Hacker News Reader

Comment by chayesfss | Hacker News Reader

Nice try, microsoft "data from 2012 that shows of 42 federal government contracts that both Microsoft and Google competed for during the year, Google had more than twice the success than Microsoft. Of the deals, 23 were won by Google and 10 by Microsoft."

View on HN

Interestingly, the GSA which supplied that data to the NY Times has also moved to Google Apps in 2011: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/07/gsa-has-gone-go...

I know, we provide their SSO & 2fa solution for access (mail.google.com/a/gsa.gov is a public website as is secureauth.gsa.gov) along with many other government agencies. I've done many identity provider installs, google apps always goes great, office 365, not so much. MS requires them to have adfs which is basically a horrible offering (want to get rid of exchange, here, install all of these adfs servers on premise). Don't get me started.

Isn't it fun to explain that to provide SSO to Office 365 you effectively need 8+ ADFS servers and a couple of pairs of load balancers (or NLB) spread across at least two data center locations?[1]

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...

and there's the little part about adfs not including any integrated two-factor for external users. Someone can basically sit here all day and bang away at mail.google.com/a/doi.gov with accounts like Bob_Abbey@ios.doi.gov or Ken_Salazar@ios.doi.gov (just google @ios.doi.gov) and it'll never lock out access from your ip.

>Of the deals, 23 were won by Google and 10 by Microsoft."

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.

"The entire State University of New York (700,000) use MS Office."

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.

Reference:

State University of New York moves 465,000 students over to Microsoft’s Cloud

http://www.winrumors.com/state-university-of-new-york-moves-...

I'm afraid that article is not accurate at all. When reading something about SUNY if it mentions an IT decision being made system wide it's most likely inaccurate bullshit. Nearly every campus has it's own disjoint IT and outside of strong suggestions and price incentives each campus can make it's own choices.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com