U.S. Army Chooses Google Workspace
cloud.google.com
cloud.google.com
Obviously YMMV, but I don't think it's as simple as you're making it out to be.
It’s honestly pretty good. All the usual features are there — importantly, version history (no more Contract v15 FINAL.docx).
The key thing is it works with Teams and SharePoint and has collaborative editing, works in browser, desktop app, or phone.
They had an on-premises version of OneDrive too, not sure if that’s still a thing.
It’s not all a bed of roses. Gmail still feels nicer than Outlook web, but Outlook web is catching up. Collaborative editing feels much more robust in Google Docs. But the OneDrive client is way nicer than Google Drive (for me, at least).
I’d definitely say Google’s and Microsoft’s “online business collaboration” offerings are comparable. I suspect users will have preferences based on what they’re used to.
Of course, if your org uses both you’re in for a world of hurt. Email works well enough, but even calendaring has friction. Filesharing / chatrooms? Doesn’t interoperate well at all.
Is this very different from the many, many universities that offer both Google Apps and Office 365 to students/staff/faculty?
Everyone who asked before we started that “war” was called a traitor.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Classy.
Nobody was forced to take on debt they can repay because their were no job prospects.
If you want to say there shouldn't be loans for college or whatever that is fine. The fact is, the US is not in that situation.
Nevertheless, the government allowed businesses to take out loans, and in many cases forgave those loans, because it benefits the country. The government allowed students to take out loans, and in many cases forgave those loans, because it benefits the country.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be college loans. I am saying the job of the government is to help people, and both kinds of loans, an both kinds of loan forgiveness, fall into that category.
And how did we reach here? Government policies. I am not saying that these policies were bad. But there can be no denying that government is the major reason why more and more people are going to college. And definitely, if college is not free or subsidised, they will be forced to take loans. Again, because economy is punishing for those who don't have a college education.
I agree the economy is set up against non college educated people. We should work to change that. Promoting trade schools as legitimate alternatives to college might help. I am not sold that would solve much though. A lot of young people don't want to get into the trades. How many 18 year olds who just graduated high school want to be a plumber?
One thing I will say is that I don't think it is solely the government to blame. Companies require degrees for jobs that don't need it. They probably do it since there is a massive amount of people with degrees so they may as well get one of them to work for the company. We need companies to step up and stop requiring degrees. At the company I work at there are people with degrees who are working in data entry.
Not all loans went to businesses that were forced to shut down.
Except that there wasn't lower demand across the whole economy, only very specific industries. Most businesses were not shut down. Lots of businesses continued running, and had increased demand. They still got forgivable loans.
Perhaps the perception it has more to do with who signed the legislation (a Republican President and Senate) than whether it was actually "socialist" (it was)?
Obviously some industries weren't impacted. Many were though. The GDP also declined.
You can probably say the same about every recession.
>Most businesses were not shut down
I never said they were. I've seen some estimates at 200,000 businesses. A huge number of businesses went out of business as well.
>Lots of businesses continued running, and had increased demand.
And lots of businesses who continued running had decreased demand.
Even if the demand remained the same or increased they might not be able to meet the requirements like outside eating or distancing which would limit their revenues.
>Perhaps the perception it has more to do with who signed the legislation (a Republican President and Senate) than whether it was actually "socialist" (it was)?
It is not socialist. Socialist can mean either state controlled or worker controlled. This is corporate welfare.
Just to be clear. I am not defending this policy. I am strictly saying that this is more justifiable then paying off student loans since the government literally shut many businesses and put other rules on businesses.
You claimed businesses got loans because the government forced them to close. I am saying that plenty of business that didn’t close (and saw record demand) sought and received loans. Nobody made them take out PPP loans. Once you acknowledge that, it looks a lot like student loans.
It was several times worse in the early days of the GWOT. Sikh's were getting killed for looking too Muslim. The stuff you see now where people want to include mandatory "Fact checks" in internet searches sort of paled to the crap we saw in the GWOT of Extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation, the Bush doctrine, destroying privacy laws in the name of patriotism, and so on.
We've already started forgetting what happened.
What's happening now is not remotely comparable to what the US did in response to 9/11 - if anything, it's the opposite (we are defending a country from being invaded for BS reasons vs invading another country for BS reasons)
The proof included claims by dozens of different intelligence agencies, testimony from high level insiders in the Iraq government, surveillance photos of mobile biological weapons laboratories, definitive proof of purchase of Uranium for nuclear weapons purposes, under oath testimony, and of course endless propaganda:
---
Washington Post - "Irrefutable" : https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/02/06/i...
