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Minnesota Moving To Microsoft's Cloud
An anonymous reader writes "The State of Minnesota is apparently the first state to move into the cloud, agreeing on a deal to have their messaging and collaboration services delivered through Microsoft's Business Online Productivity Suite. The thing the article doesn't tell you in detail is that the agreement precludes the use of open source software, which could have saved the taxpayers millions of dollars. And once such a large organization goes Microsoft, it's difficult to go back. Isn't it interesting that these developments occur right before elections, as senior officials are trying to keep their jobs with a new incoming administration? What do you think, Slashdotters? Is this a good move for Minnesota? Or a conservative move that bucks the trend of saving money and encouraging open government and transparency by aligning philosophy and practice with at least the option of utilizing open source software?"
Microsoft BOPS... Seriously?
I think the summary is the most self-serving OSS trash that I've read here. What guarantee does OSS make that will save taxpayers millions of dollars? The cost of retraining government staff on inferior software? The cost of converting documents to another format and losing formatting? Which one?
And once such a large organization goes Microsoft, it's difficult to go back.
You need a large, thick, vertically and horizontally integrated businesses to handle large customers. But actually, unbeknownst to you, the average person has been going Microsoft for much larger, er, longer than you realize. Imagine the confusion that would ensue from switching to Linux - a Windows user who is used to tasks being performed for them on the bottom of their desktop may find themselves confused that the tasks are all on the top and they have to do much more work themselves.
TFA:
How could switching to an entirely incompatible platform have saved taxpayers millions?
People are used to microsoft. Its a recognised brand name - irrelevant of how good/bad it is.
If a leader decides that their underlings will use this 'new-fangled' leenux instead of what everyone else always uses, people get scared of the change and react badly to it.
Even trying to explain to my sister why she should give Ubuntu a try was a problem for me, let alone trying to get a large group of (non-techy) people to make the switch.
Then once the smallest problem crops up, people would go "Why did you switch to such a rubbish system? We should have gone Microsoft" - again irrelevant of the change in problem amount.
"lady, I never go into any place I can't get out of"
The cloud is a great idea combined with standard formats for data (XML, whatever). IT overhead is a headache. Running servers is a pain.
The data is the important thing, not how it's manipulated. This point needs to be beaten into people.
If you're foolish enough to move into a third party cloud without standardized data formats.. or a way to get out..
You'll wish being ambushed in a bar by spies was the worst thing that could happen :)
..don't panic
"The thing the article doesn't tell you in detail is that the agreement precludes the use of open source software, which could have saved the taxpayers millions of dollars"
There are so many things wrong with that sentence that i don't know where to start. Open source "Free" does not mean money saved.
Obviously not.
The thing the article doesn't tell you in detail is that the agreement precludes the use of open source software, which could have saved the taxpayers millions of dollars.
Before I saddle up the war horses, can you provide a citation?
This is a serious allegation; tying arrangements are dangerously prosecutable under antitrust laws, as Microsoft should remember.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Surely the real cost they're paying here is for the "cloud services", and so the price would be similar whether or not the software behind it is OSS or not? Or is the argument just anti-MS really? It sounds like there's some saving from a previous move to MS Exchange and the licensing deal from that as well though.
What do you think, Slashdotters? Is this a good move for Minnesota?
Hmmmm... I've studied the data carefully and considered the pros and cons, taking account of the prevailing trends and allowing for all the variables. Based on my analysis I predict that the Slashdot consensus will be that going all Microsoft is not a good move.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
You can't just compare the upfront costs. What are the on-going support costs? There's even an open source tool to calculate TCO: http://www.tcotool.org/index_en.html
I'm from Duluth, MN and I say GACK! At one point, there was a state legislator who attempted to set into law, open document formats. Black suits showed up and ......bzzzzt!
But really, does this mean I have to now own proprietary applications to view public documents? Thanks for so much you've left us Pawlenty.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1347764/Minnesota-first-US-State-to-sell-soul
Really makes us Microsoft Haters feel all warm and fuzzy inside!
Ha Ha Ha
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
While those are valid points, we're talking about a cloud here. You don't see what OS you're dealing with if you don't want to.
For example, take salesforce.com. That is entirely based upon RedHat Enterprise Linux. It used to be Solaris/Sparc, but they found that x86 was much cheaper. They serve 88,000 companies with 1,500 Dom0 servers. And the cool thing is that they've integrated mobile devices (phone and pads) with their cloud. So you can handle your apps from your office PC, or smart mobile system. That's one heck of a competitive advantage for businesses.
And the funny thing is that I had a debate recently with a rapid Microsoft zealot who gave me the usual (outdated) MS hype about how Linux was a rip-off of UNIX, yada, yada. He was also a solid zealot for salesforce.com. He shut up after I mentioned that salesforce.com was a Linux shop, and his beloved tech was running on Linux.
