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Google Apps Not the DC Success Many Believe?
theodp writes "Google touts its partnership with the District of Columbia government, presenting it as quite the Google Apps success story. So as part of his coverage of last week's Gmail outage, nextgov's Gautham Nagesh called the DC government, but was told they hadn't heard of any reports of outages among city employees. Nagesh wrote this off to safeguards put in place for the government by Google, but readers tipped him off to another explanation: 'Despite all the press releases trumpeting Google in DC,' an anonymous commenter wrote, 'Exchange is still the city's primary email system.' Nagesh followed up, and was surprised to learn that there is indeed no Gmail in DC government. This all seemed rather strange to Nagesh, considering how much attention former DC CTO and current Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has received for implementing Google Apps for District employees. Reporting separately, CNET's Elinor Mills was told by a DC spokeswoman that while Google Apps is available to 38,000 DC city employees, only 4,000 are actively using it. The spokeswoman added that Gmail could potentially replace Microsoft Exchange, 'but this decision has not been made yet.'"
Playing with my girlfriend's new Android we managed to freeze it utterly within a minute of playing with the piss-poor camera*, and after connecting to my wifi once successfully it won't do it anymore, for no reason we can see.
The rest of the phone is shaping up to be awesome (especially when available on such cheap contracts and with google apps fully intergrated), but it needs some improvement to get the non-geek majority away from thier shiney iPhones.
*(The camera broke when trying to take a photo of my face, so it might not be an issue with the phone...)
You're very right.
As someone who has managed a few mail migrations for government agencies, and I probably could guess the reason why GMail isn't in use in DC: Calendaring. I've seen hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted over this bs.
Typical problem: you cannot instantaneously migrate GB's of email. But once you migrate the accounting department, they won't be able to see free/busy status for the garbagemen, which is essential for some reason. Or worse, the conference room!
So instead of using the secretaries to actually do something (government office still have them), they wait for a magic, half-baked technical solution.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
While I was living in DC (in the District itself, mind you) and working for PricewaterhouseCoopers, I met with the CIO of the DC Public Schools to see about doing some pro bono work to help with their information technology problems. She spent an hour describing just how wretched, disjoint, and underutilized their IT infrastructure was, and we came to the joint conclusion that there wasn't a lot that I could do to help.
This was about 10 years ago, and I was looking just as the DC Public Schools system, not the District as a whole. But as anyone (else) who has lived in the District for an extended period, particularly as a private citizen, can tell you, the District of Columbia is a profoundly dysfunctional government.
That said, I'm not sure Google should be going around touting their adoption in the District as a success story, since -- as per the original post above -- any effort to check out what's actually going on is likely to be quite disappointing. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
I understand and have worked in that environment, as well. But, it is also clear from your statement that you have never worked in government and especially in government with a union.
All it takes is one guy filing a "Change in work environment" complaint with the union and the boss's "new process" becomes not only moot, but it will become a forbidden choice for all time and eternity.
In government, you will rarely hear bosses try that.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
People in the "secure" market have phones. The thing all phones have in common is that they can all be hacked; doesn't matter whether its an IPhone or a BB if someone wants your information, they can get it. It doesn't matter who writes the encryption, there's always someone better who will crack it.
Riiiight. Unlike the iphone and other POS phones, the blackberry has been audited from end-to-end and is certified to a number of different standards. The blackberry platform has been audited by:
NATO
Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (Germany)
Communications Security Establishment (Canada)
Communications Electronic Security Group (United Kingdom)
Center for Secure Information Technology (Austria)
Defense Signals Directorate (Australia)
Government Communications Security Bureau (New Zealand)
National Institute of Standards and Technology (United States)
Turkish Standards Institute (Turkey)
Who audited the iphone? Nobody, because Apple can't do security.
