City of Boston drops Microsoft for Gmail
bostonglobe.com
bostonglobe.com
$100 per year is such an insignificant cost for something as vital to their productivity as their software. If the employees lose any time at all to learning to operate in the new environment it is all but wiped out.
While saving $280,000/year sounds pretty significant, with 20,000 staff as the article suggests you only have to make a difference of 14 dollars per year to realize those savings.
14 dollars per year is maybe 0.03% of an city employee's salary. I don't have a concern if they wanted to move for technical reasons, or if it was because it was more efficient, or if they just thought it was better software. But to save 14 dollars per employee per year and only recover the cost of migration after 3 years. That's dumb.
But it's definitely worth it for google.
It's clear the decision was made to boost productivity. The dollar savings are just a bonus.
"When the state information technology chief of Massachusetts announced in 2005 that the state was going to standardize its computer document format to be more compatible with open-source software-software that isn't controlled by a company-than with Microsoft products, loud choruses of support and outrage ensued, closely followed by the announcement of an investigation into the chief's apparently perfectly legal state-funded travel for participation in open-source software conferences, followed by a new state-government announcement that it would work with Microsoft to stay compatible with the company's document formats, followed by an announcement from Microsoft that it would bring its document format closer to an open-source format."
[0]: A Perfect Mess: http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Mess-Benefits-Disorder-ebook/d...
In other words, it's just safer to stay with Microsoft. You really don't want well-funded groups investigating every single activity, making you dig up every single receipt, and sponsoring your opponents, do you?
Looks like textbook Microsoft tactics.
As far as calendaring, I never really figured out how to use it that well in Exchange, Google's seems so much easier to me.
How are "advanced keystrokes" in Gmail going to be easier or better for someone when all of the keyboard shortcuts are completely inconsistent with every other application (web or otherwise)? Here they are - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en&ctx=ma...
I just can't imagine how anyone could find Gmail to be easier, given that all of the functionality is hidden behind unlabeled, non-obvious buttons that are spread out all over the screen. In Outlook and Thunderbird, the vast majority of action-inputs are very clearly labeled and keyboard access is made obvious by an underlined letter or a tool-tip that shows you the shortcut (unlike Gmail).
How could it be easier, when I can drag three attachments into a new Outlook message and hit send quicker than Gmail can even upload the attachments that I dragged to it?
How could it be easier, when I click "Inbox" and then I can't use the keyboard arrows (or Tab) to move to "Starred", "Important", "Sent Mail", etc? I guess I have to learn some non-obvious keyboard shortcut.
For example: To go to "Starred" hit "g" then "s". To go to an arbitrary label, hit "g" "l" and then you have a drop-down list of labels, with autocomplete. Seems nicer than tabbing about. To compose, hit "c".
Though there's a lot more to UX consistency than keyboard shortcuts...since we're on the topic...I wonder if these Gmail shortcuts are even consistent within Google's own offerings. Anyone wanna look?
Sorry, that's an Windows standard and it didn't even start with Windows.
Interesting they got that deal done. Assume for safety sake a 20% to 30% overrun and now you're at $1 million. And if for some reason your savings take a little longer than you thought to get there (don't they always?). Plus add in the opportunity cost of having to focus on this and retrain your workforce on Google vs MSFT that they all know. Then there's always the risk that any big project is the 1 in 10 that goes completely haywire. I just don't usually see enterprise deals with this long of a payback window getting done (based on $$'s alone anyway - without some other compelling reason)
Just curious on the dynamics of the deal not the Google vs MSFT component.
Even if they didn't go with Google Apps, they'd switch off their legacy Exchange eventually, which could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can't just download and install the newer version, the way you'd upgrade from OS X 10.6 to OX X 10.7. You have to go through a migration process. And you want it to go seamlessly, including a temporary coexistence mode, so you really should hire specialized consultants. For example, here's reference material on migrating from Exchange 2003 to 2010: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd638130(v=exchg....
MS Exchange is dated software, coming out with new versions regularly: 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013 (not yet production ready), and typically organizations keep whatever version they initially bought (say, 2003) rather than go through the pain of upgrading. So even if you were to migrate from Exchange 2003 to 2010 it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for consulting services in the process. And you're doing all that for software that was released in 2010, probably built in 2008-2010, so it's literally 5 years old software you're installing in 2013, that's only going to start getting more out of date. That's one of the advantages of Google Apps and SaaS: once you go with Google Apps, you'll never have to upgrade, and you'll always have the most up-to-date version.
Also, while they may save $240k per year in money they don't pay to Microsoft, I imagine anyone selling enterprise software would argue that there is money you will save from a theoretical increase in productivity from using their products, after everyone's been trained.
I don't see why a city government migrating form one proprietary software vendor to another is considered newsworthy. I would be more impressed by something like, "City of Boston drops Microsoft for local hosting provider running free software".
