Microsoft Exchange Online - Business Case Calculator

This calculator helps you to compare the estimated cost of on-premise Exchange hosting with the Microsoft Exchange Online solution. The on-premise costs include average list prices for hardware, software, maintenance, and systems administration.

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How to use the calculator

The calculator uses a 5 year term to reflect the usual cycle of hardware replacement and upgrades to new software versions.

It includes the costs of hardware, licences, upgrades, patching, backups, disaster recovery, virus and spam filtering, and labour (hassles that are removed in the Online offering).

Each business is different so your actual costs may vary a little depending on your unique situation, age of infrastructure and software, the level of hardware backup and redundancy, and the cost of your systems administration.

Start by entering the number of mailboxes you currently use and the calculator will do the rest. You can enter your own values for any of these costs if you want to override the estimate.

For the software licences we have assumed one full licence refresh in the 5 years. Costs are list prices for Exchange and Windows Server 2008 (including Client Access Licenses). We have based the costs on Exchange Enterprise as the Online offering has enterprise features built-in.

The high cost of outages is not covered by the calculator. Online Services has an SLA of 99.9% uptime, however we can't begin to estimate the reliability of your current on-premise set up - or how critical email is to you if it is unavailable. The cost of outages was a big reason why we switched.

And of course there are other benefits such as just not worrying about email at all anymore, and being able to redeploy the hardware for other things, spending time on value add tasks, etc.

All these factors are worth considering as you weigh up the benefits of Online Services.