As an ex-DC resident of many years, I had to laugh out loud when I read that there even was a partnership between Google and DC gov, and I was rolling on the floor thinking about the DC DMV using google docs or calender. I think most have just mastered the Google search field...maybe. I agree with WED Fan above, DC workers are not going to embracing new tech anytime soon. They are still suffering heart attacks over the office 2007 ribbon. And about those 4,000 that have made the huge dramatic mt. Everest leap to gmail, I bet most of them just have home accounts. Even more hilarious was when I searched for a DC gov group and only found ONE. It has 3 members and ONE post. Boy, they are really using that Goog feature no? But I may have a chip on my shoulder, as when I went into south west DC to renew my driver's license right around the time of the last Clinton election, I was asked first if I was a Republican or a Dem before getting any service. I told the big bottomed woman that I was of course a Dem and not to be fooled by my Fitzgerald Bold Pinstripe from Brooks Bros. We had a laugh, but I seriously think that if I had told the truth I would not have gotten renewed in the blazing speed that I did (two hours). For sure that lady is not using any kind of cloud computing today, unless you count daydreaming at the terminal.
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
How much do you want? Android isn't some take-it-or-leave-it system like iPhoneOS, it's a flexible platform the manufacturers and carriers can build on. TMobile released the G1 with pretty much a stock android system, but Palm took an android kernel and ran a completely new userland/frontend (WebOS) on top. AT&T is talking about releasing the HTC Lancaster with an android kernel but with a standard locked down AT&T userland with all the crappy "BUY STUFF" apps on the desktop you can't delete.
There's no reason a company can't use Android as a starting point to build a custom locked-down environment with central management, encryption, etc. and a lot of reasons TO do this, since they have all the Linux security stuff already available to tie in, meaning less in-house work.
What I recall reading was that in 2008, DC decided to start transitioning to Google Docs for replacing Word and Excel, and as a starting point for an all web application interface going forward. There was one brief mention that Gmail would be provided as well, but nothing that said they were going to use it as the primary e-mail client/server.
So I guess my question would be, where is DC with this transition and where had they planned to be? Since e-mail was not the focus of the project, where are they with the other applications? Have they signed any new licenses for MSOffice or for a new version? Do they have any desktops without MSOffice? Do any of there users run word processing and spreadsheets with Google Apps instead of Word and Excel?
As someone intimately familiar with Exchange, perhaps you can answer this simple question: What features does it have that OpenGroupware.org or Scalable OpenGroupware.org do not have? Exchange advocates frequently cling to the 'integrated address book, mail and calendaring' line, but OG.o/SOG.o have had that for a while, along with support for CalDAV clients and a web interface. Presumably, as someone who is an open source evangelist but familiar with Exchange, you can shed some light on exactly what the compelling features of Exchange over the competition are. I presume it has some, but without anyone who uses Exchange being willing to enumerate them, it's difficult for open source alternatives to implement them.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Unfortunately, these kind of comparisons are very hard to do, because people that are familiar with Exchange usually aren't as familiar with other products, even if they looked at them or evaluated them.
From my perspective as someone who works for a small Microsoft Partner, the main advantage of Exchange over the competition is "it just works". Getting a small company with 10-50 employees up and running on Microsoft's Small Business Server 2008 is something that can be done in a few days, and it offers much more than just Groupware (managed updates, group policies, file sharing, intranet using Sharepoint services).
Outlook integrates into Sharepoint, Active Directory, etc. without the need to configure anything. You can easily get a fairly standardized setup without much hassle or the necessity to develop or create deployment plans, default configurations, etc. in house, as SBS already ships with a very decent configuration that only needs slight adjustments.
My most extensive experience with another Groupware product was Lotus Notes, using both the native Notes Client and the Outlook Connector. Notes gives you several things that Outlook does not have (e.G. offline capable applications that can replicate their database when the network is back up), but it's much more of a hassle to use. The Outlook plugin sometimes just doesn't work, lags behind released Outlook versions (took forever till they got a 2007 version out), etc.
I know that the Slashdot groupthink here disagrees, but Microsoft does indeed products that work together very well. You can all your non line of business infrastructure from Microsoft, and you'll get a pretty decent system, even though there are some suppliers out there that offer partially better products (e.G. VMware).
Friends don't help friends install Communist Linsux.