That is because, for some, it's less about promoting software freedom and more about taking Microsoft down. That's why we have SJVN on the ZDNet "Open Source" blog promoting Chromebooks and Google Docs which are less "free" than Windows and MS Office because of being completely locked down and being tied to Google's Cloud.
For a even better example, see Ubuntu's Bug #1.
As usual, Linus has pithy insight.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/07/linus-...
Google Docs goes out of its way to import/export to various formats, including Microsoft's. Given this I think the above statement is hardly fair.
And by wherever possible I don't mean that some users might be "inconvenienced" by some menu change. I mean when an open source alternative actually exists.
But even then, if the government is willing to spend money to get people or companies to build that software, they should make it open source after that.
I know that's what the article says, but I'm wondering if they truly put Google Apps up against Office 365 which would be an apples-to-apples comparison? It seems more like they put Google Apps up against an on-premises Exchange + locally installed productivity software suite which is not a good comparison
Microsoft has actually been forced by their competitors (especially Google) in offering a competing offering by way of Office 365. You can have hosted Exchange for $4 per user per month. It's been in production for years, and in the last year has really worked well for my organization.
http://blog.cloudsherpas.com/hot-topics/google-apps-vs-offic...
I don't understand what you mean to say here.
I'm truly all for it conceptually, but in my experience this kind of project tends to be full of false expectations and bad math, but plenty of press.
> As long as they are promised a timely customer service from Google
> Problem?
Maybe their support has improved quite a bit in the last 2.5 years, or maybe we just weren't a large enough customer. shrug
The problem is you aren't sticking with the narrative folks here are comfortable with. This particular Internet forum assumes Google has zero support, even though this is pointed out as false in literally every Google thread. This despite HN users genuinely believing they are smarter and have higher-minded debate than other forums.
This is just willfully ignorant. If you have Exchange, you probably have Active Directory. You can update Office various ways. I updated 1000 computers from Office 2003 to 2010 without touching any of them. I can also push an update to all our computers only downloading the patches once, not with 1000 computers downloading the same thing all at once.
I haven't seen Google Docs mass controls, but with AD and Office I was able to fix a PowerPoint video acceleration issue with a subset of our machines. Otherwise I'd have to change a setting for every person who logged into these particular machines. I realize that I may not have had this problem with Google Docs. However, we've found that we can't replicate what is done with PowerPoint in Google Docs.
At least now dirsync is 64-bit so they've removed the "don't run this on your ADFS server" bit.
[1]https://devcentral.f5.com/blogs/us/big-ip-and-adfs-part-1-nd...
Nice try Google(?!)
That is a pretty bad comparison without the sizes of the user base of each deal.
"The other cities that use Google Apps are tiny: Orlando, Pittsburgh, etc ..
In public education, the big ones also use Office 365. The entire State University of New York (700,000) use MS Office.
It is true more Federal agencies that use Google Apps -- but the big ones use Office 365. For example, the Dept of Interior (80,000) uses Google Apps, but the Dept of VA (600,000) uses Office 365.
For example, Google supplies email system for tiny Orlando with 3,000 employees
You may therefore be right that "Google Apps is winning its share of government deals". You may say that Google Apps clients include Orlando and Pittsburg. But how do you compare those 2 tiny cities with New York and Chicago??"
Also, not sure why people are cheering on the migration from Office which is primary used for local files to a cloud service where your account and documents are at the complete mercy of the cloud provider.
This is incorrect and I wish whatever source this comes from would get corrected.
Both Google Apps and Office 365 are made available to campuses through streamlined contracts signed at the system level. It is up to each campus to pick which one they want to use.
I'm on a campus that chose the Google offering. We got rid of local storage for student files on our LAN in favor of promoting cloud storage and have outsourced all student and alumni email to Gmail. We're not the only ones in the SUNY system.
State University of New York moves 465,000 students over to Microsoft’s Cloud
http://www.winrumors.com/state-university-of-new-york-moves-...
Examples: Oracle is effectively "free" for campuses so why not use that? And using something like Banner or Blackboard lets you ride on existing contracts and share dedicated resource centers. But it's not mandated and there are non-Blackboard campuses (as an example).
There is no Office 365 global movement or mandate in SUNY. It's simply one of two choices IF one decides to use them. It just means each campus doesn't have to bother putting together their own contract as SUNY central took care of it already.
And why are you asking an obviously rhetorical question? ;-)
People present wrong numbers and false information in order to appear to be right to those who don't check facts.
As an example Google gives away service to education so their revenue from that would be $0. As does Office 365 (at least that is what we were offered).
Many copies of Windows and Mac based Office of course is still purchased as frankly Google Docs and 365 are only appropriate for simple use cases.
It's a real bargain compared to hosting and managing your own email solution, plus students get Office licenses while they're enrolled.
