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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.'"
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
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
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.
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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).