Comparisons and advocacy

You are not seeing the rest of the study--only the hardware, software, admin part.  I have quite a lot of data on students and instructors that get to some of these other things you mention. 

Our IT guys did a clean install of Proprietary 7.0 on a brand new server with a brand new OS.  We did not try to migrate anything over, which is the reason why it was simple.  We also elected to skip straight to 7.0, which saved us a lot of effort.  We also heard terrible stories of upgrading through the 6.x version.

I did the manual archive imports myself.  Our old db was going fast and it wasn't worth the trouble to save it.  More than half the faculty had already gone to the Moodle pilot server.  That was pretty much apples to apples with Moodle--brand new install there also.

Actual monthly costs are varied.  I have lots of hours/cost at the beginning and end of term and less in between.  I had yearly license costs that had to be paid in a lump sum.  I did not think averaging to yield monthly costs added anything to the story, so I elected to go with yearly costs.  But it would be simple enough to set it up that way.

Thank you for your comments.
atw