Gartner Web Development, LLC

Gartner Web Development fully supports the latest and greatest Microsoft Products. In fact, as a registered MS partner, we have access to a large volume of software including Servers (Small Business Server 2003, MSSQL Server, Web Servers, etc.) and workstations (XP Professional, Vista, etc.). We use Microsoft in house for 90% of our day to day operations with around $500.00 - $600.00 in operating system and office suite applications for marketing, email management, etc. per desktop. Microsoft also offers a pretty nice collaboration suite called Office 2007. The tools that are built in to it are integrated even better when used with Exchange Server and/or in conjunction with SharePoint Services. It’s a very scalable and flexible set up, but that’s the not within the scope of this article so I’ll save it for another time.Since I’m not trying to get you to replace your desktop environment with Open Source operating systems, we’re going to focus on proprietary network service software packages that are commonly used and integrate them with some of their Open Source counterparts.
Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 R2 supports 75 users or devices.[1] The majority of our customer base falls within this realm.

In this illustration, we’ll have the administrative office of a small industrial manufacturer with 15 users 10 workstations and 8 printers. They work together transparently with common phone and email directories, calendars and schedules visible to all but editable by few! They even use the markup feature in Word to display other peoples input on documents emailed to one another, or accessed over special types of network shares. Data that is vital to the companies day to day functioning is stored in a centralized location to facilitate a consistent and verifiable backup that is brought off site every night. Storage needs will be discussed a bit later when we talk about the sometimes significant differences between open source and proprietary software when it comes to hardware requirements.

Software List
Small Business Server 2003 with licenses for 10 users. This a typical installation costs around $1500.00 just for the software:

• Domain Controller to facilitate secure network resource access (individual user login)
• Exchange Server for incoming and outgoing email and collaboration tools. We’ll add Open Source spam & anti-virus protection a bit later.
• Web Server with decent and secure remote access for email and other network resources
• Centralized printer management
• Very specific & centralized control over user permissions