NYTimes - "Irrefutable and Undeniable" : https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u...
---
To imagine all of this was fabricated or based on lies would make even the most enthusiastic conspiracy theorist look at you a bit funny. These events played a major role in shaping my worldview. And what we're going through today is even more extreme.
The one bright side of this is that if we can manage to avoid nuclear annihilation, I expect an even larger chunk of the population will join the jaded and cynical asshole family. It's not a pleasant worldview, but probably necessary for the survival of humanity in the age of mass media and mass weapons.
And why wouldn't they? What exactly has been the punishment for so called reliable media for spreading lies over and over again? If anything they are considered more reliable than ever. Which means people consuming it are not interested in truth either.
Some might find it implausible the media and legislators were so credulous.
I mean, Saddam did allow UN weapons inspectors in before the war, and nobody could direct them to any WMD. Even at the time, it took some serious mental gymnastics to believe spy agencies had all this evidence of a huge programme, and yet couldn't direct weapons inspectors to anything.
If you wanted to sell papers, you needed to sell stories about AMERICA STOPPING TERRORISM! How did you get access to stories of marines busting down doors and shoving the foreign looking faces of murderous terrorists into the dirt? Well you had to be known as a news source who said the right things, had the right attitude.
At these news organisations there were some editors who were mostly there before 9/11 happened who decided that supporting America was the crap and were pushing stories from any reporter who had "sources" that gave evidence of what was going down. Readers LOVED reading stories about heroes who kicked the ass of murderous terrorists. It was a feedback loop, the more hawkish you were the more you succeeded, the more dovish you were the more irrelevant you were.
I opposed GWOT / going into Iraq after 9/11, I have not forgotten the collective national mania.
But the comparison you're drawing to Ukraine is nonsense. If you're at the point where you believe all the reports, images and interviews detailing the millions of refugees crossing out of Ukraine have been faked... I'm not sure how to help you.
Clearly, that's not what the OP is saying.
That happened with every recent war. It’s a habit of fabricating evidence, not mere clerical errors.
The UN Security Council is not a singular entity, it's composed of permanent and rotating members, so it can hardly have "habits". A member can come with fabricated evidence, which can be accepted by other members for whatever reason, but that's not the UN Security Council fabricating evidence.
Has Russia not been illegally Ukraine, trying to steal it's territory, and trying to destroy its culture since 2014?
That's the entire question of this war (and the one entirely absent from Western media). After the Russian leaning government in Ukraine was overthrown in 2014, those heavily Russian territories declared their independence, starting a civil war. Numerous efforts were made to resolve this were made (the Minsk accords), but went nowhere. Russia blamed Ukraine, Ukraine blamed Russia.
So who gets to decide the fate of a people within an area? The people within that area, or the government with historic claims to the land of the area? That's not a rhetorical question because the traditional answer has always been the latter - generally changed only by war or collapse.
But I think it's an important and fundamental one that must eventually be answered on a global scale if we ever want a peaceful world. At what scale does the right to self determination and rule begin? Obviously a household shouldn't be able to declare itself independent, but a city? County? State? Region?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Demographics_of_U...
[2] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/03/20/one-year-a...
Like in many other regions of the Soviet Union, that was done by force, i.e. by deporting or murdering the native inhabitants.
After bringing Russian colonists in all those regions, the Soviet Union frequently did not need to spend any money for them, because the Russian colonists have been installed directly in the houses vacated by their former owners, who were forced to leave almost all their belongings behind.
So when now the Russians from such territories recently colonized by the Soviet Union complain that the natives do not love them, or that they are discriminated, or that some country wants to maintain control over the colonized territory, while they want to unite with the Empire which gave them the land and houses stolen from others, there is no wonder that such Russian desires are hard to accept for the neighbors of Russia.
Today more Tatars live in Crimea than before the exile. Well, at least in modern history, if we go back to times of the Ottoman Empire, things get much more complex. And Russia remains the home of the majority of Tatars today, where they remain a large ethnic minority.
It's an important issue and certainly ironic, but not a direct factor in the current conflict.
This is also true for other regions that belong now to Ukraine, where other nationalities, for example Romanians or Poles or Slovaks, were the prior inhabitants, before being deported or killed and replaced with Russian colonists.
