Microsoft Pays University $250K To Use Office 365

BogenDorpher writes "Microsoft has offered to give the University of Nebraska $250,000 dollars to make the switch from IBM Lotus Notes to Office 365, which they say offers newer technology, greater flexibility, and operational savings. Microsoft did this in hopes that the University would not make the transition over to Google Apps."

Comments

I already use Google Apps!

[cvtan]

Pay me $500,000!

Re:I already use Google Apps!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay me $500,000!

To help you cure youre Open Sores?

Re:I already use Google Apps!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he wants to go from one type of closed sores to another. What? You didn't see that equally irrelevant pun coming from a mile away?

Re:I already use Google Apps!

[hairyfeet]

You joke but this is actually a damned smart business move, which is why Apple has been doing it for years with their college program. You get the college kids trained to use your stuff now, and then when they reach the workforce they are already trained in your software and are more likely to buy it.

This is just smart business and why Apple has offered students at the local college gear at or below cost, and why if you have a .edu email address you can get Windows 7 pro for something like $35. I;m sure many here will liken it to the tobacco companies "get 'em while they're young" but since nearly every job I see wants MS Office experience anyway having them learn MS Office in the cloud will probably help them down the road. i'm sure Google probably does something similar we simply don't hear about it.

Re:I already use Google Apps!

[Radres]

I don't think Apple ever paid a school to use their products, they always just offered them at a substantial discount. I don't see how this is a sustainable business model for Microsoft to pay universities just to get people "hooked" on their product. Real world business will see through it and use the cheaper Google Apps. The learning curve to switch isn't that big. I think we've all had experiences using software in school different from what we've had to use in industry.

Re:I already use Google Apps!

[Radres]

And of course, the people who RTFA below recognized that MS isn't paying the college to use the app.

Re:I already use Google Apps!

[Lillebo]

"That funding will pay for some consulting and licenses to convert a large percentage of our users from Lotus Notes to Office 365. We will also use that funding to pay for a Microsoft Premier Support agreement covering email and Microsoft Office applications for the entire university," the University said.

Re:I already use Google Apps!

[Kagetsuki]

They do, or at least did, pay schools in the same way MS is paying now: as a "grant" or some other form of "you buy our stuff, but we give you all the money you paid us back". Look it up.

While it would seem like a good idea to build a user base I'm not sure it actually really worked for Apple. If you think about it the same time Apple really was faltering would have been about the same time a lot of children would be graduating and buying their own computers. Their recovery with the iPod and iTunes probably had nothing to do with the fact kids used macs in schools.

If you think about it perhaps there was even a negative impact for Apple. If a school had nothing but macs a child would essentially be forced to use them while at school could have developed a negative stigma in and of itself. Children rebel, and children will often dislike what is forced on them.

Want Failure? To the cloud!

[sethstorm]

It wasn't good enough sell to the university, so they paid them outright to use Office in the cloud?

Why not openoffice?

[damn_registrars]

Is there a reason they couldn't transition to openoffice instead?

Other than the fact they are in Nebraska, where the term "open" is probably immediately associated with homosexuality, of course?

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because OpenOffice prints, looks, and runs like ass.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[cgeys]

I use OpenOffice almost daily, but for very simple stuff. The truth is, it still lacks many features that Office offers. It also still doesn't seem to open or save Office files correctly, which is really needed if you want to exchange files with other people. The GUI also feels kind of sluggish and outdated, but that probably comes from Java.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Shimdaddy]

OpenOffice is good, but it's not a full replacement for modern versions of Office. If all you're doing is authoring memos and papers (by yourself) it will suffice, though. What's with the random dig at Nebraska, though? The state has plenty of social conservatives and plenty of liberals (see: Omaha) -- there's no reason to slam a pretty respectable university over your stereotype.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[PCM2]

I use OpenOffice almost daily, but for very simple stuff. The truth is, it still lacks many features that Office offers.

So does Lotus Notes, which is the suite referenced here. I think this was really mostly about trying to get the university to transition from Domino to SharePoint.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[MightyMartian]

That's what your mom said about your dad, but with no money for dentures, who else was she gonna get in the sack?

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Stormwatch]

Microsoft seems to have something against Nebraska.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Sinthet]

I've never had a problem opening/editing/saving Microsoft formats with OpenOffice (Though, technically I use LibreOffice now). However, Office 2007 and up handles .odt files very well. I never bother to do a conversion anymore, and just let MS Office handle it if I need to use the files on a Windows computer that isn't running OpenOffice. My papers tend to be limited to Academic stuff, reports, essays, and occasionally some mathematics-related stuff. So maybe I've never run into trouble because I don't use some of the fancy features, but that being said, I fit the bill as a typical student user, and don't really see a major hindrance or lack of features with Libre/Open Office.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because OpenOffice is terrible, maybe?

Re:Why not openoffice?

[sunderland56]

If OpenOffice paid them $250,000, I'm sure they would be glad to use that instead.

Heck, even the biggest Linux advocate would be silly to turn down that much cash.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[geekoid]

Business ran just fine without the latest features.

MS Office is over priced bloated piece of software that does everything it can to tie you to it.

It's an easily exploitable security risk, and it force a company to behave how their software works, not the software to behave how there company works.

And of course this office 365 is a constant expense. Her we use office,. nit its office 2003. So while we paid for a license one time, we have used it for 8 years. 8 years at the current charge rate for Office 365 is out of the question.
\

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Dishevel]

It also still doesn't seem to open or save Office files correctly, which is really needed if you want to exchange files with other people.

Funny thing is that Microsoft Office has problems saving and opening in different versions of Microsoft Office as well.
Their product is so convoluted that the guys who wrote the last version cant get the current version to save to the old version perfectly.
How is another company going to do it.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[icebraining]

The 250k is not a payment, it's a discount. They'll still have to pay, just less.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[X.25]

OpenOffice is good, but it's not a full replacement for modern versions of Office. If all you're doing is authoring memos and papers (by yourself) it will suffice, though. What's with the random dig at Nebraska, though? The state has plenty of social conservatives and plenty of liberals (see: Omaha) -- there's no reason to slam a pretty respectable university over your stereotype.

Yeah, because people were not writing documents or using computers before Microsoft Office was created.

Jesus, new generations are retarded...

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because openoffice doesn't do what they need. They currently use Notes for email and somewhat for collaboration although anyone who's actually used Notes knows it actually does many other things worse than it does email. They also have Office installed on employee and student lab computers, they are replacing that as well from the sounds of things.

I worked at the University when they made the move to Notes and was involved in the conversion / activation. It was absolutely horrifying, but honestly it was better than what was in place before, which was a hodge-podge of department specific servers and technologies. Several people actually ran their own mail servers or a student set something up for them, addresses were all over the map, and trouble shooting someone's issues was nightmarish. Yeah it was cool that I could get my email at my actual machine, but not so cool to manage.

Sounds like a good deal for the university. Cut your recurring costs in half, get 250K up front. Pair it with the fact they don't have to manage any hardware on site, and I'm sure it makes good financial sense. Now, not so cool for anyone who's job isn't necessary anymore, because some of that money saved is probably expected to come out of payroll.

I also think the 'cloud' concept works well for a university. Probably better than it does for a lot of businesses. Students are hopping from machine to machine more than your average person, having everything right there for you will be better than transporting it on an USB stick, using a third party cloud service or back in my day a floppy disk... Which don't handle the abuse of an average student well... (Worked at the helpdesk as a student-worker and had to tell uncountable students their file was unrecoverable, and maybe next time don't leave it on your dashboard when it's 100 degrees outside.)

Re:Why not openoffice?

[BitZtream]

Yes, the primary reason is they have to communicate with people other than OO.org zealots and actually want it to all work.

