> It seems that these last few years, it has been getting more difficult

> to battle the budget team to maintain our Listserv license -

> particularly with the proliferation of social media and related

> services.



In one of our offices, we buy a certain service from a company whose name I will not mention. Their prices are absolutely outrageous - I am talking ten times the market price. In our other offices, we buy a similar service at normal market prices. The rip-off service is costing us 5+ times more than most people pay for LISTSERV, so of course we decided to switch to a cheaper service... About 1-2 years ago :) Since then, we have renewed the rip-off service every time, contrary to our own decision, for two reasons.



First, the switchover requires a non-negligible amount of work. There will be people to train and transition plans to be made and a test phase, then a switchover phase and a verification phase. This is time that will not be available for other projects. The ROI, while solid, will not be immediate because it will cost more to transition than we will save during the first year. From a budget standpoint, this increases costs for the current year. It is an investment that does not pay off until year 2.



Second, any manager announcing this plan will immediately face a barrage of phone calls and "on-site visits" from concerned colleagues who will stress how important the service is to their work, even though they only use it every few days and, above all, they will say that they simply do not have the time to learn a replacement service, even if it is cheaper. The manager can immediately scratch a couple weeks from his or her agenda on account of this and the previous point, and will operate with negative water cooler karma for the rest of the year.



When you consider this, it isn't such a clean-cut scenario any longer. If you happened to have surplus manpower, people who could be migrating the service instead of twiddling their thumbs... That would be another story. And maybe you could arrange to do it over, say, the Christmas holidays, and most people would be presented with the fait accompli once they returned from vacation. But that combination of idle manpower and fortuitous timing is not present right now, and has not been for a long time. There are other things that one can save the same amount of money on, and that would go a lot more smoothly.



This was an extreme example though - a scenario where the only reason not to migrate is that it is a painful process. There is no loss of service once the users have been retrained.



With a service like LISTSERV, or Exchange, or anything related to e-mail, it is at best controversial that you could simply pull the plug and transition everything to Facebook in an unspecified manner and everything would be perfect. I think even the people who make these claims know that they are not true. They just want to cut the softest fruit and they see LISTSERV and think, "Hey, I can come up with at least 2-3 reasons to cut that thing from the budget! Let's do it, it should be easy!" They probably don't realize that the soft fruit has layers of steel spikes beneath the surface. Thousands of people will be angry when you tell them they have to use Facebook instead of e-mail.



Sometimes what happens is that department-size LISTSERV licenses start mushrooming everywhere in the organization. The overall cost is higher but sometimes it is one specific budget that has to be reduced while there is still money in others.



We have also started offering a service where a group of academic list owners can get together and we'll host their lists for them at a preferential rate (based on the number of lists), and to some extent they can be billed to different organizational departments (not 2,651 departments billed $4.93 each though), even if they are at different universities. The fixed fee for the service is $2,750/year for unlimited number of lists on LISTSERV HPO running on an X5690 virtual server. If there are enough lists the per-list price can become low enough that most people can easily slip it somewhere into their budget. We do also charge our standard per-delivery fee that may look a little scary if you check the rates on our web site, but we can discount significantly for discussion lists because they create a smooth load curve. Newsletters are a nightmare - everyone wants to send their newsletters at exactly the same time and you have to have a lot of spare horsepower that only comes into play a few hours a week. And then the links need to be tracked and the customers open up the graphical reporting page and starts hitting refresh every 5 seconds to see how readers are responding to the newsletter :)



We make more money selling hosting or department licenses than we do selling one central license, but what did Pascal say again, budgeting has its reasons that defy reason? :) Anyway, this is just to say that there are other solutions than a large central server, although in my opinion this remains the best solution for most single-campus universities. The reason the hosting service is so cheap compared to the license is that the per-message fee kicks in if you have any volume, which universities do. You are unlikely to pay less than $10,000/year even for a smaller university, but then that's just $10-20/list. Almost everyone can slip that into the budget. Ironically the challenge is usually invoicing. "Why don't you just send us one invoice per list? It is simpler for us to keep track of and the administrative work is no bother at all since we require you to log in to our portal and input all your invoices by hand, and when you've done that we'll release the funds inside the portal and you have to log in and manually request payment, one list at a time - that would be perfect! Don't worry, the portal comes with a 57-page Getting Started manual, so it should take you no more than 2 work days to learn how to use it!" :(



  Eric



############################

To unsubscribe from the LSTSRV-L list:
write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
or click the following link:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/scripts/wa-PEACH.exe?SUBED1=LSTSRV-L&A=1