Our manager of data center technologies, Chris Fallin, has done a great job of designing an upgrade to our Exchange-based email platform. The design is enterprise-class (highly redundant and highly recoverable). But it also manages cost by reducing some of the unnecessary redundancy we have today. We will be implementing tools to manage email retention and e-discovery. We will also are buying tools to monitor the platform and manage the migration from Exchange 5.5 to 2007.

In total it will cost us $1.5M to upgrade our email platform. This includes a mix of Servers, OS, System software, Network upgrades and Microsoft Client Access Licenses.

Additionally, our cost to maintain that system (software and hardware maintenance and network connections) will run about $760K over the next 4 years. At that point we will need to upgrade hardware again (at least).

Given that we have 15,000 email users, I calculate our cost of email, for the next 4 years, will be $3.14 per user per month.