Sure OO can open a word doc ... sorta, and it can output a word doc ... sorta ... but for people who actually care about getting things done, the cost of Office is trivial in comparison to the headaches that go with using OO.org when you actually don't live in a bubble.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[BitZtream]

Yep, it does ... of course when you compare/contrast those problems to the ones OO.org has, its a fucking retarded contrast, but technically you are correct ... regardless of how incorrect you are from a practical perspective.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[damn_registrars]

Yes, the primary reason is they have to communicate with people other than OO.org zealots and actually want it to all work.

Sure OO can open a word doc ... sorta, and it can output a word doc ... sorta ...

I love how people who haven't used recent versions of the software they are complaining about are clearly infinitely qualified to assess the quality of the current version.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Dcnjoe60]

OpenOffice is good, but it's not a full replacement for modern versions of Office. If all you're doing is authoring memos and papers (by yourself) it will suffice, though.

What's with the random dig at Nebraska, though? The state has plenty of social conservatives and plenty of liberals (see: Omaha) -- there's no reason to slam a pretty respectable university over your stereotype.

Then again, outside of law offices, most of what MS Office is used for is memos and papers, particularly on a college campus. I don't really see allowing multiple edits on a term paper as a useful thing. Most universities actually frown on such an activity.

As for slamming Nebraska, any of the remaining Big 12 conference members would probably question using "Nebraska" and "respectable university" in the same sentence, but leaving the Big 12 was all about money and evidently so is choosing Microsoft's new offerings. But I'm sure the Corn Huskers got the best solution Microsoft's money could buy.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Dcnjoe60]

The 250k is not a payment, it's a discount. They'll still have to pay, just less.

Why when Microsoft does this with a university it is a discount, but when they do it in a foreign country it is called a bribe?

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Dcnjoe60]

The 250k is not a payment, it's a discount. They'll still have to pay, just less.

Actually, the 250K is a payment. The actual article states that it is to be used to pay for consulting services,etc. Sounds like if Microsoft is making funds available, that it isn't a discount, but a payment.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Alex Belits]

I use OpenOffice almost daily, but for very simple stuff.

No, you don't. You post Microsoft marketing crap in every thread where you can stuff your comment.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[HTH NE1]

I worked at the University when they made the move to Notes and was involved in the conversion / activation. It was absolutely horrifying, but honestly it was better than what was in place before

So did I. (29 WSEC machine room graveyard shift network monitoring. I learned first hand that there was one person being paid to be on call that you should never call.)

I remember commenting on how bad Lotus Notes was and being told that regardless of its deficits the deal was made, people had been paid, and the whole University was being switched to it. Since leaving I've never had the occasion to use it again.

Could that be why I lost access to my CSE Alumni account?

Re:Why not openoffice?

[icebraining]

Yeah, but since they'll pay 2x per year, it's still essentially a "upfront discount." It's not like the University is getting money for using Office 365.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[amicusNYCL]

Is there a reason they couldn't transition to openoffice instead?

I'm sure there is. Maybe you should contact them and ask, and let us know what they say.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[amicusNYCL]

Actually, the 250K is a payment. The actual article states that it is to be used to pay for consulting services,etc. Sounds like if Microsoft is making funds available, that it isn't a discount, but a payment.

If you're going to put it that way, then I'll point out that Microsoft is only paying them to help convert them from Lotus to Office, they aren't paying them to actually use Office. They're paying to get them off of Lotus, which I'm pretty sure qualifies as a charitable contribution.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Anonymous Coward]

God damn I have to hear about the big 12 here on slashdot? We left, we moved up, we ditched you fucking losers. Get the fuck over it.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[BitZtream]

And old geezers completely out of touch with reality are retarded too.

Yes, people can create text files with other various editors, but thats not the same thing.

You COULD use WordPerfect for DOS if you wanted too. I'm sure others you communicate with would be happen to deal with all the wonderful formatting you added in WP that Word knows nothing about.

Oh, they shouldn't be using Word? To fucking bad, they are, and you're obnoxious ass just lost the deal because you think your gods gift to the IT world and YOU know what companies need.

You want to communicate with other companies, you better support Doc files at least as good as Word, so that means you want Word, not OO.org or anything else.

People were simulating the physics of the atomic bomb with out computers, are you saying that we should continue to do that as well ... because we can and be cause you think some company in the supply chain is evil?

New generations may be retarded, at least they have an excuse for making statements that show themselves to be completely ignorant of the real world. Whats your excuse?

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Micklat]

I checked. What you wrote isn't true. I think you should apologize to cgens.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Dcnjoe60]

Yeah, but since they'll pay 2x per year, it's still essentially a "upfront discount." It's not like the University is getting money for using Office 365.

It was going to cost money to convert from Notes to whichever platform they chose. Microsoft said they will pay that cost if they choose Office 365. So, yes, they are getting money for using Office 365.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Dcnjoe60]

Actually, the 250K is a payment. The actual article states that it is to be used to pay for consulting services,etc. Sounds like if Microsoft is making funds available, that it isn't a discount, but a payment.

If you're going to put it that way, then I'll point out that Microsoft is only paying them to help convert them from Lotus to Office, they aren't paying them to actually use Office. They're paying to get them off of Lotus, which I'm pretty sure qualifies as a charitable contribution.

True, but Nebraska had already decided to drop Notes and would have had to pay to convert their data regardless of whether they went Microsoft or Google. Microsoft is only paying them as a perk for buying Microsoft.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[protektor]

You can't say yea but. You are agreeing with the guy and admitting you were wrong and then trying to add a qualifier as to why you were in fact correct. That makes no logical sense at all. Either you were right or you were wrong and in this case you were wrong. If Microsoft gives them cash, no matter why, it is not a discount but in fact clearly a payment. If it was a discount it would simply reduce what they pay and Microsoft would not be sending them cash. You can claim anything you want but the bottom line is Microsoft said "Look, use our product and we will cut you a check for $250,000, to use for whatever you want or need." Microsoft very clearly paid the University to switch to their software and it clearly wasn't a discount. Will Microsoft make up the money in the long run? Probably, but that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft paid them cash to switch to their product.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[protektor]

You would be wrong, as Microsoft is clearly paying them to switch to their software. If you cut a check for someone to switch to you as a vendor you are clearly paying them to use your products. It doesn't matter how it was spend you gave them cash that they didn't have before. Normally that is called a kick back and is illegal as all get out. Vendors are suppose to compete on the price and quality of their products especially when it involved government groups like a public university.

Personally I think the AG should look in to this as it is absolutely no different from a kick back or bribe which is illegal. I want to know if the software change was sent out as a request for sealed bids and had at least 3 companies bid on it like is usually required for most government contracts. If you ask me Microsoft is playing fast and loose and needs to smacked down hard, because they are doing the same exact monopoly actions that got them convicted by the US and EU. When you are a convicted monopoly the rules you have to play by are completely different from everyone else since you broke the law.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[protektor]

You mean the ODT format that Microsoft supports in Office and that Libre/Open Office support? Or do you mean RTF or DOCX or UOT or what? Both Office and Libre/Open Office support all those formats. You do know that DOC is not the default for Office any more right? You also know that Office itself has a hard time correctly reading old DOC formats right? This is pretty common knowledge in most companies that different versions of Word produce different DOC files that may not be able to be read properly (usually) by newer versions of Word. Microsoft themselves are not even compatible with themselves and you complain about Libre/Open Office? That is rich, really rich. Clearly you are blindly supporting Microsoft or you don't work with lots of different DOC versions like most business do when they trade around files with other companies. No one expects a DOC file they send to another company to open perfectly and be formated perfectly because they may not have the same version of Word. I have even seen companies call and ask what version of Word they have and try and save the file as that version to help it open better, and even that doesn't always work. This has been a known issue for a very long time with Microsoft Office products.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[protektor]

Probably not a big enough payment or donation given that Office doesn't default to DOC files any more. They default to ODT and then DOCX. Which Open/Libre Office supports as well. If compatibility is the complaint then someone needs to spend more time with corporations who trade files with other companies and see that even Microsoft has problems with this, because newer versions of office have problems reading older version files. This is a known issue with Office. Companies often call who they are sending the document to, to find out what version of Word they use and save it to that version to try and help it open better, but usually it doesn't help at all.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[dbIII]

You COULD use WordPerfect for DOS if you wanted too. I'm sure others you communicate with would be happen to deal with all the wonderful formatting you added in WP that Word knows nothing about.