The numbers above come from a recent RedHat dog-and-pony show about their new Cloud technology. They trotted out a guy from salesforce.com, and these are the numbers that he gave.
Now, I'm wondering where that leaves Suse and Ubuntu in the Cloud space. They can do like RedHat and hire Wipro to write their semi-proprietary Cloud stack. Or they can go with Open Stack and give NASA and Rackspace a hand with their Open Source Cloud.
FTFA:
Am I the only one who sees a basic incompatibility here?
Also, the original poster is wrong - if you can't manipulate the data, it's pretty much useless except to historians. You might as well store it on microfiche and lock it in a vault.
A few years ago Minnesota was looking at mandating open standards for all government operations. Now they have taken a huge step towards vendor lock-in. This move will lock up Minnesota's history for decades to come. At the same time it will make the state's operations far less reliable.
The article comments that Minnesota is switching over to something businesses have found great success in for years. As someone that has to use BPOS at work I must say the system is incredibly unreliable. We have had email simply disappear into a void. The service is slow. It frequently stops working for hours at a time. We have had other email delivered hours after it was sent.
We had to disable rather important functionality in order to migrate over to BPOS as we are not allowed to customize anything. Now we have users doing things by hand which used to be automated.
Before we switched over to BPOS I considered email as trustworthy and reliable as most utilities. My employer has structured the company with the assumption that email will be a reliable communications medium. With BPOS in place it is a burden on our organization.
Hmm... seems strange that this is also the home of Michele Bachmann, who is very outspoken about "wasteful government spending" and a proponent of small government (http://www.michelebachmann.com/about/). This seems to go against those values and her push to keep jobs local and create jobs locally. However it does seem to fit with her less spoken about ideas of privatizing everything. I wonder if we should be drawing any conclusions from the fact, or coincidence, she sits on the Financial Services Committee. I would think once one state goes this route, others will follow suit. I can also see how having all of your data saved in the cloud (we aren't responsible for it) would be in the interest of any generic banking institution. Also, not having an open source platform could make transparency much more difficult, not that government or banking institutions would ever want to hide anything!
Member of American Sarcasm Society - Motto: "Like we need your help!"
Using OSS and having transparent government have NOTHING to do with each other, unless you are counting on everyone's ability to hack into the OSS and see every detail of how all government agencies are working. At which point, the entire state would collapse into a coma from the sheer boredom of it all. Second point - whether or not the state saves money is not really a function of what the software costs. Ongoing maintenance and staff support time will dwarf that figure.
That is unless someone cal tell me how a move to an [open source alternative] would be better. Even these OSS alternatives have to be supported. The last time I checked, their support was anemic! Just ask the University of California.
yeah right.
i'm sure tim pawlenty (whose claim on history will be having given minnesota's infrastucture budget to his rich pals in the form of high-bracket tax reductions - with predictable impact on, particularly, the I-35 bridge) and michelle bachmann are more than happy at your retconning of history.
hubert fucking humphrey? from the 1960's? you asshat.
I guess this news should have floored me but it doesn't. We have an entrenched administration that has the mantra "No new taxes" which has a nice sounding ring to it but the result has been less pretty (like a major interstate bridge that just decided to fall into the Mississippi river). I was drivng down the freeway today and the truck was bouncing around so badly I had to slow down (and I was not speeding).
How does all this relate to moving to the Microsoft cloud? I am sure the state is getting a low cost price to get them in the door. Once hooked the price will go up and it will need to be paid and some other service will be asked to do more with less. Maybe the old lady in the nursing home will have to cut back on someting like drugs or catheters. Maybe a school will have to put off buying science textbooks (for the tenth year in a row).
Minnesota cannot 'move'.
An American guy i know says Americans are getting fatter and stupider every year... I guess that's one small step for Minnesota, one giant fat and stupid for Minnesotans (Minnesotians? Minne-idiots?)
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
Agreed, but easy for me to believe. Microsoft remembers, but just doesn't care. What is the government going to do? Ask them to think of their own punishment again? Boo-hoo.
I started using Linux in 1995 and have been using it almost exclusively since 1998.
What confuses me every time I try to use Windows is how many tasks I have to do on the top of the desktop that Linux does for me automatically without any intervention from me.
Linux just works, Windows is continuously asking me to do something.
Linux is the lover from your daydreams, Windows is the nagging wife from your reality.
The difference is that in the software world dreams can become reality.
My guess is that the state of Minnesota already has developed custom software in-house that depends on the Microsoft platform. You migrate to a Microsoft cloud if your existing software is already locked into Microsoft platform. That's only natural. At any rate, the whole cloud computing concept is very simple: let someone who is good at running data center do their job.