However my point was not about the prior inhabitants, but about the current Russian inhabitants, who protest that nobody should do to them much less than their grandfathers did two generations ago to the natives, by robbing them at gun point of everything they possessed.
Unlike other people, like the Germans, who have paid heavy reparations to their victims, and who have presented solemn apologies for the acts of their ancestors, the Russians have never acknowledged any wrong doing.
To whom Crimea should belong administratively is debatable, but Russia does not have any more rights than Ukraine.
For the neighbors of Russia, a Russian-occupied Crimea or any other regions of Ukraine that remain occupied by Russia are a danger, because there is no sign that Russia will ever stop from its policy of territorial expansion that has been carried on successfully for centuries, with only 2 setbacks, when Russia, after WWI and after 1990 has granted the right of auto-determination to its larger parts, and it was very surprised when everybody opted out.
After WWI, Russia has succeeded to reconquer back in a short time some of the defectors, and after WWII it recovered not only all the lost territories but it gained many more others, plus the vassal countries that were nominally independent but in fact were open for pillage in unbalanced economic relationships.
While all the other European countries appear to have abandoned a long time ago the medieval ideas that the best way for prosperity is to use war against the neighbors and occupy their lands, the Russian dictators remain addicted to such methods, so they remain a danger for all the neighbors of Russia.
Yes the invasion of Tibet was terrible (as was the annexation of Tibet from China before that), and the destruction of Tibetan culture is perhaps even worse, the same can be said for all cultures that have fallen under the guns/germs/steel civilisations. Saying China or the US is bad is kind of missing the point… it would have happened anyway.
I take it you are not from Europe, because over here everyone has historical claims on everything.
But it doesn't answer gp. Whatever an enlightened political philosophy debate might yield, Russia annexed Crimea by force at a time when it was not theirs. Full stop.
However good Russia's case was or however much a majority of the inhabitants wanted control to change, control was ultimately changed via unjustified means that should be rejected by the international community.
The proof of Russia's lack of genuine interest in the will of those people is how quickly it came in to start shooting. You don't resolve national break-ups in weeks or months (see, for example, the dissolution of Czechoslovakia).
How did “not my war” turn out in the 1930s?
> We've already started forgetting what happened.
The cherry on the ironic top.
The Treaty of Versailles was nothing short of sadistic in the penalties it imposed on Germany which, shockingly, didn't result in Germany rejoining the modern world order (of the time) but growing to despise it even more. It is this which set the stage for the rise of a vegetarian artist who had a knack for oratory and riling up crowds.
WW2 was likely necessary, but WW1 was not. And WW1 created WW2. The worst part is also always the propaganda. When WW1 was being carried out it was being framed, at the time, as 'The War to End All War.' What cause could possibly be more noble? Of course it not only didn't end all war, but even directly led to even more war. And the fundamental cause of the conflict which initially triggered the war persists to this day!
Russians and French died in much higher numbers on the Entente side than the Brits (who only joined due to Belgium's neutrality being violated anyways).
However, you probably know that the assassination of the morganatically married heir presumptive of the Austro-Hungarian throne was not the real reason for the war, only the spark that ignited the powder keg. There were many reasons and a lot of tension building for decades, starting with, funnily, Germany beating Austria which forced them to expand south, towards Bosnia, and also Germany beating France making the latter want revenge. The former pitted Austria-Hungary against Russia in the Balkans, on top of the many problems between the different Balkan countries. The latter made France eager for revenge and desperate to not be alone next time, hence it's cozying to Russia and the UK. Sprinkle an agressive German naval build-up that pushed the UK towards the Entente, German fears of Russian rearmament, Austrian fears of irrelevance, etc. and you have a powder keg with clearly defined lines just waiting for a spark.
For the Americans? I'd say their policy of being a "neutral" arms dealer mostly made the Americans a ton of money and rocketed them to global superpower status. Now Japan did attack them in a hostile action but America kind of pounded them after so I'm still not sure "neutrality" worked out so badly for them. If anything the Americans started doing worse and worse the more and more they got involved in wars halfway across the world.
For the Brits? Yeah appeasement was kind of a policy failure, Hitler turned out to not be the most trustworthy chap. I dare say Hitler was an unscrupulous chap.
I'm sorry but this sounds like an activist fever dream/urban legend. Are there actually two (or even one) known incidents like this from that time period?
I'm not defending the GWOT or opposing it here but that's an extreme characterization you're making; I was there and it doesn't match anything like my memory.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Balbir_Singh_Sodhi
Despite this grim perspective, I have hope for the future of humanity.