No problem, just import that format into openoffice which DOES know about it.

You want to communicate with other companies, you better support Doc files at least as good as Word

I've never understood the insanity of sending things in rewritable formats to people you cannot trust - let's just change a few terms in that contract or add a zero to that price shall we? If it's a finished document it shouldn't be able to be trivially changed by a third party. Of course PDF has now gone down that road too but it's a bit less trivial.
MS Word is just a bit of software like many others that do exactly the same job, there's no reason to get fanatical about it.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Alex Belits]

I checked. What you wrote isn't true.

Oh yes it is: http://slashdot.org/~cgeys

I think you should apologize to cgens.

Die in a fire.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[perryizgr8]

even the web interface of office (running on chromium) is miles better than openoffice's native linux version. more responsive, more features, better looking, everything.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[perryizgr8]

yep, the recent version of open office were SO good that ubuntu, the champion of the open source world, switched to something else.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[Vectormatic]

What, you mean libre-office, the open office fork that doesnt have the good old oracle ball and chain attached to both its feet?

That doesnt have anything to do with quality, that is just basic common sense, get out of there before Larry decides he wants a license fee, and you have to suddenly switch within a few days, or bend over.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[amicusNYCL]

If you ask me Microsoft is playing fast and loose and needs to smacked down hard, because they are doing the same exact monopoly actions that got them convicted by the US and EU.

No they're not, paying a university to use their products is not the same as bundling a browser and media player with their operating system.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[amicusNYCL]

I haven't seen that behavior, the only incompatibility I see is when someone sends me a file that is newer than my version. This is easily resolved by downloading the viewer from Microsoft if I can't get the document any other way.

Re:Why not openoffice?

[pavon]

It also still doesn't seem to open or save Office files correctly, which is really needed if you want to exchange files with other people.

I have that problem as well but it isn't restricted to OpenOffice. My GF's instructors post all their assignments and lecture notes as MS Word or Powerpoint documents. Between the two versions of MS Office we have (97 and 2007), OpenOffice 3.3 and LibreOffice 3.4, LibreOffice is the one that works the most often.

The GUI also feels kind of sluggish and outdated, but that probably comes from Java.

OpenOffice doesn't use Java for the GUI. It is just used for some database backends and wizards but that is all. Most people can safely disable it and save some memory and start-up time. And LibreOffice is working on removing much of the java code.

Since they updated the icons in later versions, I think it looks fine, but some features are still pretty hard to find.

Gracious Outrage

[improfane]

At first I was outraged that Microsoft "discounted" (read: bribed) the uiversity to switch but then I realised that the students are probably grateful because

  Lotus Notes is a horrible horrible piece of software. Microsoft might be evil but Lotus Notes is the scourge. I would happily endure a Windows only hell over a life of Lotus Notes.

IBM probably did this to the university to begin with, no system administrator would use Lotus Notes willingly.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[Ferzerp]

You were initially outraged because the university managed to negotiate some free services with their purchase?

Oh the travesty!

Re:Gracious Outrage

[TemperedAlchemist]

Well, it's out in the open, so I don't know if you could consider it quite a bribe. I say plaudits to Microsoft for not keeping it all in secret like everyone else does.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[improfane]

Its anticompetitive. Intel did it once too.

Customers are supposed to buy products. They're not supposed to be paid not to use competing products.

If it was a discount then it's not the same thing. The summary sounds like the incentive was 250k of cash plus the product. That's not a discount. That's a bribe or anticompetitive behaviour.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[cvtan]

Agree Lotus Notes is horrible. We had to use it at Kodak. Never got used to it. Everything is a database. Really? Better than IBM PROFS though.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[RightSaidFred99]

The summary is a lie, and even if it wasn't there's nothing wrong with a cash incentive anyway unless you can prove they are dumping.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[mr_null]

The only real surprise here is that UNL is ditching Notes; that it's moving to a Microsoft product is a given at this point. (If you know the University's relationship with MS)

So long as I can setup imap/pop to pull mail to another client, I really don't care what they transition to so long as I never have to open Notes ever again.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather pay for Free software than get non-Free software for free.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[Ferzerp]

RTFA. The summary is an outright fabrication. (of course, so is the title of the article in question).

Re:Gracious Outrage

[Bert64]

You can, but exchange likes to mangle messages, for instance if you receive a plain text email exchange will create a very poor html copy of it too... This breaks things like encryption and signed mails.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[idontgno]

If I discount your purchase of my product because of competitive pricing by a market adversary, is that unethical? Because last time I looked, that's called "competitive pricing".... kinda like negotiating a better price at $BIGBOX_ELECTRONICS_STORE because you saw a deal at $ONLINE_ELECTRONICS_RETAILER. Which, btw, you can do, successfully, sometimes.

It was a discount. TFS is wrong, almost to the point of libel.

That said, since Microsoft took a quarter-million dollar hit in the "Expected Sales" column, and NU got to walk away from (ick) Lotus Notes... there are no losers. Except Lotus, but they can't fix that no matter what they do, short of complete self-destruction.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[bigstrat2003]

It's worth paying money to get rid of Lotus Notes. Getting money back for getting rid of Lotus Notes? That's like some kind of dream.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[Richard Steiner]

I used PROFS/VM (and OV/VM) for a decade, and I've used Notes for almost seven years.

I preferred PROFS by a mile. It had space issues, sure, but at least it would send e-mail reliably and tell you when new messages were in your mailbox in a timely manner. Notes here is terrible ... there is sometimes a 10-15 minute delay between an internal mail being sent and being received, the "new mail" indicator triggers but I have to manually refresh to see the actual messages, etc.

Worst e-mail client I've ever used. I even liked the old "NITS" MAPPER interface to SperryLink better...

Re:Gracious Outrage

[geekoid]

"The summary sounds..."

Really? really? you are going by the summary? what, are you new here? the summaries of ALL articles are bad and inaccurate, the summaries on slashdot are often wrong and something nonsensical in the context of that they link to.

Half the times the stories they link to our sensational PoS in and of themselves.

I don't know about this story, but basing a post on slashdot fro a summary is often folly.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[Runaway1956]

Who gives a small rat's ass how grateful the students might be? The students are in college for no other purpose than to learn how to solve problems. So - dump all the worst problems that all the buggy fucking software in the world can create, sit back, and see how the students solve the problems.

Being spoonfed a "solution" that one particular corporation finds to be profitable is NOT an education.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[Dcnjoe60]

RTFA. The summary is an outright fabrication. (of course, so is the title of the article in question).

Actually, the summary just quotes the introduction to the article. And, in the article, it states that the university is receiving funds from Microsoft to cover consulting and conversion costs.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[Darinbob]

I had worked with Notes briefly, not as a corporate user but to integrate with it. And I rather liked it. There was no competition for it since no one did anything like it at the time. However I think a lot of people used solely for mail and a few side apps and thus they treated it like competitor with Outlook. But the Idea of Notes being used not for mail primarily, but as a conversation tracker was something I wouldn't mind seeing. It wasn't the easiest thing to customize but vastly simpler than Outlook. I think for the stuff I liked in it you can use a Wiki instead these days if you don't want authentication.

Still though, in all the intervening years I still have not seen anyone do the basic Notes example: I mail vacation request to boss which is authenticated, he signs it in mail and it's authenticated, it gets send to HR and the whole sequence is authenticated end to end. Instead I've always had to log into bizarre third party systems, Oracle front ends, remote NT server apps, etc, to do the same thing. The Notes email interface wasn't great but the it still does things the other guys don't do very easily.

