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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?"
Just a wild guess, but I'd say that it's because you don't need to pay to use it.
If you RTFA, they are switching from existing Novell and Exchange Servers and consolidating to Exchange. Moving from on-premise to the cloud for Exchange should be seamless and reduce the cost of local administration and on-going hardware maintenance and software patching.
That's not how it worked out for an Australian airline's outsourced booking system a few weeks ago. The millions they paid didn't include the sort of redundancy that can withstand the failure of A SINGLE DISK, and they'll be arguing about the outsourcing contract in court for probably about the next five years.
You have to be very careful what you outsource the closer it gets to the core functions of your organisation, doubly so when it's going to an obfiscated platform where you have no choice other than trusting a single vendor.
Also reputations of vendors matter. I would not touch Microsoft as a hosting vendor with a very long pole after a University near me lost their Microsoft hosted student email for over a week. The failure was blatantly obviously caused by a typo in the DNS records for a Microsoft Exchange server farm but it took over a week to get that information to a person at Microsoft, who probably fixed it in under a minute of being informed. The problem is the vendors you outsource to often JUST DON'T CARE, so you have to consider whether you can afford to lose what you outsource for what should be ridiculous amounts of time.
The choice of platform matters far less than the choice of what control you hand over.
Also "retraining" for office software is now a complete bullshit argument since a large number of office staff really don't know how to use the Microsoft products either. When was the last time you saw somebody that isn't actually a programmer write a macro? Give these people any of a dozen or more word processing programs and they'll find the few things they need in minutes.
As for Excel, the macros need to be converted to the new version of MS Office anyway which is why so many people are still on MSOffice2003.
Are you retarded, or just trolling/FUDing?
The article you linked to doesn't mention any OSS alternatives, nor any support costs/availability of anything. (Also, Mashable is the best you could come up with for a source?)
What the article you linked to (titled, "Major University Dumps Gmail Over Security Concerns") actually discusses is that the University of California in Davis just stopped their pilot roll-out of Gmail due to concerns that it wasn't secure enough. In actuality, its not clear if Davis would even be allowed to use Gmail at all, as the article notes, "[school officials said] outsourcing e-mail may not be in compliance with the University of California Electronic Communications Policy."
Later in the article it mentions that other organizations (such as the City of Los Angeles) are adopting Gmail. The whole thing is hardly damning of Gmail, and doesn't even mention OSS.
Mods: Don't just assume that someone's citation backs up what they're saying. Parent is off-topic and not particularly insightful.
For me, I can say that when my previous employer switched over to Gmail for our email it was a huge boost to uptime, and a dramatic drop in cost compared to the (unfortunately) poorly supported in-house Linux-based OSS email server and the Exchange server we were quoted.
Bill