I help run three businesses, and we use two Exchange servers (Windows SBS) for basic email and file sharing. These seem to take up a lot of admin time when contrasted with the linux file server we have, which basically "just works". Is this because I'm inefficient, or because Windows SBS inherently requires a lot of admin time?
I'd estimate I spend two man-weeks per year, per server to admin these boxes, and we have fairly minimal requirements - around 20 staff in total. Based only on the time I spend, the 20 workers, and the two servers, is this 160 man hours per annum a reasonable amount of time?
I do all the admin such as adding and removing maybe 4 users per year, emptying out log files clogging the server, installing updates, resetting passwords when needed, setting up spf/dkim/transport, spam filtering etc rules. 90% of it is down to email/exchange admin.
A data point.
I manage about 24 Exchange servers for customers now, and spend about 2 hours per month on mail-related issues which may include SSL certificates, user management, managing the Barracuda cloud spam filtering and disk space/backup maintenance.
Exchange is pretty hands-off for me post-install, however, the ramp up to installation/deployment is very time consuming.
These are all simple single-server Exchange environments with 250 users or less.