The biggest headache with Notes though for me was that it didn't integrate with Microsoft Exchange Server very well because MAPI was a piece of junk and Microsoft fully intended that Outlook would be the only mail client that can work properly with Exchange Server.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[BitZtream]

And you should learn to read before you speak.

MS didn't 'PAY' anyone anything ... unless by pay ... you mean gave them a discount ...

MS discounted the school $250k off the price they quoted them to perform the data conversion and import.

The school will still be paying MS very large sums of money and at no point will any of it be pointed in the direction of the school.

Learn the difference between a discount and pay off. The discount happens in pretty much every business.

Basically, Microsoft waived the 'new cell phone activation fee for signing a 2 year contract'. So does that mean Cingular has been paying me $36 every time I give them $200-600 for a new phone?

Re:Gracious Outrage

[protektor]

There is everything in the world wrong with a cash incentive. It is illegal as all get out for government groups to accept that. It is called a bribe or kick back and usually results in someone going to jail because they did not follow legal procedures for contract procurement. Contracts are suppose to be sealed bids by at least 3 bidders or they are invalid, and the requirements must be publicly announced so anyone can bid on the contract. Some one clearly needs to learn how government contracts work and are awarded. The university is a government body of the state. This is exactly the kind of monopoly behavior that Microsoft got convicted by the US and the EU. When you are a convicted illegal monopoly the rules of the game are completely different for you because you broke the law. Clearly Microsoft is breaking the law again and trying to make it look like it is no big deal when it is a huge deal.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a Mac. Tired of the malware scene! Gave away my 3 pc's to people with no money. Office 365 is only going to work for users with an strong internet connection.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[protektor]

That is clearly a bribe. If you give the university cash that they didn't have before just so they pick your product then that is a bribe or a kick back and is completely illegal. Someone at Microsoft should be going to jail and someone at the university should be joining them in jail as well. This wasn't a we will reduce the amount you pay us by $250,000 so you can afford hire people to do the converting. It was here is a check for $250,000 to spend however you want because you picked us.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[protektor]

If Cingular cut you a check for $36 to spend however you want then yes you are being bribed. Microsoft cut them a check to be used however they wanted. The fact they used it on consultants doesn't matter. It is $250,000 cash that they didn't have before in their bank account. That is clearly a bribe or kick back and someone should be in jail. Microsoft has to play by different rules than everyone else because they are a convicted illegal monopoly by the US and the EU.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[protektor]

Doesn't matter if it was public or not. If you pay someone cash they didn't have before then it is a bribe or kick back and that is illegal. The University has $250,000 more in the bank from Microsoft. It doesn't matter if they spent it on consultants. They were given cash they didn't have before for picking Microsoft and that is illegal.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[mcvos]

I'm no MS fan either, but getting paid to move away from Lotus Notes is a sweet deal no matter how you spin it.

Re:Gracious Outrage

[xtieburn]

Anti-competitive doesnt just mean you cant throw discounts at people even if you are the apparently evil Microsoft. It means that you are going so far that all other competition can not keep up. Whether with money or litigation etc.
MS were up against Google, there is nothing stopping google weighing in with a discount that could easily counter MSs offer. They chose not to and they lost the business that is if anything a perfect example of good competition.

So, could people please stop applying anti-competitive to everything that involves a company they dont like succeeding...

It went a little something like this

[Anonymous Coward]

University of Nebraska: "I don't care what the benefits are. You'd have to pay me to use Microsoft's Office 365."
Microsoft: [Takes out a checkbook.] "How much are we talking about?"

Re:It went a little something like this

[Anonymous Coward]

It should have continued like this:

University: Well, you paid Nokia a billion. That's with a "B."

Office 365

[Anonymous Coward]

The software practically sells itself!

Steve Ballmer..

[kvvbassboy]

needs to go. What's with all this anti-competitive bullshit coming from Microsoft. They actually used to be a very good technology company until a couple of years back.

Re:Steve Ballmer..

[Elbereth]

Ballmer offers incentives. Gates dictated. I'll take Ballmer over Gates any day, because you can at least turn down Ballmer's incentives. If you stood up to Gates, you were destroyed.

I would contrast Sculley and Jobs in a similar manner, though not nearly so strong.

Re:Steve Ballmer..

[boristdog]

Yeah, just like that stupid anti-competitive Apple has been doing with steep student discounts on their products since 1984!

Microsoft is getting a clue and going after their future market, just like Apple has always done.

Re:Steve Ballmer..

[Dcnjoe60]

Yeah, just like that stupid anti-competitive Apple has been doing with steep student discounts on their products since 1984!

Microsoft is getting a clue and going after their future market, just like Apple has always done.

Ummm, the student discount on a Mac is like $50 or $100 depending on what model. That doesn't sound very steep.

Re:Steve Ballmer..

[BitZtream]

If you stood up to Gates, you were destroyed.

God, how much of a pussy do you have to be that you're afraid to stand up to a boss?

Whats he going to do? FIRE YOU? Do you know anyone who has been turned down for a job because 'oh yea, and I stood up to bill gates and he fired me'? No, no one anywhere would give a shit.

This is America. You can find a job. No boss can 'destroy' you, only your fear will destroy you. Your boss is just a man, same as you (or female, but you get the point). If you're afraid of Bill Gates, you have bigger issues than anything he can do to your career.

Re:Steve Ballmer..

[Elbereth]

Yes, one is usually not destroyed by one's boss, no matter how much of an asshole he is. However, the competition was destroyed, and, as I'm sure you're aware, that's to what I was referring... though it was a good troll. I rate it 4/5. Would be trolled again. An asset to Slashdot! A++++++++

Re:Steve Ballmer..

[protektor]

There is a world of difference between a discount and whipping out the checkbook to write someone a check for buying your product, especially at the government level which is what the University is. The University ended up with $250,000 more in their bank account that they didn't have before. Doesn't matter what they spent it on. That is clearly a bribe or kick back and is illegal as hell. Someone at Microsoft and the University should be going to jail over this. This is anti-competitive. Microsoft is a convicted illegal monopoly by the US and the EU. When you are a convicted monopoly the rules of the game are completely different for you since you broke the law. I am bothered that no one at Microsoft ever went to jail over the monopoly convictions. Microsoft jacked around with the trial and lied and all they got was a slap on the wrist. Clearly Microsoft paid someone off give how other monopoly convictions punishments have been handled in the past. They should have been broken up in to three companies and not allowed to sell to each other. That's what happens when you break the law on such a grand scale.

Re:Steve Ballmer..

[perryizgr8]

it is when you multiply it with a whole university worth of students.

Re:Steve Ballmer..

[Anonymous Coward]

The University ended up with $250,000 more in their bank account that they didn't have before. Doesn't matter what they spent it on.

Why do you feel the need to post that same line over and over all through this thread?

Setting aside the fact that it is not true if you actually read the article without a red haze of hate redacting it for you, you've clearly got some real personal issues based on your reaction to a fluff piece from a blog.

Re:Want Failure? To the cloud!

[MindStalker]

Think of it as a marketing tool. If it is good students who have used it for 4 years will go on to promote it in business, at which time they will be laughed at, (or not).

Lotus Notes

[ISoldat53]

Lotus Notes still exists?

Re:Lotus Notes

[AngryDeuce]

Yeah, really. What is this, 1998? Is Limp Bizkit still the coolest band in the universe?

Re:Lotus Notes

[crypticedge]

Limp Bizket was never cool.

Re:Lotus Notes

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I hadn't run out of mod points; I'd mod your post informative. ;)

Re:Lotus Notes

[J Renard]

Neither was Lotus Notes.

Re:Lotus Notes

[AngryDeuce]

Wish someone would have told me back in 1998 :(

Re:Lotus Notes

[Megane]

Someone had to be paid to switch from Bloatus?

