E1 is a fantastic plan.  It’s the perfect, low cost step to unlock users from the limits of a P-plan.

The difference between the E1 and E2 plans is the addition of the Office web apps (the ability to edit / create office documents from your browser).  Price jump: $7

The differences between the E2 and E3 plans are the addition of Excel/Visio/Access Services and Office 2010 desktop licensing.  Price jump: $8

The value of the jump from E1 to E2 is somewhat minor.  Okay, yes, there’s some kiosk / remote work increase.  The value jump between E2 and E3 is huge.  Unfortunately, the net cost between E1 and E3 is substantial.

Adding Excel Services, by itself, is huge for companies.  It allows dash boarding, charting and other functionality that absolutely rocks in SharePoint.  I’ve built beautiful things that clients love using it.  Is that client willing to pay $15/user/month for it?  Umm.. not so sure.

But wait – it includes Office 2010 Professional!  Realistically, how many enterprise customers don’t have Office 2010 installed?  Of my client base – almost none.  If they didn’t have it, it’s a fabulous deal.  But when most companies can’t survive without Office, you know they already have it in place.  So that’s not a great feature.

What I’d love to see – take Office 2010 out of E3.  Make the jumps a little smaller ($9.5 for E1, 13.5 for E2, 17.5 for E3) and add an add-on for Office ($7).  It’s the same fees to customers who want everything, but more flexibility for Enterprise customers.

While most SaaS solutions claim to be significantly cheaper than their on-premise solutions, doing a full analysis over the life of the product might surprise you.  For commodity services such as email, it’s often safe to assume the hosted solution will be cheaper.  For specialty products, this changes significantly.  At first it may look cheaper, but be sure to look deeper.

Note that server and software support costs may not be line items if you already have the resources on hand do to it without additional costs.

When you list the costs like this, it looks like pricing would clearly be on the side of the SaaS solution.  The part that’s often missed is that you have to calculate these costs over the life of the product/service.  For most software, assume 3 to 5 years.

It’s also important to understand if your company prefers operational or capital costs and if there is a desire to include a net present value calculation on the costs.  If you’re doing an NPV, you’ll find your SaaS “savings” reducing quickly!

One of my clients was really surprised to see how much more, over 5 years, a “less expensive” SaaS product really cost.  Especially when we factored in upgrading their ADSL line to ensure connectivity (this is a mission critical system).

It has to make you wonder about economics on some solutions – and we haven’t even started to talk about risk, overall support costs and the like.  Do your research and develop a real cost model so you can be sure about your decision.

I started playing with workflows and have been getting an interesting error:

User cannot be found

Troubleshoot issues with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.

Correlation ID: 519442d6-a684-9456-4d94da871808

This happens when I do a number of things:

• Click Workflow Settings in a document library
• Try to enable SharePoint 2007 Workflows in the Site Collection Features

This is a brand new site collection.  Right out of the box with no workflows or customizations.  Interestingly enough, my own SharePoint site doesn’t have that issue – and it’s been my playground for ages.  If anything was broken, I’d expect it to be that site! Both sites have the same features activated and the same out-of-the-box workflows shown in Designer.

Some Googling of the error sadly did not provide me with an easy fix.  One person claimed that they went into SharePoint Designer and deleted some of the other language workflows and the problem went away.  More checking found this community post – where they talk about having to republish the workflows. I’m lazy and don’t want to do that.  Plus, I’d rather find what the problem really is!

My troubleshooting steps:

1. Check one of the standard workflows and ensure all users exist (there’s only the Approvers group).  Group exists, and I’m in it.
2. One by one, deactivate ALL workflows features at the site collection level.  When I did this – I stopped getting the error message when I hit “Workflows”.
3. Activate the OTHER workflow features to ensure it’s just the one package.  Still works!
4. Reactivate Workflows.  Still works!

So in the end, the problem was due to the “Workflow” feature at the site collection level not being right.  Deactivating it and reactivating it solved the issue.

You’d think we were grumpy old men. Recently I had lunch with a number of IT leaders, and  several people were bemoaning the challenges they’re having with some of their younger staff members. The complaining was ironic, as none of us are old men (yet). One thing was clear however: managing the
generation of instant gratification (gen-Yers, millenials) requires a different set of strategies.

To read more, please jump over to the GrowthPoint Group news page.

By popular demand (believe it or not) our first topic will be developing an IT budget.  With it being early in 2012, this is very timely. 

The goal of this event is to develop a budgeting template that everyone can take away and use in their own company.  We’re going to work together to develop the best practices and create a template which will be made available to all group members.

If you have an IT budget, please bring a copies along!  Of course, you’re welcome to blank out the numbers as appropriate.

No (or minimal) experience at budgeting?  This is the event for you!  Experienced budgeters – we need you at this event as well.  This is the ultimate version of peer-learning.

Date: February 22

Time: 6 PM – 8 PM (we start sharply at 6, please arrive early)

Location: Please see our Linkedin Group – You must be a member to attend.  We’re limited to 15 people, so RSVP quickly!

RSVPs are required. Attendance is limited to members of the Vancouver Technology Leaders group on Linkedin.  Want to join?  Click here.