I have a customer in the social sector. He owns multiple homes for young people who cannot live with their parents for various reasons. They are neither a charity or a non-profit organisation. Nevertheless budget is extremely tight! They run on old software and hardware and I need to create a migration plan for them.
This is their set-up:
- The core team running the business consists of about 10 people.
- Every member of the core team has a personal computer account on a dedicated computer.
- There are about 13 homes in different cities. Every home is cared for by a home team. Each home team consists of 1-2 supervisors and about 8 therapists.
- Home team supervisors have personal computer accounts and dedicated computers.
- Home team therapists shared a single computer account and computer per team. They share a single mailbox per home to send and receive emails. (home1@..., home2@..., etc.)
Files are currently saved in Dropbox and shared amongst the core team members and the home team members.
This is the plan for the core team:
- Every member gets an Office 365 Business Premium subscription.
- Every member gets a personal email address.
- Every member gets access to the shared mailboxes.
- Every member gets the Office desktop apps installed on their computer.
The costs would be 10 members × 10.50 € p.m. = 105 € p.m.
This is plan for the home team supervisors:
- Every supervisor gets an Office 365 Business Premium subscription.
- Every supervisor gets a personal email address.
- Every supervisor gets access to the shared mailboxe of his home.
- Every supervisor gets the Office desktop apps installed on their computer.
The costs would be 20 supervisors × 10.50 € p.m. ≈ 210 € p.m.
This seems solid and I don't think there are much better alternatives. (I wouldn't mind suggestions for improvement, though). That way my customer can also ditch Dropbox and use OneDrive.
The problem is with the therapists. They need to put their times into the system at the end of the day, write maybe 1-2 reports and write/send one or two emails. They share one computer, account and mailbox. (Setting them up with them personal accounts is needless and out of the question for management reasons). So getting them the Office 365 BP subscription for 104 therapists × 10.50 € p.m. = 1092 € per month is absolutely out of the question. First of all, they do not want to manage 104 therapists and all the changes in staff. Secondly, they need office maybe 30 minutes each day and paying 1000 bucks for that is simply not in the budget.
An alternative would be to buy Office 2016 standalone for the shared home team computers. That way every therapist could access Word and Excel for a one-off payment of 8 computers × 590 € = 4720 €. But then my customer would still need to license every therapist with an Exchange Online Plan 1 license. That would be 104 therapists × 3.40 € p.m. = 353.60 € per month. But they don't have access to sharepoint and would all have to get a personal email addresses, which will have to be managed somehow. That is overkill and my customer will definitely not do this.
It's so crazy, I can't think of any way to have 104 therapists just logon as one of the eight shared home team accounts/mailboxes without having to administer every single one of them. Microsoft's licensing options are basically preventing me from implementing an easy solution here, unless I overlooked something. But as far as I know, we can't have 8 therapists share a business premium account. Honestly, I wouldn't give a **bleeping** **bleep** about that and just tell my customer to do it. I have zero respect for the licensing rules Microsoft established here, but I don't want to get my customer and myself into legal trouble.
Right now I am on the verge of recommending them a dedicated server with Open-Xchange and Nextcloud and have them all use Thunderbird and Office 365 Business (only Word and Excel) for their 10 core team members and 20 supervisors.
Suggestions are welcome.