You could very well argue that redeveloping the software to base on an open-source platform might be a better plan in the long run, and I would tend to agree with that. But the redevelopment will surely cost the state some millions of dollars more in the short run.
You also probably don't realize that software costs money to develop. Even when the software is offered to you for free, someone, somewhere is paying for it. That's because someone has to spend time doing something. In order to sustain the livelihood, that person needs to eat, drink, pay rent, and once in a while use medical help. When software gets open sourced, the person is donating his time and effort and has absorbed the cost of writing the software.
And don't forget that free software is not really about the cost. It's about the freedom to learn from the software, to modify the software, and to distribute your modifications.
I once had a signature.
There isn't one. Minnesota is gonna get fucked in the pooper on this one.
Well this would explain why the state is blue most election years. It's not voting for the Democratic candidate; it's crashing.
Will it have a dome?
control society. Why are they allowing a private entity (non government) control of the publics information? The public (and maybe the State) will not have access to public information. What is the process for a FOIA now? The State has to ask Microsoft for the information? On a different angle, Microsoft is not known for properly backing up information. What guarantees are Microsoft making for good backup and accurate restores? What guarantees are in place to protect the private citizens information from Microsoft or others? Just look at what Grumman did to West Virginia. The State was down for over a week. This whole thing is very bad. Leave government IT functions to government employees. Otherwise your handing over your government to corporations. Corporations that hold government contracts are seldom audited, as opposed to government entities which are audited at least annually.
Many government services need to be up nearly 24/7. Government employees are not paid well and their resources are nothing like those in the private sector. I speak from experience here.
It's nice and all to say that they should be using OSS, but really? Data centers are expensive. So flamebaity as the OP was, consider:
1) government entities need to invest in a really good database platform with upper echelon support and training options, as well as with a large community of mercenary experts you could bring in from anywhere in an emergency. SLAs for the government don't just lose money; you're talking about public safety departments, state/local/federal requirements for information access, etc. Waiting for forum answers is frequently not an option.
2) having employees with deeply technical skill sets and loads of experience is going to be hard; keeping them for any length of time is going to be harder. You are going to offer very little in terms of salary for doing actual work; benefits are good, but they really only matter if you're still relatively young career-wise. 25-year retirement plans don't matter if you have 20 years of experience already. Government employees also jump between positions a lot. This means the guy who developed an app might then become a sysadmin, then he might move to the HR department, then go work for the Clerk. You really don't get to call him in when there's an emergency. It's not his job and it's not his responsibility. That boundary is a requirement in government shops for liability positions. So that personal knowledge base is going to get flushed very frequently.
3) government IT supports dozens to hundreds of apps. Jails, fire departments, municipal services, judicial services and records, clerk apps (for elections and public record retention), public safety offices, tax information, property information, GIS and spatial databases for land parcels and property value assessment, not to mention any random social programs you have going on like substance abuse programs, public health departments, transportation bureaus, etc. If you think you're managing all of that on mysql, you're absolutely insane.
4) in-house development, while nice, tends to be impractical for anything that rates higher than "minor". You don't generally have career systems analysts who built the inmate tracking system from the ground up and documented their vast knowledge. These apps and their databases get absolutely massive, and between elected officials, turnover, and the frequency with which government employees tend to switch positions (to get promotions and earn more money, since merit raises are incredibly rare), having such monsters is a tremendous liability.
This is an area where OSS has yet to prove a good fit. Here and there it is an excellent solution; as a cover-all it is a terrible one. The OSS community is good, but Oracle and Microsoft answer their phones 24/7, and allow 15-minute MTTA SLAs to exist. Which, you know...is legally required in some places.
I read the article and Minnesota is moving their Email from several different platforms over to Exchange. Or in this case, exchange managed by MS, "aka the cloud". And I can see where this will save them money from having to support GroupWare, Lotus, and Exchange like they currently are and for large organizations, there isn't anything in the Opensource world that can compete with Exchange.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
A totally screwed state. After all, it's not as though BPOS is renowned for its reliability, and for that matter since when was it a clever idea for a state to go to relatively bleeding edge tech.
It does not surprise me one bit. Our Governor is a slime who only about 1/3 support and many of those only because of his party affiliation. (3rd parties upset results often here.) He's been doing the whole "no new taxes" thing for his whole term and its only ended up hurting us as well as word games where they actually raised taxes in other ways. Then we have our ROADS -- that bridge that fell down was ours -- which took a voter initiative to get the road funds used ON ROADS! (before the bridge fell, but not fast enough... the bridge fell while they were fixing it.) I wouldn't be surprised if MS bought his support since he wants to run for President or VP.