There is also the idea that the "military" are not to blame for wars, wars are created by politicians not the military. The truth is of course that generals want to go to war because it keeps their budget allocation high.
These myths make it hard to both support Joe who's back from the war, and yet be anti the war in the first place. It's hard to mention that the overall military budget seems like a lot, without sounding like you're anti-joe.
Even something as simple as "thank you for your service" is in some ways a propoganda. To ask an ex serviceman about the point of the Afgan war, to ask them if 100 000 dead Afghans makes up for 3000 on 9/11, to question the logic of signing up to serve in an army currently fighting an unjust war, would seem antagonistic.
To question how Afghanistan is different to Ukraine would be unthinkable. [1]
In truth one can (and should) support veterans, but perhaps can also raise questions about the scale of US military spending, and question the wisdom of having an enormous standing military which needs to get involved in conflicts of dubious value, simply to justify its own existance.
[1] they are of course very different in a lot of ways, but in effect are the same in more ways we'd care to admit.
The short answer is "not a lot" - primarily because I think it's a conversation best had in person, not via forums. It's hard to create the nuance such a discussion would need when typing.
But, perhaps more to the point, it's not veterans that worry me. I suspect (as I think do you) that many are disillusioned with the real outcomes of the war. Just like those who served in Vietnam etc.
No, the people who worry me are the "politicals". Those who see _any_ criticism of the military as being anti-troops. (As noted above, this is expressly the outcome the military-industrial-complex has been working on forever.) And the messaging is so successful that, on either side of the isle, it's basically political suicide to "vote against the military".
While reducing the spending on the military may garner some support from those who have actually served (although I doubt in significant percentages) - it's the blow-back from those not actually in the military (military families, and everyone else) which is most concerning. There are not so supportive as those who are not actually doing any of the work or in any of the danger.
When people complained about not getting the things they wanted, what they were really railing against was the fact that they didn't get what they wanted all the time anymore; the military grew accustomed to telling someone "I want X" and it happened, regardless of cost, lifecycle sustainment, security, etc. NMCI forced the DoN to develop and articulate requirements properly, write good contracts, budget for software and hardware sustainment, and generally operate professionally.
In short, I would take an NMCI computer and enterprise services from 2010 versus a Marine Corps Enterprise Network computer and enterprise services from 2022 any day of the week.
Disclosure: I have been a Marine Corps Communications Officer for almost 20 years; starting before NMCI. I worked at the regional and enterprise levels to transition ownership back from the NMCI program/contractor to government owned.
In 2018 I was issued an NMCI laptop with a hard disk drive in it... with platters and a spindle and everything. Each time I powered it on I spent 20 minutes being serenaded by its deliciously clicky retro soundtrack as I waited for a desktop with a working Start menu (and I use the term "working" loosely since it took 5 seconds to appear when clicked). If I didn't have work to do it might have been comforting - it kind of reminded me of my old Presario V2555 from the late 90s. Constant McAfee updates and poorly-designed bespoke MFC management apps completed the aesthetic nicely.
"Treasonous" might be hyperbole but it isn't entirely unwarranted.
I imagine that the laptop you were given in 2018 was not an NMCI laptop, but instead a laptop from either the Navy or Marine Corps' new ownership/operations model which is incredibly flawed. Also, HBSS was poorly implemented in the 2010 time frame and Tanium was introduced (at least in the Marine Corps networks) around 2017. Both are major contributing factors to the issue you're describing.
In short: the current state is that computers are barely usable and that is not NMCI from yester-year.
I think I would normally disagree with a govt. agency using a cloud platform, but it might actually be MORE secure than what they can do themselves.
Wow, that's pretty loaded. Is this some kind of no true Scotsman situation?
"Matters" in this context was related to national security concerns.
Heather Adkins who leads security (and is one of those ultra-longtimers) brought a number of senior eng for internal, ultra-private meetings where they showed the eng leadership exactly what had happened. I wasn't invited but at that time, sat near the exit door and their faces were just ... aghast at the consequences of what had just happened as a function of the systems they built.
The snowden dumps also showed that the NSA had packet traces of BigTable RPCs which was quite an eye-opener and definitely sped up privacy projects.
I knew wikipedia was going on a dangerous path, but I didn't know they had fallen so low. I'm talking about calling the entities involved in that affair as "belligerants" and also having the lack of tact of writing about "Casualties and losses" (in a non-ironic manner, I suppose).
