Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
And how much "corporate control" can you exert over an Android phone? Encryption? They have a central management server you can install?
I really doubt an offering from Google is ready for the government scene. They may be perfect for home consumer markets, which is fine, but not government or 'secure' corporate.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I work in government. Not DC.
The problem is user inertia, it always has been, it always will be.
We deployed SharePoint years ago. Did that improve anything? No. User's still send attachments in email, still use network drives for collaboration, and still use spreadsheets to gather data.
The spreadsheet thing is really funny. The boss finally put the spreadsheet up on SharePoint and sent a link to it. But you still see people downloading the spreadsheet from the site, filling out their portion, then uploading it with a new name. Then yelling over the cubicle wall that they are done with their tasking. We've gone through training and tried to get them to do it the more efficient way. Impossible task.
Trying to get users to switch off of software and methods they've used for years is a near impossibility.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
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...)
"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." This part looks very interesting to me as in the past few weeks a lot of things Mr Vivek Kundra has been claiming he done in the past have turned out not true and has opened a lot of questions about his experience and expertise. You just had the John C.Dvorak blog bring up a lot of questions and day by day it seems he is more right http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/ I am starting to wonder if this selection was not some kind of political pay back for something Vivek Kundra did in the past or people around him.
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)
Wow, and the haters who love to bash MS begin. Ya, exchange, the mature product that does calendering and mail and all your contacts truely sucks. It is much worst then google (oh wait, they don't have a global directory, and email outage, blah blah blah), or Apple .mac (really? that works now?) or mac servers with IMAP.
Google, is not enterprise ready, and is not secure, and will own your data in the cloud. I would perfer my local .gov NOT to use it if my name is going to be on any of their docs.
If Google used this 'news' to help their stock prices or increase sales, id call it fraud. And they might too.
1) You're assuming that Google had any idea. They got an agreement from DC that they could use them in advertising (I'm fairly certain, since no one trumpets a customer without such an agreement) that that's it. They don't get to tell DC how to use it.
2) There's nothing false in saying you made a large sale when you did. Your claim of fraud is similar to claiming fraud when Ford touts a giant sale of a fleet of cars to the military when the military is just putting them into bunkers and never driving them.
3) Do you really think an apps sale to DC affected Google's stock price? I dare you to find a blip on their chart.
The spokeswoman added that Gmail could potentially replace Microsoft Exchange, 'but this decision has not been made yet.'"
Quit dorking around the flip the switch already. We did and it was the best move we ever made. It was a little rocky at first, then smooth sailing ever since. We've noticed two outages in the last year, I think there have been three total. Only the recent one generated any calls. Overall that makes it more reliable than Exchange.
Not sure what holds companies back from making the change. I've heard the arguments, they don't hold up to reality. Google doesn't spy on our email and if it's something really sensitive we can add a password to the document or encrypt the content. I've done that exactly once in the last year. Your company email passes unencrypted through dozens of relays, regardless of what email provider you use. Any one of those relays could be copying and storing those messages. So what would make Google any bigger risk than any one of them?
Backups are the other thing I hear about a lot. If it's that important, you can set up Gmail to auto-forward some or all of your messages to another account or you can use any number of tools in Windows, Linux and Mac to keep backups, if you feel the need. So far email backups have been a big waste of time and drive space, but I suppose it's better that small waste than a big loss if something bad did happen.
That change freed up a lot of money. We didn't need an Exchange admin and we saved a bundle on license fees.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
I have to agree. I am generally in favor of free and open source software. But MS exchange and the software ecosystem surrounding it is highly available, reliable, feature rich, painlessly scalable from a small operation up to hundreds of thousands or possibly even millions of users at a price point that almost any business can afford. Its one of microsofts best products, and there really isn't anything I have seen in any competitors that can meet, much less, beat Exchange at its game.
Wait a second, you and your girlfriend were testing out a new camera...
And you decided to take a picture of your face?
In the same situation, my girlfriend would have been nude within seconds.
As an open source evangelist, I also regretfully agree. While there are substitutes for many *parts* of the Exchange ecosystem, there is no other truly integrated system that works as well, is as comprehensive, provides the full gamut of functionality and is as mature and easy to use.
If you want to know how Google Apps as a whole compares to Exchange as a whole, compare the Google Apps spreadsheet application to MS Excel. Sure, it covers the functionality needed by little Johnny figuring out what a spreadsheet is, but the minute you need to do any *real* spreadsheet work, Google Apps just doesn't deliver.
That is true of the whole Google Apps framework. It's great for high school study groups and perhaps even university clubhouses, but when heavy lifting needs to be done, it doesn't cut the mustard. Anyone who thinkos otherwise hasn't spent any/enough time in a real, productive office workplace.
As I said, I regret to have to say this, as I'm a Linux only desktop user, and hate it every time I have to troubleshoot some guy's virus infested workstation. I *wish* open source could deliver, but it just can't - YET. Google Apps, THANK GOD, doesn't deliver. Moving from platform lock in on the desktop to another platform lock in where not only the software that I'm using but also my frakkin' USER DATA is also locked in is literally jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Can the Google fanboys please stop? Can't you idiots see that Google has the makings of an evil monopoly that makes Microsoft look like your friendly local corner store.
I hate printers.
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
I thought blow up dolls came nude....
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.
Consider this:
I've seen lots of companies using local authentication for their linux boxes, along with a supposedly secret root password configured in every machine. There are a lot of centralized directory and authentication options for linux. But, how much people use it? But, they do know how to setup Microsoft's Active Directory and setup clients to use it.
Linux has ACLs for some time know, something that is way better than the old permission schemes. But, again, I've never seen it widely deployed across a large network. ACLs are the default file permission scheme on Windows.
No to mention that lots of linux and servers desktop out there are not configured with a password on GRUB to avoid people booting into single mode and getting root credentials.
So, while linux is as corporate-security capable as windows under a administrative point of view, most corporations and system administrations are not aware of that. And even when they are, the tools for managing such things are not as straightforward to use as Active Directory;
Being less sucetible to exploits is not the whole game in security. It doesn't matter what is your operating system, a badly configured operating system is insecure no matter which kernel do you use. And at this point, ease of management becomes very important.
Your ad could be here!
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
Palm took an android kernel and ran a completely new userland/frontend (WebOS) on top
Do you have any evidence that Palm took the kernel from Android, as opposed to a stock ARM Linux kernel? Actually, reading the rest of your post, do you know what 'kernel' means?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Exchange over Activesync? RPC over HTTPS? Seamless integration with Outlook?
(I know that Zimbra, a groupware product I used for a LONG time, had the basics of the first feature, but lacked everything else.)
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.