I've had to use that crap at two places I've worked, once in the late '90s and another time for a few months back in the mid 2Ks.

gosh, why would they be getting RID OF Notes...

[Anonymous Coward]

...possibly because it so unbelievably bloated? or because they glued Lotus Symphony into it and made it even more bloated? I can't think of any other specific reasons because there are so many... ...

Did I mention that Lotus Notes is a bloated, fat, resource hog already? :D

Re:Want Failure? To the cloud!

[Ferzerp]

No. RTFA. They discounted conversion services by $250k. The school is still paying for the product. This is commonplace in the industry.

"Sure, we want to swap from x to your product y, but it will cost us too much to transition"

"How can we help out so that we get a revenue stream from your subscription/maintenance (that still makes us money in the long run)?"

Who needs accuracy (though the linked story had the same inaccurate headline)?

Not very gracious

[Anonymous Coward]

$250k is cheap like a whore, the vice chancellor probably gets paid more than that in a year. I wouldn't get out of bed for less than $2.5m, unless that bed had Lotus Notes in it.

Re:Not very gracious

[not-my-real-name]

$250k is cheap like a whore, the vice chancellor probably gets paid more than that in a year. I wouldn't get out of bed for less than $2.5m, unless that bed had Lotus Notes in it.

Where do you work? I'll get out of bed for only $2m. Now, do you get this every time you get out of bed or is it just once a day? Also, if you have to get up during the night, does that count?

Re:Not very gracious

[Cwix]

Also, if you have to get up during the night, does that count?

Naw, you are on call.

just switched to android for free, would have paid

[Anonymous Coward]

how things 'change', years after they 'should', into what? unlessgangstered?

Cheap

[sproketboy]

250k? That's all? It will probably cost the university 3 times that in support and upgrade costs. They probably should have run this by their math department....

Re:Cheap

[nedlohs]

You should have probably run the article by your reading comprehension department too.

Re:Cheap

[sproketboy]

You should make the world a better place and go fuck yourself.

Re:Cheap

[geekoid]

No, I'm pretty sure it would be a better place if people tried to actually understand what they are commenting on instead of just spouting off.

Re:Cheap

[nedlohs]

I can't reach.

Lotus Notes is still around?

[elrous0]

I'm not being sarcastic there, I haven't seen anyone using that since the 90's. I kind of put it in my "assumed they phased it out years ago" file right next to Novell Groupwise (found out not long ago they still make that too).

Re:Lotus Notes is still around?

[methano]

Duke Medical uses it.

For what it's worth.

Re:Lotus Notes is still around?

[LoudMusic]

Lotus Domino (server) and Notes (client) are actually alive and well. This article is old, obviously, but you can see that Notes/Domino was slowly slipping until 2006 where it began to recover.

http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/dx/lotus-notesdomino-marketshare-is-growing

These two pages show that the Notes/Domino combo is actually even closer to Exchange today than it was five years ago.

http://dominoorexchange.pbworks.com/w/page/18061910/FrontPage
http://dominoorexchange.pbworks.com/w/page/18061909/Fortune-Global-500-(2007)

I was a Domino admin for 9 years, from 1999 to 2008, versions 4.5 to 8.0 I believe, with a single server instance. I am now an Exchange admin and have been for about 3 years, versions 2003, 2007, and 2010.

The whole time I was a Domino admin I wanted to convert to Exchange. Now that I am an Exchange admin I wouldn't mind deploying Domino. They both have peculiar issues. Domino has really weird wording in their config documents, but Exchange/Outlook have a really hard time with virus/trojan/malware issues.

It's a toss up. I really don't think you can go wrong with either one, so long as you know what you're doing with the one you've chosen.

Re:Lotus Notes is still around?

[Yaddoshi]

Eyes...twitching...

Re:Lotus Notes is still around?

[Anonymous Coward]

CSC (formerly Computer Sciences Corp.) uses it, too. Truth be told, I would rather use Pine or Elm in a small console window than the abomination called Lotus Notes. That is not, alas, an option here.

There's a web interface to Lotus Notes, which focuses primarily on the email and calendar portion (and uses only a small fraction of the memory). It seems not to bother with the incomprehensible "database" part that the whole fugly thing seems to be built upon, but requires ActiveX and that has its own set of issues, like timing out silently, and requiring re-authentication many times a day.

But one of the features of Lotus Notes, as far as I can tell, is transparent and hidden digital signing of messages (at least those that don't leave the system). It's probably good for purposes of accountability and message integrity, but only useful for messages that travel inside the system, as the external gateway appears to discard that information. Yeah, it's an ugly, ugly beast, and it just won't die.

Re:Lotus Notes is still around?

[ColdWetDog]

Head asplode ...

Re:Lotus Notes is still around?

[antdude]

My employer used it (both non-tab and tabbed versions) until mid 2000s before going to Outlook.

Re:Lotus Notes is still around?

[Anonymous Coward]

The company I work at still uses Groupwise... and we're a Fortune 500 company. My laptop was 6+ years old before it was recently replaced. This company does not like to invest in new technology of any kind. Getting your crappy wares into a university or company is very lucrative since they are slow to change, even when a better option is clearly available. Retraining for new software is a nightmare.

Re:Lotus Notes is still around?

[zeroduck]

At least with the version my company uses, ActiveX is not required for the web interface. Or it has a ActiveX interface, a heavy interface, and a mobile interface and just doesn't tell me about the ActiveX one when I log in on my Linux laptop with Chrome. It would be nice if it would stop asking me which interface I'd like to use. That said, Notes should DIAF.

Re:Lotus Notes is still around?

[rrohbeck]

I was forced to use it two or three years ago for a couple of months after a merger. Thankfully everybody else said the same: Horrible, horrible, horrible.
But users are locked in -the same way as with MS: Proprietary file formats and APIs create a lot of inertia. It was quite a project to integrate that new group.

Re:Lotus Notes is still around?

[Anonymous Coward]

screw you I have to live through lotus notes hell everyday - at least I don't have to use pine * shivers from university memories

Re:Lotus Notes is still around?

[atamido]

When I had to use the Notes client, it was pretty terrible, but that was back in 2003, and I don't recall the version. I've known several people in the past year that have had the client at their place of work, and it seems to be universally hated, although I don't know the versions. Even if the servers are of comparable quality, it seems that the overwhelming dislike for the client would make Lotus a thing to move away from.

If you're having virus/trojan issues, then try using an edge filter of some sort. A number of companies sell them, like the Barracuda Spam Filter. Drop whatever you get between the internet and your Exchange filter and you will likely never see a virus hit Exchange. You can get a transparent proxy product to do general web browsing. That's what I do and I haven't seen a virus issue on Exchange in many years (with thousands of users).

Does MS really see Google Apps as a threat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone in Redmond actually tried using GDocs? The built in functionality is on par with Office from a decade ago, and the portability of its files is on par with Works circa WFW 3.11.

GDocs made a big splash as the first free, cloud-based office suite, but it really is subpar in every conceivable fashion. Its portability with regard to spreadsheets is particular abhorrent. Export to Excel and you lose all linking between graphs/charts and the data which is supposed to be driving them.

GDocs might be fine for grade schoolers who don't need much out of an office suite, but it's a joke for post-secondary education and beyond -- especially for students/professionals in STEM. I'd say a combination of OOo and Dropbox should be a bigger threat than GDocs.

Re:Does MS really see Google Apps as a threat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone in Redmond actually tried using GDocs? The built in functionality is on par with Office from a decade ago, and the portability of its files is on par with Works circa WFW 3.11.

You can win the functionality battle now - but Google isn't just some random startup with an array of shitty Office-alike products. If they get their acts together and put out something that's on par with 365, that lost sale will be one Microsoft will never get back because there'll be no need for the customer to switch. I think it's a smart way to close the deal, and frankly $250,000 is peanuts to Microsoft anyway. (Although to be fair, if you're a CTO and you're basing your purchasing decision on what a company could theoretically do, you should be shitcanned anyway.)