Have Amazon or Apple had a major breach?
(I do think Google takes security atypically seriously, though)
Apple only has if you count exploits that allow for hacking Macbooks and Iphones as far as I know (and I wouldn’t count that personally).
citation needed
I mean if users followed best practices it won't have been possible [2]
---
[1] which could be known more easily than if you are a celebrity
[2] Not trying to defend Apple here or absolve them of responsibility, but trying to differentiate a product hack (design choice and social engineering) from a pure technical compromise like a RCE or speculative execution which is developer purview and more interesting.
[1] https://www.blackhatethicalhacking.com/articles/hacking-stor...
Ninja edit: seems like dekhn just confirmed what I said above
They continue to fail badly on all three of those fronts from an end user perspective. However, most of their problems on that front are self-inflicted / intentional cost saving / revenue generating.
Edit. Examples:
Sent box message injection in gmail getting (edit: people) fired. People sneak a forged sexual harassment message (or whatever) to the victim past the gmail spam filter, put the victim's address in the from header, and then corporate IT checks the account, sees the "outgoing" message in the victim account and fires the victim.
Google drive data loss (many examples in web search results).
Permanent account lockouts through no fault of the end user.
Their entire targeted ad business.
Malicious you tube take downs.
...and dozens of other examples
Alternatively... They could just not route inbound messages to "sent".
What possible reason would enterprise customers have to demand that certain incoming messages get black holed into a folder that no normal user will ever look at?
My best guess is something like outlook or other client integration for "legitimate" impersonation.
Google itself uses gmail in both of the ways I mentioned.
Personally, I'd be pretty pissed if a tool injected into my sendbox instead of sending an (optional) copy of whatever it generated to my inbox.
On the other hand, I know how to set up filters.
Anyway, it has been a half-decade since I gave up on figuring out what fresh UI hell gmail has shipped each year. (I autoforward whatever must be sent to gmail elsewhere, and set up a logical contradiction email filter to nerf their broken and mandatory spam filter).
I guess if random systems are sent box injecting me, then I'll lose the emails. Oh well.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2018/jun/28/c...
It sounds like there are third party G Suite tools that force you to enable delegated access (from the article, it is unclear if this is possible for personal accounts).
On top of that, some manage to enable it without prompting. Yet, somehow, Google let them keep their API keys.
Nice.
Hate to burst your bubble..
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chine...
> nothing like those million record breaches that EVERYONE is afflicted by.
Why do you think that? Google has had several major breaches.
There was a google+ bug that exposed info on 52.5 million users, one on 500,000 users' data, and other disclosures. There have also been corrupted apps on the play store, like Brain Test that infected at least a million devices with difficult to remove malware. A decade ago there were about 5 million Google passwords leaked online.
That's just what I can recall atm.
There was a vulnerability discovered internally by Googlers. There's no evidence it was exploited.
>A decade ago there were about 5 million Google passwords leaked online.
Those weren't taken from Google. They were stolen from somewhere else (possibly multiple places). Less than 2% were val
Disclosure: I work at Google.
[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2014/09/cleaning-up-after-pa...
A lot of people have selective memory when it comes to security issues.
And those breaches are multimillion record breaches.
The China one was bad enough for google to terminate the entire link to china and pull out entirely.
I can't find the article now but it had a picture of an NSA presentation with what was obviously a bigtable RPC (spend enough time debugging protocol buffers and stubby). From what I can glean, it seems likely that they tapped an undersea cable carrying Google's traffic between a frontend and a backend, although that's speculation.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...
That’s not because Microsoft is trying to market segment. Turns out different parts of the government love making things hard on their suppliers by insisting they are special. I seriously doubt google actually manages to negotiate the minefield that is contracting and CISOs with conflicting requirements like the GP is dreaming of, but cool if they can.
Before anyone tells me that Workspace is FedRAMP compliant: Yes, I know, but they do not expose the controls necessary for non-government users to be compliant.
That or soldiers getting reprimanded because accidental auto-responder was like 'Haha!' or 'Great!' to something requiring a deeper response.
This stuff can be dangerous. My son asked me a question in chat and my phone somehow auto-responded a "No" answer. I'm guessing I put my phone in my pocket without locking it. Luckily I caught it in time and as soon as that happened I disabled all auto-responding features.
In my personal life I almost never use email for communication, it is prominent in business for now but even that is shifting
You go to make a car or flight reservation, enter all kinds of info including your credit card, and then bam, it says "Oops, something went wrong, try again later". Or an e-commerce site asks you to enter your email and they'll send you a confirmation code, but the confirmation email never comes.
