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?"
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
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.
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