 (yes, thousand) for the cheap route upgrade. Our reaction, well you guess. We have looked at Linux/Open source but it is hard to put a case that senior management are happy with. On the salary they pay, it is hard to get/keep good technical support. Our solution, migrate to the commercially available stuff (MS, boo hiss I hear from you all) for peanuts (got campus agreement which we pay anyway) and pay less than £3000 per year for 14 servers (manage more than one site, with help). We even get to choose how we want to migrate as opposed to having it dictated to us. Hope this answers the cost questions. P.s. We are also saddled with Sims software, Haven't quite worked out whether it is supposed to be windows or dos based or borland or sql or whatever, nor have they. Peter

===== Original Message From Matt Johnson ===== An RM story...

We went RM big style here (before I arrived - justify, justify).

We get 'support' (!) from county. If I ring RM, they say 'erm, no, you're in Herts, we cannot help you'. So I ring Herts (well I've rung them twice in two years). Hmm.

A managed service from RM is a _lot_ of money. I listened to them at BETT, and they were talking £10,000 to £18,000 - but that was for a fully managed service. I don't know exactly what you get for that, but I'd want to be a damn happy ICT co-ordinator _all_ year round.

RM value?...

£99 for a Community Connect licence. *choke* Of course, almost the same again for Office and Publisher licences. *choke*

Per box. *choke*

I'm not going to go into the 'super value' that is 'WindowBox'. Luckily, we _didn't_ go that way before I arrived. Check out the cost of that stuff. Unbelievable. And, RM assure me that we need it, and tried to make me justify how we covered the curriculum without it - in a meeting, in front of my boss! Not very proffesional now was it. I replied by asking them to justify us spending our money on it, as it was them who wanted our money, not us who wanted there product. Waffle waffle. We said "No, thanks".

The community connect licence includes a client access licence for NT, but an NT client access licence isn't anything like £99 for education (is it £11? I think).

Putting in 20 boxes? You do the maths on the licences - then, erm, *choke*. Have RM heard of educational rates?

Even if folks insist on Windows for a desktop (with a linux file server), then you can grab a Windows 98 licence from your LEA (probably) for maybe £30? (I think? check it out), and put StarOffice 6 on in a month or so (when it comes out) for £150 _site_ licence. Now that sort of money, is at least 'reasonable' on £500 of hardware. At least the proportions (software:hardware) are not completely insane.

---

Incidently, the RM stand at BETT mentioned that one of the _big_ advantages of going to XP with there new Connect 3, was the much more reasonable log on times. I pointed out that that clearly implied that the current system they've been selling has unreasonable log on times. "Well," the man explained, "sometimes logons could be slow under certain conditions." I pointed out that those certain conditions were, erm, "the use of, erm, 'TOPICS'!" He half smiled, and nodded. I continued, "We did away with topics two years ago, and we have had 'reasonable' logons ever since."

So what other benefits would it give? We never really got round to that.

I'm not anti-RM. The hardware is reliable, and at a reasonable cost. The boxes turn up on time, and it's good kit. But, I don't feel I need to say more about what to avoid.

-- Matt

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