I've determined by experiment--using a different IP but a Gmail email address--that a frequent cause is a secret bias against commercial email services. It's particularly infuriating because I think a commercial email user with a paid account is a much lower fraud risk than a free Gmail user.
If it’s one of their domains, not sure, but I’d guess their free accounts originate a bunch of garbage due to the nature of their service.
I don't believe for a second that protonmail generates more spam than gmail.
I mean, there’s some reason you’re being sent to spam. And it’s not anything about PM’s configuration, they use solid defaults that should make default spam filters happy.
I’ve never even gotten a spam email from someone using Proton Mail. It’s always people that are very serious about privacy and always a human.
It's almost like saying "Donald Trump's presidency was just like Josef Stalin". Sure, there are bad things but if you seriously look at what was going on, there was just a whole different level of badness.
Doesn't sound like an endorsement to me. They needed 150k email-only licences to bridge until they can replace contract they buy the rest of their Office 365 licenses on. Google showed up with an bid they couldn't refuse. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a loss-leader for Google (or an "investment", as we call in the defense business).
This was probably a major factor. Government, and more specifically DoD need more variety.
There is this irrational fear to stop using MS Office and to me the fear is now having to use it. I am not working with that company anymore and having to deal with Office again has been painful.
The second is having work in a browser tab. It’s so much easier to keep things organized when switching around between programs when you have an actual app.
I suppose the online variants of everything (with PWA support that is) all have the same benefit: easier to stream incremental changes to all users, and easier to centrally manage workflows and access control. Because nothing needs to be re-evaluated locally, you are only left with on-line verification and CAC verification/signatures.
“Google Workspace does not replace Army 365. The Army has the world's largest Office 365 implementation with over a million users. This capability serves a niche user base with a unique set of requirements and complements our enterprise capability through Army 365. This is why we had the endorsement and support of the DOD CIO.”
Also, the current vision is to serve people with very limited needs (recruits in basic training is a prominent example). Seems like a heck of a negotiation lever though.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6982900...
I can see how licensing for Office is "expensive" but this is the DoD so that should be the least concerning issue.
Training is touched in the PR, but, it is not 1:1, especially for excel spreadsheets with macros, pivot tables or integration to PowerBi, which again is Office 365. I doubt FPA/Accounting and such are going to move over to Google.
For tech, same ,I don't see it happening. I could see an excuse as "more secure" as the identity is entirely cloud based, and you don't need to label/track content via Azure AIP/DRM'ish and it's easily accessibly within google, but that is entirely possible on O365 after it's tuned for that. I also am curious about general mail routing and such, no more exchange? No more outlook? (Well, I guess you could use outlook via imap, but then again what's the point?)
This PR just has me asking more questions, especially since all of the options AFAIK for gsuite require an active internet connection and a modern/newer browser. The same org that uses Panasonic Toughbooks, is going to have a have to use an "offline" mode of gsuite.
Ref: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/11/18/german-s...
Maybe now MSFT won’t charge DoD as much for 365 again.
Sounds like a typical day in the cloud wars. Let’s see what happens when renegotiations come up for the contract.
I look forward for the day when we come full circle and they re-name it Google Apps for Business, Government, Education, and Grandma Bertha.
I work in a company that has forced Workspaces upon us and it randomly is a nightmare. Tons of functionality you get in Excel is not there. It is a complete nightmare adjusting access to random files. You often end up with files and folders "owned" by a user who no longer exists and then we have to get the central IT to go fix it.
Ugh. Everything being browser based with crap desktop clients is the worst. They also want to constantly share crap via Google Drive and, unless I have missed something major, you can't run Google Drive, in Windows at least, under multiple signed in users with the same drive letter. You'll just get access denied errors. THAT makes shortcuts and all a complete fucking nightmare.
I have to often shrug when my users have issues and send in a report to the Japanese head office and hope they respond timely. I know /that/ isn't a workspaces fault, but it just compounds things.
I mean, like I said, a lot of the complaints I have aren't really the fault of Workspaces.
We actually use the multiuser functionality of Sheets a lot but I still run into constant issues. And the fact a huge chunk of this crap does /not/ play nice with /multi-user local workstations/, in 2022, drives me bonkers.
When the original dev team moves on to other projects, the new guys just make minor tweaks and no major product changes happen. Big new feature releases do things like "we moved this tool from the edit menu to the file menu".