I used to know a state IT guy - a unix guru. You can be assured that they have some great experts for intelligent planning who were not the deciding factor. I will have to reach him and see if they cut his job since he did do some email servers among the 100s he managed.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Source article from the summary
Officials said the state did not seek bids, or requests for proposals, for a cloud computing system as Microsoft hosted suite was already a standard part of the earlier large licensing contract signed to consolidate the messaging systems.
The Sate capital is moving to St Cloud
We had enough clouds and rain in September, we need some fine weather (but some clouds overnight would save us from an early frost.
Every Silver Cloud has a leather lining.
People like the author of this story give my party good reason to think of Linux as liberal, however, I believe that open source was intended to be politically neutral. Many of you pretend to think it is still this way, while at the same time wishing the hot oil pit on all conservatives! There is a difference between progress and wishful thinking my friends. What most liberals fail to do is look at things from all angles I have noticed. For instance, gay marriage. Maybe homosexuality is not morally wrong, ok then, but the malice filled, nose upturned and false superiority attitude that comes with the majority of homos is morally and logically incorrect. Some of the less intelligent people in my party decided that linux was everything liberal, and because of these few retards spreading this rumor throughout the GOP, this is something that has stuck, and to add insult to injury, many of you regularly attack the Republicans, solidifying their belief that you are the enemy. To be fair, the reason about 30% of the people in my party are Republicans is from their wish to hide in the past, such as not believing in dinosaurs and evolution. Republicans are often a bunch of do-nothing fatasses, but democrats are a bunch of touchy-feely weasel faces that are willing to starve all of america to save an endangered breed of cockroach. I even hear them actually DEBATING on whether or not AIDS patients have the right to screw people without telling them they have AIDS first, "to protect their privacy". Sickening.
Microsoft really DOES have good enterprise tools. If you don't know about them all that means is you haven't worked with it in a large enterprise. That is not useless. It makes things easier to manage, which means less support costs. Never underestimate how much personnel can cost. If you save $1 million per year on licenses going open source, but have to hire 20 new support staff costing $70,000 each (remember people cost more than just their base salary, have to account for benefits, taxes, and so on) to support it you've lost money, even if there is no retraining/productivity loss.
I'm not saying that would be the case here, I haven't studied their setup and don't care to, but then neither have the knee-jerk "OSS is cheaper!" folks. Sorry, but it may not be. It is complicated. In any setup you have to study what they have, what they need, what it would take to change, and so on. ALL costs have to be considered. You can't only look at license or hardware costs and ignore staff or training costs.
So just because OSS doesn't have upfront costs doesn't mean it is free.
We've seen that where I work. We do Windows, Solaris, and Linux. It isn't really optional, we do education and research that needs all of them. Fair enough, but let me tell you getting a central system that works with all three has not been easy. It cost a fair bit of money (in the form of Sun Directory Server and IDsync) and a lot of development by our staff. It was worth it, since we need it, but there was real cost, and ongoing cost to support it. On the other hand Active Directory just works. Does what we need right out of the box. In fact the Windows side runs all on the AD, that just syncs to LDAP. Yes, we have to pay for Windows licenses, but there is something to be said for the features that come with it.
I'm quite sure that OSS can work for a large enterprise because there are plenty of examples where it does. However glibly assuming it is easy or costs less is stupid. The needs to the organization have to be assessed, and you have to factor in ALL costs. You may discover that in some situations the answer is it actually costs more. What you save on licenses you lose in other areas.
Whether it not you want to believe it, the anti-trust issue is still fresh in their minds and still affects the way it handles a majority of pr and marketing. How do I know? Just did my mandatory training and a large portion of it dealt with this and closely related subjects.
in less than 5 years i bet Minnesota declares bankruptcy and they are forced to change the name of the state to MSMinnesota then microsoft subsidizes the state government providing the state advertises and uses the MS logo on all state signs and official state documents & stationary.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
But a lot of people forget how much of his money actually goes to help others through such programs as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation..
And I thought the planet was rotating and orbiting the sun...
It likely goes against laws of the state related to government procurements and agreements. Most states have such laws and policies in place for good reason.
I think this agreement needs to be examined from as many perspectives as possible. It is clearly inappropriate for a vendor to say that a customer cannot do certain things as a condition for any given deal.
They are a cuckoo that has pushed its way into the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" mentality without providing the service that gave IBM the reputation.
The reality is such stupid stuffups as not even getting ping right when they had the source coded as a gift, divide by zero errors when they tried to go mission critical, devices that shut down due to leap years and the malware swamp we suffer from today. If you ask ME it's not a good Vista to look at.