That all said, as a UNL student I think I'll stick to the non-cloud version of Office to get my papers done.

Re:Does MS really see Google Apps as a threat?

[Bert64]

GDocs may be inferior, but it's cheaper, and has a large company with a big marketing budget behind it. That's what MS is afraid of, because their business model has always been all about offering cheaper inferior products, marketing them heavily and getting the users locked in.

Also, people were getting their work done with office a decade ago, and the things they need to do haven't really changed.

Problems with export to excel are likely due to microsoft's proprietary formats, do the same problems occur if you export to openoffice?

The collaborative features of GDocs are great too, and nothing from MS or OOo comes close to them.
On the other hand tho, there should be an open set of APIs so that users of desktop software can interact with gdocs users and vice-versa, desktop apps may be more powerful but web based apps are far more convenient. That way a company can move to google and choose between using the web based or native apps depending on requirements and budget.

Re:Does MS really see Google Apps as a threat?

[breeze95]

Has anyone in Redmond actually tried using GDocs? The built in functionality is on par with Office from a decade ago, and the portability of its files is on par with Works circa WFW 3.11.

Well if it is as good as Office from a decade ago (Office 2000) then it is a very good product. The organization that I work for still mostly use Office 2003 and there is nothing that we do with Office 2003 and Office 2007 that can't be done in Office 2000. Personally, I like Google Docs, but I don't think it is as robust as Office 2000 as you claim.

Lock them in for cheap

[wile_e8]

$250,000 is nothing compared to future revenue once they are locked in to Microsoft products

It's just more proof that...

[Anonymous Coward]

...UNL sucks and is an embarrassment to the Big Ten Conference.

Now there's an "innovative" way to calculate ROI

[Monchanger]

I suppose we'll soon enough see an endless stream of magazine ads including a "testimonial", about how Nebraska U. "saved" hundreds of thousands of dollars by "choosing" Office over IBM's product.

nt

[shentino]

Wouldn't this count as a bribe?

Re:nt

[Lunix Nutcase]

No, it's not since they weren't paying them to use it. It was a completely commonplace discount given to a big customer. Universities negotiate such discounts all the fucking time. The summary and article are FUD.

Re:nt

[Dcnjoe60]

No, it's not since they weren't paying them to use it. It was a completely commonplace discount given to a big customer. Universities negotiate such discounts all the fucking time. The summary and article are FUD.

According to the article, the university is receiving $250,000 in funds to cover consulting services for the conversion from Lotus Notes. So, it is only a bribe if you are paid to actually use it, but not if your are paid to make it so you can use it? I agree if Microsoft actually discounted the price of Office 365, that this is normal and happens all the time. However, if the university actually received funds as part of the transaction, then how is that not a bribe unless the only contractors involved are Microsoft employees and they aren't charging for the conversion.

Re:nt

[idontgno]

Is a $2000 consumer rebate on buying a 2012 Pigmobile a bribe? Even if you actually take the money in hand, rather than having it applied as a discount on the purchase price? (Because, you know, the former is income to be taxed, whereas the latter might reduce sales-taxable purchase price (depending on jurisdiction).)

Or... and let's be honest here... is it evil because that convicted monopolist is doing it, and anything that they do to get any sale at the expense of any competitor is EVIL.

I swear. There seems to be a huge contingent of slashdotters who think that Microsoft is morally obligated to take any action it needs to in order to become the provider of last choice, perhaps in atonement for past evil, perhaps on the general principle that anything SO EVIL is obligated to starve itself to death.

You're welcome to hold and espouse that perspective; to some extent, it's a free world, after all. But don't expect too many rational people to agree with your irrational fantasies.

Re:nt

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA: "We will also use that funding to pay for a Microsoft Premier Support agreement covering email and Microsoft Office applications for the entire university"

Its just Office 365 with a support agreement thrown in - "we'll give you the money and then you give it back to us".

Seems like a poor publicity strategy on Microsoft's part, but they have always been associated with unscrupulous business tactics. You would think after a quarter of a century they would have learned something about how to improve their image a little.

Re:nt

[protektor]

The problem is the laws that government bodies have to abide by are not the same laws that consumers have to abide by. If I can con someone into giving me a product for free and then paying me cash on top then I am legally allowed to try and do that. Any time a state university or city or state gets paid to award a contract that is bribery and/or a kickback and that is illegal and people have gone to jail over it. That is exactly what happened here. Microsoft said if you award us the contract we will whip out our checkbook and cut you a check for $250,000 and that is exactly what happened. The University has $250,000 cash that they didn't have before. It doesn't matter what they spend it on it is still a bribe to award the contract and that is illegal.

Re:nt

[idontgno]

Under some fairness-in-contracting laws, what you say is somewhat true. However, it's not necessarily true in all cases. As far as I can tell, Nebraska doesn't have any such law, so "kickbacks" (rebates) and "bribes" (incentives) would not be illegal. Federal fairness-in-contracting law wouldn't be applicable, either, since this is strictly a State contract.

Money in the personal or campaign pockets of decision makers would be illegal under any reasonable definition of "anti-corruption" or "anti-bribery" law, but that's not what's happening here. (Not even Microsoft is stupid enough to boast about this as a marketing success.)

"Illegal" is about what is specifically in the letter of the law, not what we wish were there or wish it meant, or what we think is right or wrong. If there's no letter of the law, there's no law. Q.E.D.

Besides, what makes you think Microsoft marketing is stupid enough to not submerge such "payola" in the terms of final pricing, so it just looks like a bottom-line price discount? Even if cash under the table is illegal, reducing purchase price by the equivalent amount and making the "payoff" by allowing the customer to just keep that money in their pockets would never be illegal.

Your moral outrage is noted. It's just not meaningful. This is not against the law, and unless Federal-style certified pricing is brought into effect, even if it were against the law, it'd be easily circumvented.

Article is a lie.

[RightSaidFred99]

Unless my alarm company is also "paying me $300" by installing my monitoring equipment for free and 3 months of free service so I will then pay them a monthly, 2 year contract guaranteed amount of $30.

The University is paying for the service, but getting free services and a discount. Article makes it sound like Microsoft is paying them to use Office 365, which is untrue.

Re:Article is a lie.

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to University of Nebraska at Omaha, and work next to campus, and do some R&D with them. UNO changed from Lotus Notes to Gmail for the students 2-3 years ago. Pretty much everybody wants to move away from Lotus Notes, which is still the faculty system. My guess is that they aren't actually paying for the service, this is to protect the Microsoft site license. If they move to Google Apps, at some point in the future, they might stop paying the huge site license fees. My guess is that is how the economics of this breaks down. I have no idea what the amount is, but I'm guessing that $250K is likely less than the 10% of the yearly amount. Small potatoes if it keeps them paying that site license just one more year. Every year after that is just gravy.

Re:Article is a lie.

[protektor]

The problem is you are not a government body, so the laws are different for government bodies which is what the university is. If anyone pays a government body to be awarded a contract that is bribery and/or kickbacks and that is illegal. It doesn't matter what you spend the cash on, taking cash to award someone a government contract is illegal. People have gone to jail for doing the exact same thing in city governments and state government departments as well as state universities. You also can not award a government contract unless three valid closed sealed bids are received. So writing a bid request that only one company can fill is not allowed either. You can accept a bid that is higher because more things are thrown in that doesn't exist in the lowest bid, for example a 2 year support contract included in the bid and the lowest bid doesn't have a support contract.

Re:Article is a lie.

[eulernet]

And $250K is probably the price that the formation for Office 365 will cost !

Simple.

[jellomizer]

$250k to compensate the college for trying out a new technology. I get the feeling that the university didn't really want to go to Google Apps anyways but used to as a bargaining chip with Microsoft. Organizations have done this before all the time. I don't know Boeing, Air Bus seem like a better deal. Or You know Ford we like those Chevy's for our fleet trucks. An educated consumer can really give those evil corporations a ride. (They just make all their money off of the stupid consumers)

Re:Simple.

