Slashdot Mirror
Los Angeles Goes Google Apps With Microsoft Cash
Dan Jones writes "The Los Angeles City Council has approved a US$7.25 million, five-year deal with Google in which the city will adopt Gmail and other Google Apps. Interestingly, just over $1.5 million for the project will come from the payout of a 2006 class action lawsuit between the City and Microsoft (Microsoft paid $70 million three years ago to settle the suit by six California counties and cities who alleged that Microsoft used its monopoly position to overcharge for software). The city will migrate from Novell GroupWise e-mail servers. For security, Google will provide a new separate data environment called 'GovCloud' to store both applications and data in a completely segregated environment that will only be used by public agencies. This GovCloud would be encrypted and 'physically and logically segregated' from Google's standard applications. Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?"
You neglect the effect of the close call that MS experienced that tempered, somewhat its proclivity for using the Mafia business model. Remember even under the W, supposedly MS was under judicial restraint. Those factors had to play a role in allowing competition to reappear*.
* However, if you look at the netbook experience where Linux suddenly vanished (supposedly completely) from its initial dominance one can see hints that MS is probably back to its old game, but the environment has altered in the interim.
In a word, no, Google mail is not ready for primetime. They are not able to meet the SLA's required for a business, especially government work where the email system needs to be readily available. I would assume there is some extent of document management involved here, and if that's the case what happens when gmail goes down? I know government tends to move slowly, but this could seriously interrupt procedures - what if cases weren't tried in due time? Businesses and government use email for more than just simple communication, it could also be a sign-off step in a procedure's workflow, and breaking that is often a big problem.
In 2009 Gmail was down in February and then in September, and I believe there was at least once more occurence this year as well. In 2008 Google was down in July, three times in August, and once in October. If I ran a business and my email was completely down to this extent I would fire my Exchange team.
Sure Google gives you 15 days free when the service is unavailable for a period of time, but that doesn't really help now does it?
"Cloud Computing" differs from "information superhighway," "cyber" and "web 2.0" in that it's not just a buzzword but an actual strategy shift in software development which is not only creating "marketing babble" but also directing an increasingly large share of global IT expenditures. This is a real fundamental shift away from traditional notions of the "Platform" away from operating system APIs and proprietary client/server applications to ubiquitous web/standards based applications and commoditized scalable third party provided infrastructure. Capital expenses are shifting to operating expenses, and whenever this much money changes focus you have to keep your head on straight and your eyes open.
I run a small 200+ computer operation and had Google Enterprise call yesterday. We use their Postini service for spam and really like it. The sales rep on the line wanted to know if we were interested in their Apps product and had mentioned that Los Angeles recently switched to it. Call me traditional or old-fashioned, but I like having physical access to my data. I also like being responsible for ensuring our services stay up and running. If e-mail is down, I can fix it, instead of calling someone else to check it out for me. Several techs in our state from a recent meeting shared this sentiment as well. What is the general overall feeling from IT on "cloud computing"? I'd be curious the thoughts from the LA IT department...
It's a mystery to me what "satisfactorily stable" consists of for people who point out availability as a problem with cloud solutions. As a rule, enterprises don't publish their internal downtime statistics, but I can tell you that for a large chunk of them, it's far worse than the occasional Gmail outages. And no one who makes that argument ever seems to look at the necessary companion to stability, which is cost. What does it cost you to be satisfactorily stable running internally? For most businesses, again, it's a lot more than an Apps subscription, for a lot less stability.
As for off-line access, Gears is already available to allow offline access to Gmail, but if you don't like that, you can just as easily configure the same sort of standard POP3 or IMAP client-side application that you would use with any other mail service, with the same capabilities should your connection be severed.
It also seems to me that people over-estimate what actually gets done in many offices when network access goes out, regardless of the off-line capabilities of clients, but that's another arguement.
No relation to Happy Monkey
possibly, but the only outage we have experienced was about 2 hours and was only the web interface, i have seen much more downtime on a local exchange server
A Smith & Wesson beats four aces -- Murphy's Law of Poker
That's not the reasoning for our case (I used to co-admin the email system where we're at but have mostly given up my influence there after just taking on too many other systems so that I didn't have time to work with it anymore). For a long time we monitored anything with an image coming in to make sure that it wasn't the type of stuff you mention. Eventually though the man-time required for that just became too much. I still admin the filtering gateway but not the actual server anymore.
No, in our case it's more so a misguided belief that users simply shouldn't save email once they get it; their thought is that "if you need to keep it, print it out", which is about as goofy a thing as I can imagine in this age. Why should I waste more paper and storage space out here in the real world AND drop back to a format that is non electronically searchable?
Part of it too is that due to being government and subject to FOIA they'd rather that in case there is anything embarrassing in the emails that it not stay too long in the system where someone can request it. Enforcing quotas means there's but so much mail a citizen can ask for (since they can only requests what we actually keep). Now don't get me wrong we're not involved in water-gate here, but if for example, someone forwards one of the jokes you mention above that happens to have a girl in a bikini in it, then the powers that be just don't want such an email showing up in our batch of stuff if we receive a FOIA request.
I also think that on some level it's just outdated admin views. The main admin of that system is from old school mainframe times. She almost views technology with a disdain. She gets unnerved if people send her a short email about something rather than just calling on the phone (and I'm complete opposite). Or when additional users ask for email access she's always complaining about how they probably don't need it (in her eyes email is like some precious resource that should only be doled out to the most essential personnel). It's almost as if she yearns for the old days when the computer systems were segregated from the majority of the workers (even office workers) and it was just a small subset of trained users on the system.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Google is well on its way to becoming Skynet! Come on, don't give them control of an entire Governments worth of information!