I still use their stuff but there is no point pretending that it is the best available.
I hate to break it to you, but you do also have to pay to get support with commercial software, too. And pay MORE most of the time.
Microsoft is a monopoly. Nothing wrong with monopolies, per se, but they have to play by different rules.
MS is providing software and services under the stipulation that the client cannot use their chief competitor. That sounds like it it directly opposed to the Sherman Antitrust act.
The thing the article doesn't tell you in detail is that the agreement precludes the use of open source software, which could have saved the taxpayers millions of dollars. And once such a large organization goes Microsoft, it's difficult to go back. Isn't it interesting that these developments occur right before elections, as senior officials are trying to keep their jobs with a new incoming administration? What do you think,
I think this is classic flamebait. First: it's seldom as simple as saying "Hey let's replace everything with OSS!", because unfortunately there *is* at minimum a manpower cost when switching all of your existing systems over. There may be a manpower cost here - but if Microsoft is providing tools to make that transition simple, cheap, and/or free , then they're already a step ahead of their open source counterparts.
In addition, what open source options are there for hosted services of this type and scale? I'm not aware of any (but could be wrong). On that basis alone, the fact that they didn't go OSS is completely irrelevant because there are no OSS offerings in the running to begin with. And I suspect that if/when such services come into being, they will cost similar to what MS is charging, because now it's not about the software licensing - it's about the services and convenience of not having an IT staff to do the maintenance work.
Finally, who really thinks so narrowly as to believe that the software platform plays any role at all in whether senior officials "keep their jobs with a new incoming administration"? Software platform is a background part of these people's day-to-day activity - it's a tool that should do its job and stay out of the way. For the administration it's just one more cost in the budget checklist - and probably not a very significant one, relative to all of the other spending a state does on a daily basis.
Unless/until Windows servers are free and as effective at what I need as Linux servers are, I'll be running Linux servers for home and business. For my needs, it's the best solution - changing over would cost me significant money that I had not planned to spend. But for the state of Minnesota, it's awfully hard to evaluate whether or not that holds true on the basis of a PR release, a computerworld writeup, and a loaded slashdot summary.
We've looked at some of Microsoft's cloud computing initiative, such as Azure. One big issue is HIPAA concerns (look online - there has to be a lot added to meet HIPAA). Given that Minnesota's government is going to be putting personal information in their documents, I wonder what their security consists of. I'd personally be scared crapless that somebody could get to the wrong documents and publish them or steal the numbers or whatnot.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Trouble Pawlenty, whose Indian name is Chief Tumbling Bridges, does not want to spend a penny, nor help anybody except the 157 million/billionnaires who he caters to. this is not a "big vote" for cloud computing, but he probably thinks by getting rid of infrastructure, he can get rid of more of the state government. it's foxes for the hen house.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Excuse me, but I had thought the discussion was about how easy it is for average people to use the system.
In a corporate environment, or any situation where trained people are available, Linux is so much easier to use that the comparison loses all meaning.
OK, so this is a US state, buying services from a large US company. Nothing to see here, please move along...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Why is anyone surprised by this? It's the safe thing for the state to do. Just like buying IBM mainframes used to be. You never lost your job for buying IBM, you'll never lose your job for going with Micro$oft. And don't kid yourselves. If MN wants to void that contract sometime down the road, they will find a way. And you know bureaucrats - they don't give a fat rat's ass about saving taxpayer money. It's not real money to them anyway.
The State of California is going this route as well in the next few months. Our State CIO is a BIG Microsoft fan. Those of us who are IT employees for the State hope that the upcoming election will save us... Wishful thinking?
It doesn't even make sense, it's a cloud service for hosting things like Exchange. With a hosted service you arent supposed to care or how they provide the service just so long as it works.
If someone out there wants to provide a similiar service using OOS they are welcome to do so.
I'd be interested to see how they've worded that contract. An agreement to exclude any other vendors could run afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why don't people just directly pay taxes to M$ to skip the government's cut?
Biased summary
Isn't it interesting that these developments occur right before elections, as senior officials are trying to keep their jobs with a new incoming administration? What do you think, Slashdotters? Is this a good move for Minnesota? Or a conservative move that bucks the trend of saving money and encouraging open government and transparency by aligning philosophy and practice with at least the option of utilizing open source software?
I honestly cannot think of a more charged way of asking that question that doesn't involve out and out stating conspiracy theories (rather than just hinting at them), or vulgarities.
./ ferchristsake. It's not like it'll be hard to get support for anti-Microsoft OR pro-FOSS, let alone both of them.
This is
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
Microsoft BOPS... Seriously?