[protektor]

Companies can do this, government bodies can not by law and it is called bribery and/or kick backs and people have gone to jail over this exact thing. Government bodies accepting money to award a contract to a specific group or person is illegal. That is exactly what happened here.

Re:Now there's an "innovative" way to calculate RO

[RightSaidFred99]

Considering that they are going to pay 1/2 the yearly licensing fee, umm... yes, we will and it's true.

Or Perhaps ...

[eldavojohn]

which they say offers newer technology, greater flexibility, and operational savings.

Microsoft: "It offers newer technology, greater flexibility, and operational savings."
University of Nebraska: "No it doesn't! It costs $249,999.99 more than Lotus Notes."
Microsoft: *slides check across the table* "There you go."

sales manager face palm....

[bodland]

kickbacks are supposed to be UNDER the table....damn computer illiterate millennials...

Re:sales manager face palm....

[RightSaidFred99]

Ahh, if only a kickback was what you appear to think it is. A kickback would be if the person making the decision was personally paid $250k.

This is actually a discount or incentive, and part of doing business.

Re:sales manager face palm....

[Dcnjoe60]

Ahh, if only a kickback was what you appear to think it is. A kickback would be if the person making the decision was personally paid $250k.

This is actually a discount or incentive, and part of doing business.

While I agree with your kickback definition, more or less, a discount or incentive implies a price reduction. Microsoft paid the university cash so the university could pay outside consultants and contractors to work on the conversion. Might not be a kickback, but it sure seems to smell.

Re:sales manager face palm....

[protektor]

If anyone pays cash or anything of value to be awarded a government contract over anyone else that is illegal and anti-competitive, the whole government bid process is suppose to support competition not get cash awarded for a contract. People and corporations are different due to laws specifically covering this for government contracts.

Article miscategorizes the form of payment

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft did not write a check to the University for $250,000. Microsoft, like so many other companies do, probably offered $250,00 worth of credits to pay for consulting services from themselves or their Microsoft partners. This is a common practice, that both Google and IBM engage in. Even your local taxing authority offers tax rebates to bring in businesses.

It's a mess :(

[rsilvergun]

Sorry, I want to like Openoffice, but I just watched it eat my daughter's 20 page novella with a know bug in the auto-recovery that's existed since 2.0 and has an easy work around (disable auto-recovery). BTW, once the auto-recovery bug gets going just about anything you open gets wasted. It's a nasty, critical bug. On thing about commercial software, they can't tolerate these bugs because they get sued class action style.

Part of me wants to give them the benefit of the doubt on this, but the mean spirited part wants the devs at oo.org to pull their heads out of their posteriors on stuff like this. I can't help but wonder, if they knew it was a problem why the heck they didn't disable it in the first place. I understand it's hard to fix, but for Pete's sake, disable it.

Re:It's a mess :(

[micheas]

And how many court filings have been missed because Microsoft Word ate the pleading?

And how many times has Microsoft been sued for it?

Software that makes sure to not lose your work like lyx is very rare.

Re:It's a mess :(

[geekoid]

What bug? Can you link to the bug report? I'm curious how I managed to avoid that.

" they can't tolerate these bugs because they get sued class action style."
HAHAHAHAHahhahahah.. oh man, you crack me up. I have seen years of data go buy buy forever because of MS bugs in their office suite.

Re:It's a mess :(

[amicusNYCL]

And how many court filings have been missed because Microsoft Word ate the pleading?

  And how many times has Microsoft been sued for it?

That's not how debating works, you don't just get to ask questions. So, what are the answers? How many times has Microsoft been sued for Word bugs?

Re:It's a mess :(

[amicusNYCL]

On thing about commercial software, they can't tolerate these bugs because they get sued class action style.

Have you seriously never read any EULA? Just about the first thing they say is that you can't sue them for damages caused by their product, that they don't warranty anything.

Re:It's a mess :(

[mysidia]

And how many times has Microsoft been sued for it?

Dunno... I couldn't find any filings on that subject; I assume Microsoft's never been sued over it, yet, so that's probably a pretty good record.

Re:It's a mess :(

[protektor]

Microsoft can not be sued over Word eating your documents. You need to closely read that EULA you agreed to when you installed Word. They are not liable if it destroys your data. The only thing you can from them is the cost of the software you bought. So if you bought it on sale or under some discounted bulk license agreement then that amount is the most you will be able to get from Microsoft. Yep it pretty crappy how the software industry disclaims everything and all liability. They even go so far as to say they don't guarantee it will work, or work as advertised or work like the box says. Modern software EULAs are basically a pig in a poke. They think you should count yourself lucky that they even allow you to buy the software, now sit down and shut up and do exactly what the software company says. Remember they can change the contract any time they like and you don't have any choice about other than stop using the software, which you never owned in the first place. Why software is allowed to be so different than anything else the average consumer buys I will never understand. Personally I think it is time for the government to step in and smack the commercial software industry around and make software follow all the same laws that everything else does and no EULA can change it, and that consumers do in fact own their software.

Re:It's a mess :(

[protektor]

I would love to know why the software industry is allowed to disclaim everything and even say their software isn't guaranteed to work or do what is claimed or written/shown on the outside of the box. I would love to know why the software industry is allowed to change the purchase contract (I bought the software at the store I didn't sign a license agreement) after you have paid for it and you don't get to know the terms until after you buy it. You also can't return it to the store you bought it from if you don't like the contract because they won't let you return opened software. The software industry even writes their EULAs up so that they can change the EULA anytime they want and you get no say about it. That right there is a complete scam. Why the commercial software industry is allowed to be so different from every other product that consumers purchase in a retail store I will never understand. I am personally waiting until some Judge or politician gets screwed by some EULA and takes the whole software industry out back and smacks them around.

I personally think the whole commercial software industry needs to be b**ch slapped. I especially think the computer game industry needs to be b*tch slapped given how many rights they make people give up like interoperability and hacking it up to be more like you want.

I personally think if you don't have the consumer sign a contract before the sale then you should not be allowed to add one after the sale. If I can't read the contract and have it explained to me at the store then it should not be allowed. I should have to sign it at the store before the sale for it to be legally binding. I also think software contracts if they are even allowed should have to be fair, balanced and equitable to all parties rather than slant so extremely far in favor of the software industry.

Re:It's a mess :(

[Chrisq]

And how many court filings have been missed because Microsoft Word ate the pleading?

And how many times has Microsoft been sued for it?

That's not how debating works, you don't just get to ask questions. So, what are the answers? How many times has Microsoft been sued for Word bugs?

(German accent) Vee ask die questions!

Re:It's a mess :(

[amicusNYCL]

Why software is allowed to be so different than anything else the average consumer buys I will never understand.

Easy. They started doing it that way, and no one has really challenged it.

Even MS marketing falls flat on its face now

[Ant P.]

A product so bad, you couldn't even give it away for free to Lotus Notes victims!

Re:Even MS marketing falls flat on its face now

[RightSaidFred99]

Odd, the school is paying $250k a year for it. Oh, never mind - you didn't read the article and are just trying to score cool points with other neckbeards. Carry on.

Re:Now there's an "innovative" way to calculate RO

[Barlo_Mung_42]

Hey now! no need to go dragging your "facts" into this.

Be aware, no VBA macros in Office 365

[GPS Pilot]

M$ is trying to get away with marketing unscriptable office apps once again (Office 365 doesn't support VBA macros).

What happened the last time they did this? Office 2008 for Mac dropped support for VBA macros. Customers complained mightily, and now it's back in Office 2011 for Mac.

There's only so much one can do with unscriptable office apps. M$'s new "ribbon interface" is hardly a breakthrough. Things only get interesting when users have access to automation and an easy-to-use programming language like VBA.

