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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.'"
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.
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
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).