Recipe for Team Server in a small business

If you have a small company, say 6 to 30 people, you will look at team server and think, cool…But what does it cost.

Well, there are a number of costs, some hidden that you will need to pay. The bad news is that the VS2005 Team Editions are expensive, really expensive.

The good news is that you don’t need them. If you have Visual Studio 2005 Standard or Professional you can install Team Explorer and away you go. So, what other costs are there:

Recipe:

1 * Team Foundation server @ £2500

10 * CAL (Client Access Licence) @ £300 (which is £3000)

1 * Server @ [whatever you can get away with] £500 ish.

All this will bring the price up to around £6000 for 10 users and £12000 for 30.

What you get:

• Full bug, issue, risk and task management for your entire business
• Process management on all these items
• Document management per project
• Source Control
• Reporting on project metrics
• Integration of all of these things into ONE system that you can cross link.

Not bad for £6000.

Do you think that this is worth it for your company?

If you want to go down the full route you will need for for out a further £7500 per developer, architect and tester or £14000 for a user that has more than one of these roles. This changes the project from manageable to silly money and only the big companies will be able to cope with this.

note: if you only have 5 people that you want to use Team Foundation Server then you can get the whole lot for the price of an MSDN Universal licence (£2000) or Join the Empower program and get 2 years MSDN universal for £260 per year.

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