Comment by cooldeal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cooldeal | Hacker News Reader

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>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.

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