No, Slashdot got it wrong, in a move that has surprised literally nobody. It's BPOS.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
You say support is anemic in FOSS alternatives -- and link to an article about GMail and Google Apps (which aren't FOSS) in which a university doesn't mention even once having any issue with their support.
Don't even get me started on the sand-pounding you do to get help with issues in a proprietary product (e.g., IIS) vs. the totally transparent and much more effective support available with well-run FOSS products (e.g., Apache).
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
I did some searching online, and can't find the answer - do the MS cloud version of Office apps require that the client be IE on Windows? Or does access from browsers other than IE on platforms other than Windows work (even if not as well integrated)?
I have no doubt that at a minimum, MS built it such that the user experience is degraded somewhat on other browsers/platforms (think Outlook Web Access), but if in fact everything functions, it could actually indirectly enable migration of desktops to other platforms, since it addresses the oft-voiced "MS Office compatibility" issue.
Wouldn't that be ironic, if the MS move to cloud-based services finally ushers in the Year of the Linux Desktop?!)
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
MS is no more afraid of anti-trust laws than the man in the moon. They got the ruling against them in the case of Idiot judge Thomas Penfield Jackson overturned as easy as making a phone call to Ken Auletta. After the ruling Auletta asked the judge what he thought about Bill Gates and the guy said he thought Bill Gates had a Napoleon Complex. This was enough to get the lawyers to reverse the judge on appeal. Now we have to live with the problem. Put aside the notion of bias long enough to ask yourself how we got such an idiot in a place of judicial power who acted like he knew abolsutely nothing about recusal, anti-trust law, or anything.
The justice system is in many cases an industry that rules for the highest bidder. And when you have a client that could spend muiltiple billions in a hundred different areas, guess what?
"Dangerously prosecutable under antitrust laws" - you have got to be kidding me. I am sure MS corporate lawyers are quaking in their Gucci boots even as you write that.
Bottom line: By "You cannot use any OSS Software" being part of the agreement, Microsoft is stating they don't want OSS software cutting into their long-term profit margins; they're making an infrastructurial investment here. This is a low-key admission it'd actually be cheaper for what Minnesota wants to do.
I liked the original title better.
BPOS has had an awful track record when it comes to reliability. I hope they have a backup plan for those days the service is gone. Im also curius about how they will handle the data breach problems? Dont they have a responsibility for keeping stuff private about their citizens? Good luck with that on BPOS.
HTTP/1.1 400
we can say that Microsoft's Cloud is gone, and all they have is the Blue Sky of Death?
We have a 1200 seat BPOS installation and until now [It has been 8 months already], it's holding good. We had a 30 minute downtime recently but apart from that, we think MS service is good. We negotiated an easy exit plan, that is, if ever we want to leave BPOS, we will get all of our documents in a format easily convertible to an ISO approved format without any exit fee. We think it's a win-win.
PS: The office live communicator is excellent.
Funny how that cost doesn't exist for Win upgrades isn't it. It's all "require training" this, "training in that" but when it comes to the Office Ribbon document, these problems somehow magically disappear.
Did the retraining fairy smuggle them out somehow?
PS What if your Snr Developer wanted a free FOSS IDE? That developer then costs $249 less to begin with and then reduces your overhead because you don't have to employ ten people to keep tabs on licenses, with BSA breathing down your neck and interrupting your process.
So funny how this works, isn't it. Any cost of commercial licensing doesn't exist (especially ongoing ones), but you insist that free software MUST have them. Even if you have to make up hypotheticals to do it.
"Instead of providing wonders in the clouds via a browser, M$ is attempting to add to the features/bloat of "7 with new client apps tied to M$'s piece of the cloud. The discerning user will see that their options are reduced by this generosity. The more they depend on added features from M$, the harder it is to migrate away" link
haaa ;)
The Kentucky school system switched to MS's cloud email last June. It has been a pain in the ass for most of the stuff that we have to do. Most of the administration of the system has to be done in Powershell instead of a nice GUI. They have had frequent crashes and issues with the service and we experience slowness working with it daily.
Also if you use IE to work in the OWA interface it is horribly slow, which is funny since you would think that is the one that MS would work on. Chrome and Firefox help quite a bit.
MS has routinely screwed things up by not entering licenses in load balancers, or servers and I get really tired of clearing the cache in our browsers so that our users will get bounced to another server.
Also it only works with Outlook 2007/2010 and some of the online collaboration tools won't even let you print out of them.
>> The thing the article doesn't tell you in detail is that the agreement precludes the use of open source software, which could have saved the taxpayers millions of dollars. And once such a large organization goes Microsoft, it's difficult to go back. Isn't it interesting that these developments occur right before elections, as senior officials are trying to keep their jobs with a new incoming administration? What do you think,
> .. In addition, what open source options are there for hosted services of this type and scale? I'm not aware of any (but could be wrong). On that basis alone, the fact that they didn't go OSS is completely irrelevant because there are no OSS offerings in the running to begin with ..
