how to estimate the TCO of open source implementations

Question

I mean, this is Sakai, the open source project of a learning management system. But, really I'm clueless trying to estimate the hidden costs in one implementation project (on the technology side, not the pedagogy-stuff) in a small-medium scale institution.

• Deployment (1 engineer two or three months, with experience in JEE)
• Customisation (1 engineer, 1 designer two or three months also)
• Support (1 guy)
• One server reasonably good with 4, 8 or 16 GB in RAM. It will host the application server, the database server, and da da! ?
• ???

can somebody experienced, give me advice in how to estimate the TCO in open source implementations like this? In fact, it could be Moodle, and in that case I would be lost too!

Yep, is not really a question of programming, but I think that this is one proper place to ask.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I work on support staff for a large uni that uses Blackboard. All the support people are students working part time, so salary can be pretty low per hour. You'll want to have someone on permanent staff as an administrator, who could also be the developer/deployment guy. Perhaps only part time if your institution is small enough, but someone who knows the ins and outs of the system will be handy when (not if) things go wrong. (Maybe you could combine them with the support role?) On that note, you'll probably want a seperate server for backups and recovery, at the least something that will backup data.

If your school is small enough, maybe one person could handle the admin/support/dev roles by themselves (my roles are both support and developent and I often wish I had admin priveleges). You could probably talk to your IT department on how much servers are going for these days, I'm not sure there or on competitive salary ranges (but students are cheap.) Hope that helps some.

Answer 2

Sakai Deployments lists details of some Sakai deployments, but be careful to check the last updated date as I would look a deployment data that has been updated in the last year.