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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?"
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.
"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
Same reasoning applies: not having to pay for it is cheaper than buying it from a commercial software vendor.
The governor could get better support from his own in-house staff. My employer uses BPOS. We have 20,000 people on it, yet we have terrible support. The state of Minnesota has 36,000 employees. Something tells me the difference is not significant enough to get better support.
We have a managed dedicated server from Pair Networks that handles our company websites and email. (We have a few more that handle our E-commerce Platform). We access our email through IMAP with Mac Mail, iPhones, iPads, Android phones, Outlook, and thunderbird. We looked at Google apps and the dedicated server was cheaper for our company (4 full-time, 6 part-time employees). Two years and we've not had any noticeable problems. I think I had to call tech support once to get the machine reset that took a whole of 5 minutes on the phone from the time I dialed until the server was rebooted and working again.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I ised to do IT support when I was graphic designer for a very small firm (3-10 employees depending of the needs). We had our very own Exchange server, but only the boss used the calendar and contact features. When our server finally crashed, we outsourced our Exchange services for our one boss for a couple bucks a months, outsourced web servers to a datacenter for peanuts a month, including backups and kept our big fat pipe to ourselves. It made my life easier, saved the company the support budget and made our one server more efficient to serve our big fat multimedia files and daily backups. The exchange server relied on a different domain, but that was the only inconvenience...
Tomorrow is another day...
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
A few numbers to back you up:
Where I work in local government, our IT budget is $90 million. A little under $2 million of that goes to Microsoft directly. Our Unix/Linux guys start at a pay rate that's probably 20% or so higher than the Windows guys that get hired.
Sure, we could save some up-front money to Microsoft, but some of it would still go to Red Hat (all production Linux servers run RHEL, as CentOS is authorized only for test environments), and the admins would have to be retrained or replaced at rates that run higher than the existing ones. It would get ugly very, very fast.
Note: I spend about 70% of my day on a Linux notebook.
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
Take a trip to Montreal, QC, Canada... you will find your roads to be pristine and mint conditions...
Or perhaps Louisiana, where it is easy to tell when you've crossed the line from another state into Louisiana, because where you were doing just fine driving the speed limit a few miles ago, now you need to drop 15 miles an hour from your velocity just to maintain control of your vehicle... Ah, Louisiana...
This is the same place that doesn't seem to have an issue with spending billions to rebuild a city with an average of elevation of several feet below sea level after it flooded (surprise!), but then doesn't even acknowledge that there was a hurricane on the other side of the state that was, by all accounts, a worse storm that arguably caused more damage, if not (thankfully) more deaths... Rita was a stronger storm than Katrina, but no one seems to notice. There was Federal assistance available (in states on the other side of the country from where the "disaster" occurred) 5 years after the event, if you could prove you resided in an area affected by Katrina during that particular event. I don't mean just public assistance, I mean "free money" and job placement and housing assistance and all sorts of other things - handouts for having lived there at that time, regardless of whether you were actually affected by the storm. I don't mean to downplay the plight of those caught in the sixth-strongest storm in recorded history, but please read on.
Most people don't even know that Rita happened - in the same state, in the same year, and actually the fourth-strongest storm in recorded history. There was discussion of changing the classification systems, which would make Rita a Category 6 Hurricane; Katrina would still have been a Category 5 Hurricane. There were mandatory evacuations; the police came to my house to make sure I had evacuated. Driving away from my home, it took nearly 10 hours to go 38 miles, due to traffic (and the police stopping everyone to tell them not to go east because all the shelters were already full - we had arrangements to stay with friends in that direction, but whatever). They closed the borders of my city and I was nearly arrested for coming back two weeks later, once the "all-clear" had been sounded - the issue being that I was on the road after dark and my truck was full of stuff (I was returning from Baton Rouge for the second time that day, after ascertaining that our pets would be safe coming back with us (3 hours in a vehicle containing 6 cats is *so* much fun)). They were still recommending people stay away, but part of my job was to make sure the local governments could operate - I was the technician for a company specializing in software solutions for municipalities, and so could claim I was part of the "relief efforts".
Rita didn't drown a "cultural center", it just washed away entire towns. A governmental office I worked in had 3 feet of water in it, and not only is it on the second floor, it's easily an hour's drive from the coast. My neighbor had a tree that was easily ten feet in circumference blown through his house. People still have "blue roofs" (tarps instead of shingles) in some locations in south-west Louisiana.
There was no federal assistance available for having survived Rita. No handouts, no free jobs, no relocation assistance, no compensation for having been forcibly removed from our homes. All of the things that Katrina victims got handed to them just for asking (or in some cases, without even asking), Rita victims asked for and were refused. Even the damage numbers were skewed, because somehow New Orleans properties are more valuable than the rest of the state. Maybe it's because not as many people died (due largely to the fact that we got out of the way, and our homes were above sea level, instead of below it).
Katrina only got all the hype because people were too stupid to leave when given a week's notice, and it's a "cultural center", whatev
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There are 2 things further
1) The deal - apparently - precludes using OSS. This is bad no matter how you look at it. This means something perfectly useful - and productive - won't be allowed.
2) I've used the MS Virtualization software and it really didn't work well at all. It was certainly the worst of the bunch.
Why anyone would really choose that kind of agreement is beyond foolish to me. Good luck to them.
I have to agree that a mix of different software makes tons of sense. AD is hard to beat -- and makes sense to use it. Exchange is hard to match, but there are reasonable alternatives... and I think everything else is a question mark.
In my experience at least you need fewer admins per server with Unix than with Windows. Largely because it is easier to script and automate stuff and to some extent because those Unix admins with 20% higher pay rates actually know more about computers and can therefore fix problems faster than the corresponding Windows admins.
So you can't say it is more expensive to admin Unix than Windows just because of higher wages.
Erik Dalén
Thats the unfortunate thing about MS. Its all politics on the inside. There is no "Big Microsoft Machine"
In general I've found that much better support was to be had(when necessary) if you got the person that was in charge of making the decision to buy the licenses to call the SALES office. Not the support office. I had one of the managers in the tech support department call me back inside 2 hours with a solution to the problem we were having once I went that route. If anyone else had called in it would have taken 3-4 days minimum, if we ever got anything at all.
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.