Microsoft To Pay The University Of Nebraska To Switch To Office 365 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft To Pay The University Of Nebraska To Switch To Office 365

maximumpc.com

21 pointsrbanffy28 comments

"cover the costs of consulting and integration services for migrating from the legacy Lotus Notes to Office 365 for email and calendar."

$250,000 to go from their 15 year old software. We're talking about a migration here, not just a clean cut. I kind of doubt that $250k is going to cut it. Especially when you consider the additional hardware that they will have to invest in. (Assuming that if they are running 15 year old software, they likely aren't on most recent windows operating system--xp most likely. Of course, Office 365 min requirement is vista sp2 or better) I would have gone with google. Then all you need is a decent web browser and you're not even locked into to the vendors web browser either -- firefox or opera certainly suffice.

You don't have to use Internet Explorer with Office 365. Safari and Firefox both work on the desktop for Exchange, SharePoint, and Office Web Apps. You can also use Mobile Safari and Mobile IE.

Well, yes and no, they do work on these other browsers, but most of the document features are disabled in Sharepoint/Office Web Apps are disabled outside of IE, at least as of 10 months ago when we migrated this stuff in.

Having done this migration in the IT department at the university I worked for, I can say you are quite right that $250k will likely not cut it.

However, the main reason many universities did not go with Google was because they failed to meet 508 Accessibility guidelines. Some universities got around this limitation, and Google eventually pulled its collective head out of its ass, but for quite a long time they simply refused to do accessibility compliance.

As a former student/staff I can say anything is better than Lotus Notes. But, I am surprised Microsoft is going to pay the University to use it, especially with the Jeff Raikes support/connection.

For what it's worth, I've heard it with one or two degrees of separation that Jeff's contribution to the (now) Raikes School was completely isolated from their decision to go with Microsoft for their email a year or two ago. Besides, he'd already retired and acts most as a philanthropist.

They are not paying the University, they are offering a discount of $250,000 via incentives. Any competitor could have lowered their price using incentives, they choose not to.

The University still has to pay annually for the service which will amount to a revenue positive (not sure about profit) for MSFT.

(I'd rather have google's service, but the title of this article is ridiculously misleading.)

What remaining products does MS still compete on? Buying users, suing competitors, it's getting a bit frustrating. I wish MS would win the old fashioned way: make a great product.

For what it's worth, Office Live is actually pretty decent. Not as good as Google Docs yet, but the capability's definitely there.

(But I agree.)

Xbox 360 and the related services are great. Xbox Live is the industry standard.

What recent MS products have you used that you hate so much? I use bing and windows phone and just love them.

That's not my point. I'm just talking about how MS seems to have increased their desperation a bit lately. Trying to get revenue and/or market share through brute force means instead of honestly providing the best product in the market.

You may love your Windows Phone (and honestly I've never even used one), but it's hard to deny it's not doing so well against Android and the iPhone. So why did MS let the market slip? Why did they wait until it was too late to be competitive? Why didn't they release a phone that just wipes the floor with Android/iPhone? Instead of becoming more agile and competing better, they seem to be resorting to other tactics that I find less than desirable.

I would agree they probably aren't 'paying' them anything. Discounting is fairly different, and is not that surprising. Microsoft probably doesn't want a loss against google and is willing to pay for it, as well as is looking for accounts that are reference-able. Also considering their margins are very high, they still aren't going to lose money on this even if they don't buy anything else. More likely, they'll get it all back on the next true-up on their licensing.

Microsoft has managed to turn plain-text and basic html text exchange and who-what-where-when into an absolute technical quagmire. You can take two very simple concepts, give them to large businesses for 15 years, and you get email clients and servers with thousands of features, and a proprietary calendar protocol that doesn't work with anyone else.

That will end up in pain and tears for thousands of students and staff alike.

My trial of Office 365 lasted 45 minutes i.e. until I realised how much pain it is to get data back out of the Outlook and Sharepoint implementations. They just don't want you to do it.

It's the WORST lock in I've seen in any product.

Can't you just import the PST file into another mail app? And for Sharepoint there's a power toy: http://blog.falchionconsulting.com/index.php/stsadmpowershel...

Even the list hurts the eye. It still baffles me why Sharepoint is so pervasive in the market.

Does the list of commands for csh or emacs hurt your eyes too? I can read virtually every command and know what it does. This is certainly clearer and easier than the magic emacs and vi incantations. ZZ

I don't know though. using a text editor for you daily job and remembering the magic incantations because it makes you much faster seems worth it while the magic incantations to migrate your data away that you might use once does not. It's not really a valid comparison. If MS cared about vendor lock in they wouldn't expose that stuff via a command line tool. They would instead do it via GUI which is the de facto interface of windows ease of use.

The problem is that exporting all files and documents isn't common user functionality. It's generally an admin task. And for users where this is common you can map everything to a local folder, in which case you just use Windows Explorer drag drop, just like any other folder. For admins, command line tools are their standard UI.

As you even say yourself, for a task you might do once ever, why would you add a button to clutter the UI? That's like Apple adding a button to the iPhone to indicate that you'd like to terminate service with your carrier. Just wouldn't make any UI sense.

Forget the UI. It's not important.

It MUST be common user functionality both for private and corporate users.

People have completely unjustified trust for these cloud-based services when in the face of it, they screw people's data up all the time. You should be able to maintain an offline archive of all of your data to guard against vendor failure.

To be 100% honest, at least here in the EU, I think they should legislate to make sure that a) you can get your data back when you so desire and b) the data should come back in an open format.

I have seen more than one Sharepoint intall crash so badly that the company was crippled for hours because they couldn't access their documents nor be sure they were working with the most recent versions. Having a regularly (as frequently as needed) exported mirror is a top priority for any SP-like application.

And, of couse, when you do realize SP is utterly awful when compared to its competitors, it makes the migration a lot easier.

I can easily imagine a migration from SP a couple years down the road would cost a lot more than the US$250K they are being offered to leave Notes (which is every bit as awful as SP)

Agree about Notes being as awful. I had to suffer that from '99-'02. Looked like it improved after that but you can't polish a turd as they say.

I've watched SharePoint go with a spectacularly large boom when some muppet renamed the AD domain... That was a fun two days of my life reverse engineering it believe me. Thank goodness they did write it on top of the CLR as it's easy enough to decompile then to work out what the hell is going on.

Because there are consultants. That is the only reason!

Consultants alone won't explain that. You need clueless people making technology decisions on subjects they can barely understand, under advice by snake oil salesmen.

Fair point. I'll give you that.

You HAVE to buy Outlook to get the PST file out by syncing your local outlook with the Exchange Live server which is unacceptable. You can't access the data any other way.

Yesterday's discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2732537

And only Microsoft could champion cross platform web apps by forcing you to view the demo video, not in a native format, not in the ubiquitous, cross-platform Flash, but Silverlight. Guess that shows me how much interest I should continue to have in it.

Microsoft lives and dies by lock-in. They are not going to start using competitors' technologies (not without their own magic dust, at least; see EEE/Halloween memo) simply for user convenience when they could be furthering Microsoft/Office/Windows/DirectX lock-in by shoving their custom stuff down your throat.

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