I thought the agreement precludes using Open Source on the clients, unless you know different ?
Note that everything after the first sentence in the summary is not backed by any cites to any sources. It is purely the speculation of the anonymous submitter.
Background:
- Lives in MN and pays taxes
- Has worked for the state and different state agencies on some of the systems they appear to be outsourcing
- Has worked with Microsoft on messaging outsourcing solutions
- Currently works at a much large corporation with messaging
Is this a good thing.. Hell yes!
The state doesn't have the volume of users to obtain the discounts that come with large messaging enviroments. Nor do they have a large enough IT organization to support the specialized talent required to build an enterprise solution, thus are forced to rely on contractors/consultants. Outsourcing will be very low impact on the business and will avoid the need for additional training or tool changes (due to consisten product usage). I would suspect they are outsourcing for less then the cost of their licensing renewal + hardware refresh.
Our company attempted to use BPOS for a few months, but its shortcomings were evident very quickly. We gave BPOS the boot about 4 months into the project and moved back to hosting our Exchange in-house.
Just to echo the issues others have posted: Unable to configure many critical options, administrative system is unreliable, outlook can't stay connected to their cloud a full day without being knocked off at least once for an annoying 30-60 second reconnect time, their inability to let you configure forefront to meet your needs beyond "safe/evil sender list", etc.
I hope this post allows anyone who might be considering a switch to this to reconsider. It's only useful in the most basic of applications, i.e., small mom+pop shops that can't afford an exchange admin.
> Project Limux that was thwarted in Munich
Er, you got that backwards. The Munich transition is going more or less OK if not on time, however, there have been quite a few other failures: an internationally obscure Swiss canton failed, and also the city of Vienna.
After Munich actually finishes its transition, we will get to see whether the long-term TCO is smaller. It will be very interesting, assuming that Microsoft won't manage to somehow corrupt the flow of objective information about it. Unfortunately, it won't necessarily prove anything about the profitability of future migrations, since Munich hadn't even bought XP licenses (they were running NT!) at the time it decided to go for Linux, yet even like that they had a horrific amount of lock-in via Office macros. They also used the transition as an opportunity to "clean house" and prevent every department independently writing its own Office macros for shared tasks, which will also save them maintenance costs in the long run.
This is nothing new, exact same thing is being pulled by Microsoft at FAA.
He is doing everything he can to position himself as a GOP presidential candidate. He likely did this because he knows that certain hard-core conservatives view free software as a stepping stone to socialism. Costs to the state are irrelevant if the decision improves his stance in the eyes of the GOP.
He has already shown a willingness to crap all over the state constitution in the name of keeping up conservative appearances, so this really should surprise anyone.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Microsoft and Oracle OWN government IT at all levels. There's a whole ecosystem of lobbyists, lawyers, salesmen, consultants, lazy bureaucrats, etc - all devoted to milking the taxpayers. It stinks... like everything else about government in general. Should provide ammunition for small-government advocates though.
This state govt clusterfuck is no great loss for the free software community, BTW. I mean, nobody is gonna volunteer to modify spaghetti code (whether it be PL/SQL or VBA or Perl or Python) to meet the needs of ever-convoluted reporting regulations, and the state systems analysts (who quit every year or two for more interesting better paying private sector jobs unless they're marking time until retirement) can't get it together. Actually I've seen a few cases of institutions sharing code with each other, and it was utter crap that barely worked for the guys who wrote it... when a FOSS project accepts such a "contribution", it's called pollution. Maintaining FOSS code is hard enough without it.
Hey, it's in the cloud right? It's safe! Everything belongs in the cloud! All the cool kids are smoking the cloud! Now governments are in the cloud! You know..where everything is safe from things like outages...no wait Google's had several outages. Safe from lock-in! No wait, by virtue of the fact you're in a cloud and not keeping things in your control you're actually locked-in. The point is the cloud is GOOD!
Seriously, this is even worse than locking all of your software into one vendor. Now you're giving them the data too!
Whoever wrote the TFS doesn't fucking live in Minnesota, that's pretty certain. The DFL has run Minnesota for the past eon.