Pricing details at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/academic/compare-office-36...
Locally hosted Exchange is insanely wasteful. Organizations continue to believe that a $25 lock on some closet is "more secure" than a real datacenter and insist on paying 3+ intermediaries' markup on outrageously expensive software licenses and servers, racks, UPSes and other accessories. They buy servers which they barely use, and what cost savings there is gets wiped out by VMWare licensing fees if they decide to do virtualization. Then they've got to pay another company to bring technicians out to maintain the server, change the UPS batteries, etc, at a cost of $100+/hour.
All of this could be so much more cost-efficient at scale. GMail may be a privacy concern, organizations' insistence on hosting their own email is maddeningly, mind-bogglingly wasteful considering they could get the same functionality for a few hundred bucks a year.
Someone needs to make a real open-source competitor to Exchange so people who insist on hosting their own stuff can at least stop throwing away money that could employ people on Exchange licenses. I understand that IMAP exists, but no one actually wants to use Thunderbird.
But so many small business owners believe (and are reinforced by their IT consulting companies who profit from that belief) that everything must always be hosted onsite.
>Why should "someone" else waste a huge amount of their time and effort on something that you think should be done and given away for free?
For the same reason any open source software exists. It'd basically be the Outlook component of LibreOffice. And no, I'm not saying "someone make this for me for free!" I'm saying this is a gap open source has yet to adequately fill and I'd be interested in filling it.
Most of the places where I've seen this scenario had between 10 and 50 employees. There are a lot of companies in this range, and the only software company that seems to be catering to their needs is Microsoft (which is drastic overkill in functionality, complexity, and price compared to most of their needs).
Apple's and Microsoft's business transactions(except for Bing) are upfront. You pay us this much money and you get this service. Google's is a more subtle "use this free service and we'll track your behavior and try to profit off it, if not we'll kill it".
>All of this could be so much more cost-efficient at scale. GMail may be a privacy concern, organizations' insistence on hosting their own email is maddeningly, mind-bogglingly wasteful considering they could get the same functionality for a few hundred bucks a year.
There are thousands of companies that host Exchange for you. Or you have Office 365.
>Someone needs to make a real open-source competitor to Exchange so people who insist on hosting their own stuff can at least stop throwing away money that could employ people on Exchange licenses.
Why should "someone" else waste a huge amount of their time and effort on something that you think should be done and given away for free?
Because upgrades, support incidents, and software assurance are free, and they will give me the manpower to run it all? Where do I sign up? :)
With Google, you will always be the product - and you have no choice in that matter.
There are ways to protect business computers from the Big Bad Internet too. Can you think of any? I certainly can...
For what 95% of people are doing Google Docs is more than sufficient.
Edit: Also, doesn't Google Docs have controls to limit sharing of online documents to certain persons, groups, or teams?
The big concern I can think of is PII spillage, but honestly I think I trust Google more than I trust random GS-13s with their externals and laptops. DoD at least has PKI but in the Navy we're recommended to also use a password-based certificate for encrypted externals in case the CAC is lost, which kind of defeats the point since I'm sure the password is not going to be high-entropy.
With minimal studying on their own, a smart office worker can be pretty efficient doing analysis with Excel Pivot Tables while avoiding a lot of red tape. I could see the switch to an office suite with reduced features getting in the way of work done by a lot of behind the scenes, unsung heroes.
I think that when actual exposure to how people use software is largely comes from support calls, it is easy to get an inaccurate picture of bumbling and general incompetence, rather than creative solutions to often arbitrary constraints on their tool sets.
We write memoranda and instructions, we make PowerPoint briefings, we use scads and scads of spreadsheets, and although I personally use and admire PivotTables, most don't.
Even the famous "Access database that underlies the operation" is very rarely to be found around here. The only thing I've ever seen an Access database behind around here (besides the ones I personally use) are for FITREP processing in the Navy.
Perhaps surprisingly, much of the stuff you'd use "advanced spreadsheets as database" for end up being run by actual databases with website frontends around here, which makes office software even less essential; just make the ad-hoc query on the web page and export to Excel and you're done.
I have no doubt that macros are in use somewhere in DoD, but it's really not that extensive for day-to-day stuff.
If you don't believe me, just search for .xlsm files compared to .xlsx on a standard Navy command's share drive.
Looking forward to more of the world switching to Google.
I hope that one day the notion of enterprise products will disappear completely so that everybody can happily use well-designed consumer products.
Though the question has to be asked would all of the users in local government be OK to use Gmail from a legal perspective?
for example police or social services might have more stringent data protection requirements.
https://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/government/benefits.h...
> Google Apps for Government includes dozens of security features specifically designed to keep your data safe, secure and in your control. This segregated system, for government customers in the U.S. only, was the first cloud-based email application to receive FISMA accreditation from the U.S. federal government.
http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft_office_365_blog/archive/...
