Slashdot Mirror
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.
Use MS software, and your boss will see it as MS's fault when it breaks. Use alternatives, and it'll be your fault. It's the 21st century analogue of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
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?
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
Probably less than the cost of being locked into no-shop clauses in an MS agreement.
Such a non-compete clause is most likely an anti-trust violation if TFS is correct.
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.
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.
Although you're probably an AC Microsoft shill, there's precedent that says that open source systems fail-- see Project Limux that was thwarted in Munich. That said, Minnesota takes a huge chance on untested infrastructure, and indeed binds themselves to Microsoft's hosted products-- when many others might do the job. Let's see how the TCO for taxpayers actually amount to in five years.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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).
Excuse me? Please do not relate any of Minnesota's Values to Michelle Bachmann. She is the worst kind of politician who has no intelligence what-so-ever. She continues to be elected by an extremely gerrymandered district that has had no real competition on the right and wouldn't elect someone from the left unless literally directly paid to do so. Minnesota aside, any words that come from her mouth have a tendency to be as hollow as her head and can not be trusted. She is an agitator and a crowd pleaser who we can only hope will somehow manage to lose an election so she can go wallow with her tea party friends somewhere outside of our state. She may make her direct electors proud but the rest (majority) of the state laughs at them and are embarrassed to be represented by her.
It's not "wasteful spending" when the money is going to one of you close corporate buddies.
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.
You do need to pay to get support. There is absolutely no way any corporation, including the government, would ever run business critical apps without support. Get real.
I'm not sure your so-called point...
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.
Hookers and blow, is what I've heard.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
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.
training and support for new programs = Unknown since it depends on if you do a FLAG DAY type cutover
Never worked at any large organizations have you? The cost of software licenses is trivial compared to the costs in time and lost productivity anytime you introduce a change in the workflow. Doesn't matter if this is switching to a new program, introducing a new program, or even an upgrade from the previous version to a new version. Case in point, we hired a new Sr. developer who had his IDE of choice. Cost: $249. We used an opensource IDE. We're paying him roughly $70 an hour all said and done. How many wasted hours of time learning the "free" opensource IDE does it take to cover the cost of that license? If switching to the "free" opensource IDE costs more than 1 day of productivity, it's cheaper to buy the program. (which we did). This looks like its a change in the background, from a users perspective they'll probably still be using Outlook, it's just the settings are a little different. The end user won't notice anything different in their workflow. They used Outlook before, they'll continue using the same program here.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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.
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.
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.
"Sure, we could save some up-front money to Microsoft"
Of course, you would save 100% of use licences since using open source software you don't pay use licenses *at all*.
"but some of it would still go to Red Hat (all production Linux servers run RHEL, as CentOS is authorized only for test environments)"
Not some money, but some *other* money. Well, if you want support from Microsoft, you still have to pay it apart from use licenses too. Rates from Microsoft and Red Hat regarding support are basically the same, so you are at odds here -and you are still in front since you didn't pay for use licenses.
And then, public government is there to think about overall society benefit, isn't it? Even if now only Red Hat could bring proper advanced support for their products, if they are taking too large a profit margin what do you think that would happen? Support contracts at the State level are not peanuts and everybody is in the position to give proper support on Red Hat. Or any open source program for that matter. And then again, being Red Hat both open source and unix-like, it works lightyears better on integration with other solutions and with lightyears less risk of lock-in. You don't like Red Hat? OK, there's Suse, or Debian, or Ubuntu, or even FreeBSD and you can change to them with only minor transition costs.
Now, who can give advanced support on Windows but Microsoft? Where can you go appart from Microsoft when you don't like Microsoft without incurring large migration costs?
And that's exactly the point: Microsoft's basic strategy is based on lock-in, which being a variant of monopoly we all now what it does to the customers. And it's obvious both from common sense and past experience that it won't be any better tomorrow, so while meaning a large and expensive exercise, the sooner you break Microsoft's lock in, the more money you will be saving long term.
"the admins would have to be retrained or replaced at rates that run higher than the existing ones. "
You mentioned that rates were about 1:1.2 but, what about serviceability? Because if each Unix/Linux guy can bring to the table more than 1:1.2 when compared to Windows ones (and that's usually the case in my experience), you are getting savings *even* at a higher individual hiring costs. And then again, why do you think Unix/Linux guys get better wages? I'll tell you: on one hand because they diserve it (or else no one would hire them at such cost mark) on the other hand because of relative scarcity. Well, what do you think that will happen -and happen *fast*, with regards to scarcity if it's acknowledged that Unix/Linux guys are wanted in big numbers and payed over market average, specially if Windows guys needs start to decline?
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?
You pay for a copy of Windows and you get 10 years of guaranteed patches from the date of release. Not too bad over all.
Obviously you don't sign the invoices for Microsoft products. You don't just pay for a copy of Windows server. You pay for the sever, then for CALS besides the seat licenses for the products that connect to that server. With MSFT you pay and pay and pay. Their prices, their upgrade schedule, their partners.
With RedHat you pay for annual service at the level you want. Or you can go with something like ClearOS and get updates and patches handled for you for less than $250 year or go with CentOS and do it yourself.
You don't get those options with M$. Stop apologizing for greedy corporate fucktards.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"The problem is the vendors you outsource to often JUST DON'T CARE"
There is ALWAYS one thing a manager must take into consideration when outsourcing a service that I haven't seen pointed out almost NEVER.
* The goal of an external provider is always offer as little as it can go with and ask for as much money as it can go with.
* The goal of an internal provider is always offer as much as it can asking for as little money as it can.
Somehow a lot of managers don't seem to get this simple fact straight.
this 'new-fangled' leenux
Not just Linux, even this argument is getting really old now.
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.
Unfortunately this is very familiar. Yet, this "rubbish system" question can sometimes be eased by rasing attention to the rubbishness-list of Windows itself. There are several annoyances that people don't even realize since they have grown more and more tolerant towards Windows, given they were never given the option or the opportunity to use anything else. Awareness needs to be raised that blind acceptance is not the way to go anymore. Of course this is a harder task than it sounds, still, I'd really want to see those countless open source "evangelists" (what an idiotic job description) make a freaking better job.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Minnesota cannot 'move'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_drift
Be seeing you...
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
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.