No, what is clear is that you don't live in Minnesota - or haven't for the past few decades. The current conservative idiot ("Teflon" Tim Pawlenty) is just the latest in a string of ever-more-conservative governors going back to the 80s. Look at the past three governors:
Based on the trend it is likely that the next governor of MN will be Pat Buchanan, as a late write-in. Really there are few states excluding Texas that are more conservative than Minnesota currently, and Pawlenty has worked hard to change that.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Most companies who gross over $500 million per year are Microsoft Shops. Open Source is for the other 95% of small businesses (rule of thumb, not always). Microsoft has the advantage of history (both good and bad) and longevity. I run Microsoft WSS 3.0 (the free version) inside of an Ubuntu Virtual Machine in my lab. I share my WSS 3.0 deck on slideshare at http://wss.gregrank.us/ Like it or not Microsoft, Amazon and Google are buying property on all the big rivers and dams and plugging directly into the power grid at the source. This is their business model: cloud and collaboration services for a hand held and ipad future world order. Another good resource for evaluating the move to the cloud: http://www.cloudsecurityalliance.org/guidance/csaguide.v2.1.pdf
Bad for minnesota and Good for Micro$oft
Managing IT in large organizations there are many other considerations than just the license cost. In fact the license cost is small part of overall cost for liftetime in product. Some things that are also important - available support (many open source projects have none, or through forums/email only) - usability / user training (many open source projects unfortunately are more difficult to use than the commercial products. Comparing Office 2010 for example to OpenOffice, in terms of ease of use I think Microsoft Office is miles ahead) - on going maintenance (Most commercial products have limited number of updates and updates mainly focus on security/bug fixes until a major release every 1-3 years. Open Source projects tend to add features rapidly with major releases very frequently) Now in this case they are also moving to cloud which eliminates need for many of their backend infrastructure which was probably very expensive to maintain, and now will just pay for the amount of users on the system. Unlike having your own infrastructure were much of it may be under utilized and you are just paying for electricity/hardware/data centre space that is wasted. So I think this is probably more cost effective option the route they are going.
Oooh, yeah, MS is afraid of getting punished. Right.
Here's how MS operates: They do whatever the fuck they want, and then use power-lawyers to drag any court case on for years. Meanwhile they are still making big bucks. Then they get "grassroots" organizations to pay off congresscritters (in the USA at least) and eventually most of these cases lead nowhere.
Seriously, do you think they are afraid of *possible* consequences which would likely cost little money, when there are *actual* profits to be made in the meanwhile?
But aside from that, my post is in the context of what the OP was discussing - if they hadn't signed the agreement to begin with. Further - it's still a moot point, as there are no OSS options out there for this that I know of.
While states have different regulations clearly they have to deliver similar services to their citizenry.
According to Wikipedia, Minnesota and its neighbor Wisconsin have about the same population while Minnesota has about 1.5 times the land of Wisconsin.
Now if MS is going to supply all of Minnesota's systems for say $100M, then if they also delivered the same service to Wisconsin it would cost another $100M.
But a huge amount of savings ought to be possible if the two states built their own cloud using freely customizable open source software systems. And if the savings aren't big enough then add in Iowa and the Dakotas for good measure.
This would also keep citizen data out of the hands of a convicted monopoly, create jobs, improve efficiency by code reuse, and possibly it could even create a revenue flow as more states join on. After all, the early adopters will have a head start in building a pool of developers to work on the system and it would be natural to use them for additional clients in the future. If Minnesota was a bit smarter it could run its hardware at a profit through payments from other states.
For closure, I'll respond to my own comment - according to their website, the MS Office Web Apps do in fact support other browsers and other platforms.
Again, irony would abound if availability of Office Web Apps enabled widescale migration to Linux on desktops, by virtue of eliminating the dependency on Office. Otoh, since for businesses that would drive either licensing the apps from MS in their cloud, or adoption of Windows Server licenses (to be able to run SharePoint), it could be a hedge-your-bets kind of move on MS's part.
Of course, until there's a clear analysis of how degraded the user experience is when accessing from something other than IE on Windows, I, for one, have this urge to keep chanting "it's a tarp, it's a tarp". We'll see.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
KDE has had a bottom screen taskbar ever since I started using Linux 4 years ago. I'm looking at my desktop right now, I've got 19 apps on it.
And even with Gnome, if one wants a taskbar on the bottom of the screen, all it takes is drag and drop.
Tech Public Policy stuff
feature that is far more important than functionality or cost-effectiveness.
Thanks to the Citizens United decision that says that corporations are people with unlimited freedom of speech, M$ can provide MN politicians who supported the bill with unlimited campaign TV ad support.
With a feature like that, who cares if it works? Or if state employees can actually send and receive e-mail or process documents? Or if a "no-bid" contract is a pointer towards government corruption?
Or if MN has to hire IBM in a few months to clean up the mess, replace M$ with a Google or IBM cloud or Open Source enterprise software, and have IBM help them to hire a shitload of replacement IT workers to replace the ones MN thought it can safely fire over the next few weeks?
Tech Public Policy stuff