Hi, A friend is purchasing an existing business (in events & publishing) with 25 employees. He is taking the entire department and moving to a new office. I am trying to work out how much IT support/budgets per person/what he can do without to save money and other needs he might have to help him out. He wants to run on a budget initially. The systems they currently have are 19 PCs/Laptops, 6 Apple Macs, 1 xServe, 1 File Server, Colour Printers, Copiers, Exchange Email, Blackberrys, VPN, general network stuff (tape drives, ups, switches, Active Directory etc) running XP, OSX, Adobe Indesign, Photoshop etc, Font management utils, Quark (inc licensing server), MS Office, Phone and Voicemail, multiple databases – CRM databases, booking system, event management database. All systems are shared with other departments as well.
He initially wanted me to do the IT support 3 days a week which I will decline but wanted to help him plan it a bit and help with budgeting as a favour. Can anyone help with the questions below:
1. How many staff and how many days a week/month would people have?
2. What sort of per person per year budget would people aim to have for a company to run reliably and well?
3. Is outsourcing the support to an external company a good idea?
4. He has been offered 2 very basic HP servers (ML115s) to run everything from as he likely wont have a server room and can leave these in the corner along with a MacPro to replace the xServe. They currently utilise rack mounted servers with redundant power, Raid, 2 net cards etc). Running everything on 2 ML115s worries me but it is designed as a small business server. Would people run these as the AD controller and FPS server????
5. Anything I should be careful of? He wants to run on as limited budget as possible in the 1st year.
Thanks for any advice, as Im declining the role, I still wanted to make sure he looks to get the right equipment and support.