Sheets is cool, but, Excel and Word and Office365 are streets ahead of Workspace from an enterprise point of view. I've been a staunchly non-microsoft guy for years. When I was younger I was the guy writing it at Micro$oft or more likely Micro$shit. These days, managing multiple companies, some of which use Office and some which use Workspace I cringe when I need to deal with issues on the Workspace side. There are some things which Google does better. Generally APIs for the Office365 products are not as good as the APIs for the equivalent Sheets/Docs/etc product. I've done some fun/funky things with using Google sheets as an adhoc database. Put a "job" in a row in a Sheets sheet and a few minutes later something does your task and you can see the result in that sheet. Super easy to do with Sheets API, I've tried for years to get similar CRUD to work on Excel API and always hit roadblocks.
Office365 APIs for user management and groups and all the "AzureAD" stuff is absolutely top-notch.
Anything Google Cloud or cloud related, google wins hands down.
So many choices. No one product to rule them all.
Excel is probably one of the finest pieces of software devised. But not that part.
For whatever reason, I recently got Excel and... yeah - way better.
It needs more resources not less, especially for the inbuilt fetching APIs, like Google finance
Google drive files live in their own hermetic world. There is a desktop client but it doesn't reliably sync to the local filesystem; when it does most of the files aren't actually searchable so you have to do two searches if the file you want might be on google drive. So stupid.
Different accounts are hermitically walled off as opposed to the "different parts of the filesystem" way you can handle locally.
And even if you can somehow do everything inside the google drive, well stuff shared with you can't be part of your file organization like it could with dropbox or, you know, the filesystem. If someone shares a directory with you google drive still won't let you make it a favorite much less move it in with the rest of your files. No, it just keeps falling lower and lower in "shared with me" as other stuff is shared with you. Pathetic.
I detest using web browsers to manage files honestly. I have yet to see it done well, there's usually a notable delay to descend into a subfolder. It's an awful experience really.
Are you rsyncing Windows NFS to Google Drive or something? If so, why!?
> send in a report to the Japanese head office
Oh, that's why. Are you still mailing floppy disks, or did they get with the program and upgrade to fax already?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/japans-digital-minister-vows-t...
Luckily no floppies. But the Japanese are obsessed with over utilizing spreadsheets and want to create ones with VBA scripts for inter office use that require multiple users to utilize at once and they share them out via google drive. And their macros and scripts have hard coded pathing (don’t get me started) so they are hunting for the same drive letter path.
It took me a week to convince them what was happening when they first tried doing some of this. Beyond the hard coded paths they also had inline kanji and it was breaking everything on our American systems. Like excel would detect a broken and just delete the vba bin from the xlsx. It was kind of funny.
It's not perfect, but most of the time it feels like magic.
It is annoying that not all their features are available in browser, but I still prefer it over Google docs for anything other than lists.
That sounds reasonable to be honest. If someone leaves and has not left the files editable by others in a group... what's the other safe option? Someone has to be the arbiter of the permissions and the IT seems like a good choice.
I can assure you that some asshat HR dude has dropped the “Gay Employee PII DRAFT2 Pre Final.xlsx” on his home drive or saved it to a public folder while trying to email it to his Yahoo account to work on it at home.
When the founder retires and the files did not get shared before, how exactly do you want to deal with that? (context: we're in a situation where we already know the standard handover / permission granting procedures either didn't kick in, or failed)
Now multiply that by hundreds of employees over years, add in 50 revisions and forks of documents, legal liability, etc. Yes it's a giant pile that just gets worse.
It's all tradeoffs and a problem you hit when you get older and bigger.
> rather than facilitating business units performing their work
Sure, and the team which enables business units to deal with this internally is... IT. I'm not saying they have to deal with every single document, but if they enable this, they deal with things that fall through cracks.
Both Google and Microsoft products are awesome in this space. They each have pretty serious deficiencies that may or may not be a big deal to you.
The latest release of Excel seems to be fully caught up to Sheets on collaboration features. We can save a file on Teams and then have multiple users editing simultaneously through a mix of desktop, mobile, and web clients it works really well.
If that's the case, there's a pretty decent chance that you just have relatively novice spreadsheet skills/needs, so a basic tool will satisfy you (e.g. you're not so much evaluating your tools, but yourself). I'm not saying that's actually the case, just that "it works for me" gives very little information about the software you're using.