Sufficiently large organizations don't just accept the click-through EULA. Get a contract and sue if it's breached.
Yes, you can can read it both ways...
I guess nobody wants to administer mail these days...
If I were in that boat, I'd beg and plead to put everyone on a disposable internet-only type machine and run webapps only. Then I could worry about security and reliability, which sadly gets last priority in most places :(
http://betanews.com/2011/10/20/los-angeles-wants-refund-for-...
""Google's record with the city is nothing but broken promises and missed deadlines," the letter reads in part. "The Internet giant simply has not done what it said it would do and has tried to buy its way out of the mess it has made by covering the unbudgeted costs of the LAPD's GroupWise System that the department has been forced to continue using."
The mayor's office did not have any immediate comment as of press time."
Edit: Somewhat ironic that Google Docs and Drive are currently down. https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=google%20drive&src...
"Google Drive documents list goes empty for users " http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57583952-93/google-drive-do...
For a while after I was a social pariah. My expense reports would go missing (want to find a Microsoft fan? look in accounting). My calls to IT (staffed with MCWhatever certified individuals) unanswered. The controller pulled me aside and said in a menacing Brooklyn accent I didn't know he had in him, "I would appreciate it if you would make this go away."
I learned a valuable about switching costs that day.
People used to folder their emails because searching was terrible. Gmail's search is pretty good, so the best workflow in my opinion is to archive email once you're done with it, and search if you need something specific. I do use labels too, especially auto-labels, but I've found search to be more useful.
Still, some people are reluctant to change, and just want to do things the way they've always done it. So that's why nested labels exist.
I've downloaded my mail to mac's mail app. With identical search strings, the Mail app finds more messages.
This includes searching by sender email, which yields incomplete results in gmail.
There have been many occasions where I've only sent someone one email, or vice versa. Gmail often misses these.
So for anything I must find (e.g. tax documents) I label them.
IMAP and POP use hierarchical folders and don't understand that a tax email might be marked as both "Government" and "Finances", or whatever your filing system happens to be.
I've found 1-2 emails in mail from a particular sender, where gmail was unable to find any results, even with their exact address.
I've likewise found perhaps 7/10 of a set of emails in gmail, and found the remaining 3 in mail (while confirming they had unique information not listed in gmail).
People only use search exclusively in Gmail because they don't have folders.
That's not a benefit. It complicates things. Folders are simpler - one location, one parent, one place to go and find it. Average users can understand folders. Heck, expert users can use folders immediately without having to figure anything else out.
If nested tags are better than straight hierarchies for storing and finding things...where are all of the nested tag file systems? In a nested tag file system - would I have to go all the way to a settings dialog to create a new label like in Gmail?
Also, look at this guy's post about how "Gmail sucks when you have lots of mail" - and his response to someone recommending nested tags (Apparently, you can't just drag an email to nested tag.) - https://plus.google.com/105059362788808645801/posts/3amd9ZMi... All the web-app loving hipsters jump on his case for not "knowing the tool". I love it. How about just give us a tool that works like we expect? Who wants to invest time figuring out a new email client that has very questionable benefits?
I use a remote data center email server because office/residential network connections tend to be unreliable. Even without the telephone getting knocked down, I get intermittent outages. I'd prefer to have mission critical services (like email receipt) working at a data center. This way the message is received and doesn't bounce back. Then, my local exchange server can pull the data when it's online.
So, I guess the mobile option wouldn't really work in this case unless you were sure the IP address won't change.
The company was very East Coast, very sales-driven, not very tech-driven at the time. I don't like using age as a proxy for tech-savviness since there are plenty of tech-savvy older folks, but this was a bit of an older organization as well.
But yeah, people adapt. They will kick and scream and claim that their world is ending and then a month later they'll forget about the old way of doing things. (Or, as was often the case, IT just set up their Outlook to pull their emails from Gmail's servers.) And then the anger subsided.
I've noticed that using IMAP on multiple devices can cause Gmail to say that you're using too much resources. Tripped me when I first saw the limitations. I had not thought there were limits on Gmail. How did they handle issues where people might want to access Gmail from various devices? Google has some numbers and recommendations here[1] but I'm interested in how you handled situations like this in the real world.
[1] https://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=...
I seriously doubt Accounting has Microsoft fans as such. They're very wedded to their tools and workflow in order to do their job because they spend their entire day on email and spreadsheets. Take away those and replace them with crippled alternatives like only Excel on the web, and they'll still hate it even if made by Microsoft.
How would a developer react if one day their vim editor was removed and replaced by EMACS or vice versa because of a mandate from the CEO?
And that's to say nothing on the idiocy when those users decide they are empowered by their tools and decide they'll do math with them. I've seen more than one case where the AVG function was replaced with SUM and COUNT.
A much better article on the subject: http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/10/google-apps-hasnt-me...