Sixty percent of the install cost was manpower, with hardware as the second highest cost. Tivoli was used for the Exchange distribution, but directory cleanup and turned off workstations caused some frustration. E-mail TCO was studied midway through the migration, but simplifying the desktop was the paramount issue for Dell. More training, especially of remote users, might have been helpful. Mail is business-critical, with uptime at 99.6 percent to 99.8 percent.
Maintenance takes a couple of hours per month on weekends.
TCO factored into the mail migration, but wasn't controlling. Bandwidth usage has increased 100 percent since the migration four years ago primarily owing to e-mail itself. Messages exceeding 10 MB are discouraged. Server loads typically are restricted to less than a known pain point of 1,500 clients. Sharp believes costs have been controlled by policies preventing proliferation of public folders.