But there's an even more basic problem - trading documents with Excel users. Trying to round-trip anything more than a simple data-only Excel doc through Google Docs is folly, especially if you keep passing a document back and forth.
In case it wasn't obvious, I have to use both. I have multiple external vendors where emailing Excel docs back and forth is how you do business. Internally, we're Google Docs, except where we're not, mainly anything that touches Finance or Legal. But the Windows IT folks also use a lot of Excel. And, you get the idea.
In conclusion, the idea that anyone has a "solution" that is supposed to actually solve "sharing" is hilarious.
I don't think so. It says that the software satisfies the basic requirements of its target audience, and gives a hint as to who that audience is.
On the other hand, if you receive the opinion of some self-proclaimed expert, I think you're receiving less useful information. Experts are typically a small percentage of the userbase, and among experts there can be vastly different opinions depending on their specialty. Ask an Android dev to review vim, and an operating systems dev, and you'll get wildly different responses. If you ask a generalist software developer, you'll likely get less noise.
>> "it works for me" gives very little information about the software you're using.
> I don't think so. It says that the software satisfies the basic requirements of its target audience, and gives a hint as to who that audience is.
No, not really. What's the "target audience"? The GGP certainly doesn't say, and wrote a comparison that is meaningless unless you're already very familiar with the software (transforming it into a statement about the particular user), and perhaps misleading if you don't. I could say the exact same thing as him, except about MS Paint, e.g.
Yes, I get desktop Photoshop but I have never had to use any feature in it I couldn't get in MS Paint (I use MS Paint a lot outside of work).
Does that say MS Paint is a powerful program, or that I'm an amateur user? You can't really say unless you already know the programs, since I didn't say anything about the kinds of graphics work I actually do.
> Ask an Android dev to review vim, and an operating systems dev, and you'll get wildly different responses. If you ask a generalist software developer, you'll likely get less noise.
No, you won't get less noise, you'll just get different noise.
Not to say they aren't delivering value, but I work in a place where many people have only used Google Sheets their whole career. They can't imagine running a finance org any other way.
On the rare occasion I have to put something into Excel for some business person, it's a dump from CSV.
This is a problem for all across time.
We started with Xero, but it couldn't handle our international books. For instance the NZ IRD mandates particular exchange rates, and weird tax regimes (looking at you, Canada!) were way beyond it.
Sheets means a server can securely update data remotely, and we can instantly share data with our accountants. It's a five minute job to build a sheet that mimics tax reporting forms, and you can do financial what-ifs without having to dump data to Excel.
I'm sure Excel power users will hate Sheets, but Sheets power users will hate Excel just as much. Oh, and let's revisit this after your SSD dies just after you'd perfected the ultimate data analysis formula.
I was actually OK with moving from Excel to Google Sheets since the coverage of functions seemed mostly ok, minus all the new cool shit they added in one of the more recent releases (XLOOKUP, etc) but I literally tried a trivial INDEX/MATCH with a simple 5x20 matrix of price values and literally could not get it to work even though the identical "code" worked in Excel.
Really, really frustrating. I was working at a hedge fund at the time and I was simultaneously working on a real time portfolio dashboard as a web app, and needed to also have a stopgap solution in the form of a spreadsheet for people to play with and debugging differences in Google's spreadsheet function implementations and Excel's was infuriating
One of my "acid tests" for a well-designed UI is if integrates metrics with configuration.
For example, VMware will show cute little inline bar charts of CPU and Memory utilisation when browsing virtual machines.
Similarly, some firewall or load-balancer products will show "hit counters" or similar stats next to rules or virtual servers.
For the other 99% of products out there, it's up to the end user to manually perform the "join" by clicking around the GUI. There may be an API, or a scripting tool, but without fail these won't provide a robust link (a foreign key) that would actually make this easy.
It's awesome that we funnel tons of money to tech companies instead of raising federal government scientist salaries to be competitive enough to just retain the expertise for ourselves!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)
No self-inflicted red tapes, now Google is a normal company
was there ever a company pledge?
Back in the day somebody made a meme which had a D&D alignment chart for all the Google leaders- Vic Gundotra was Chaotic Evil, while Urs was Lawful Good. Had to take it down because an SVP complained.
It boggles my mind that people think complaining about work - ON WORK TIME AND WORK RESOURCES - is some sort of protected activity. Freaking stupid.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/david...
- Sorry, a misclick.
- OK, NP.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military–industrial_complex
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Could you elaborate?
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