Re:Be aware, no VBA macros in Office 365

[Anonymous Coward]

There are other languages and bindings besides VBA. They are getting rid of VBA because it blows donkeys for quarters. Any modern language (on the windows platform) has an ActiveX binding somewhere to get the job done. I'm sure (though not an expert) that there's a way to access that on Mac.

Re:Be aware, no VBA macros in Office 365

[Bigbutt]

Microsoftie Bob: Hmmm, how can we get folks to migrate off of the next version of Office quicker?
Microsoftie Bill: I know! We'll disable VBA Macros. Folks will complain and we'll have more time to work on the code.
Microsoftie Bob: Yea, it worked for Vista!

[John]

Re:Be aware, no VBA macros in Office 365

[GPS Pilot]

Duh... of course average users can, and will, easily use the ActiveX bindings of non-VBA languages to create cross-platform ways to automate repetitive tasks in their M$ Office apps. That's exactly what I had in mind. Thanks for setting me straight, AC.

Re:Be aware, no VBA macros in Office 365

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree in principal, but, at the same time, Office 365 is a completely different product from Office for Mac.

With Office 2008 for Mac, you literally lost functionality (that returned in Office 2011 for Mac). With Office 365, you have a completely new system. I'm sure that Office 365 lacks support for a bunch of things as a result of being too new, and from a lack of a "proper" scripting language. However, I imagine that this will actually lead to a much better system that likely supports JavaScript or some other scripting language that is hopefully not VBA, which has been "good enough" for far too long. Accountants do not need to become real programmers, but there needs to be a better system in place than VBA.

And even if they don't, they still provide a mechanism to bring your documents out "from the cloud" to your local system, thereby creating a simpler sharing mechanism that can be automatically backed up, and avoids cluttering everyone's email. I would expect (never used it, so don't know) those downloaded copies will retain the embedded scripts.

Re:Be aware, no VBA macros in Office 365

[Tacvek]

Do you even know what office 365 is?

Office 365 is:

• A Microsoft hosted Exchange Server
• A Microsoft hosted Sharepoint Server (including Office Web Apps)
• A Microsoft Hosted Lync (Imstant messaging) server

That is literally all there is to it. They have tweaked the Web-app UIs to be branded Office 365 and put the whole thing behind a single sign-in portal, but you could set up the exact same service locally if you were a large business.

The more expensive plans also include subscription based access to the Office 2010 "Professional Plus" (previously known as "Enterprise").

Microsoft knows that many small businesses will end up buying full versions of the desktop apps. Since the "Cloud" is merely Exchange and SharePoint, there is no real problem using the desktop apps in conjunction with the web-based apps.

Re:Be aware, no VBA macros in Office 365

[amicusNYCL]

M$ is trying to get away with marketing unscriptable office apps once again (Office 365 doesn't support VBA macros).

Don't worry, it's online, there are way better options for scripting than VBA. There is always a better option than VBA. Javascript shines like a Grail-Shaped Beacon next to VBA.

Things only get interesting when users have access to automation and an easy-to-use programming language like VBA.

The explosion of things like Wordpress shows that not only would people rather download something pre-made than make it themselves, but there's also a commercial market for programmers willing to do the work and compete.

Re:Be aware, no VBA macros in Office 365

[shutdown -p now]

Given how limited Office 365 actually is, compared to desktop Office (it's only feature-rich if you compare to Google Docs, really), I think that the lack of macros is not going to be a stressing issue for many users. They'll probably run into something else first.

Re:Be aware, no VBA macros in Office 365

[Anonymous Coward]

AutoCRAP (AutoCAD) is going the same way - AutoCAD 2011 requires installation of a VBA "enabler" for macros to work, and eventually they will drop support for it altogether. From the Autodesk website [http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=12900036&linkID=9240617], "Autodesk has begun the transition of Visual Basic customization from VBA to .NET technology".

Moral of the story: beware of any software dependent in any way on Microsoft

Re:Be aware, no VBA macros in Office 365

[Anonymous Coward]

use the ActiveX bindings of non-VBA languages to create cross-platform ways

I don’t know about linux, but there have been no ActiveX controls (or whatever they are called) for Mac OS X since Microsoft stopped developing IE for Mac OS X, which is now nine years ago.

Re:Be aware, no VBA macros in Office 365

[GPS Pilot]

Maybe my use of the sarcasm tag in the post to which you replied should have been explicit.

Did they actually pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a common tactic used to talk about how much donors give is to point to really expensive software and say "they gave us 5000 licenses to a product that retails for $500! So they gave us $250,000!". I'm wondering if this is what Microsoft did, or if they agreed to actually donate 2500 hundred dollar bills to the school--the article didn't explain it at all.

The difference being, in my mind at least, that giving money sounds like a bribe, while giving software licenses in exchange for a contract just sounds like standard contract negotiation.

Which University of Nebraska?

[jojoba_oil]

University of Nebraska at Lincoln? University of Nebraska at Omaha? Or the whole University of Nebraska system? There're more than one University of Nebraska...

Re:Which University of Nebraska?

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole University of Nebraska system. Though the medical campus isn't using the "cloud" products because of HIPPA and wanting more control.

Re:Which University of Nebraska?

[Anonymous Coward]

It will be across the entire U of Nebraska System - although I believe that U of N Medical Center will be using something different due to HIPPA requirements

Re:Which University of Nebraska?

[Anonymous Coward]

the whole system, save the medical school in omaha (because they had hipaa concerns).

Re:Which University of Nebraska?

[Anonymous Coward]

University of Nebraska at Lincoln? University of Nebraska at Omaha? Or the whole University of Nebraska system? There're more than one University of Nebraska...

Entire system...although the Med Center won't be using the cloud, apparently.

Re:Want Failure? To the cloud!

[jschmitz]

Microsoft is fast on its way to becoming irrelevant - Their office suite was actually their best product ..sadly for them it won't matter for much longer

Re:Now there's an "innovative" way to calculate RO

[Ferzerp]

I have, on multiple occasions seen licensing fees negotiated down to 1/3-1/2 initial asking price on more than just Microsoft products. It is no crime.

Indoctrinates maybe 250,000 users over 10 years

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought higher learning institutions should be payed to indoctrinate their users into using a particular vendors commercial product, which frustrated the shit out of me when my state government continually announced signing multi hundred million dollar contracts with Microsoft to install their operating systems and office applications throughout my state's high schools.
I always wondering what was running through the minds of the dipshits making these deals until one day I found out. Turns out my wife's, sister's, husband's sister was the main negotiator in the state government making these deals. I found this out while chatting to her at a restaurant after meeting her for the first time.
She was actually a very nice, intelligent lady, but it didn't take long to work out what the go was.
I could tell by the excitement in her eyes while she was describing the latest hundred million dollar deal (which I had previously ridiculed with my friends) how much pride and status she felt about it.
It all made sense. She would have felt about 100 million dollars more important announcing her Microsoft deal than what she would have announcing a move to use Linux and OpenOffice.
This also explained why my Dad used to miss out on tenders where he'd already implemented the solution by the time the tender was submitted. He wasn't charging enough! He would only charge tens of thousands of dollars while the winners would charge millions of dollars for something they'd deliver 12 months down the track (or usually never at all). There's no status in doing a deal in the tens of thousands!
Moral of the story...charge like a wounded bull if you're dealing with the government.

After which...

[broginator]

...Google countered with a bid of $271,828.18

Re:After which...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Google would have atleast picked a more practical economic figure, such as a prime number in the fibbernacci sequence that if multiplied by the square root of e would give you the distance in hands from the googleplex front door knob to the tip of the antenna of former wtc 1 :P

Paid for by Android

[Kamiza Ikioi]

They have money to burn now. Still, if I was them, I'd put the money into a campus party, then use Google Apps anyways, which is free for universities.

Re:Want Failure? To the cloud!

[BitZtream]

No.

They gave them a 250k discount on the fees the University was going to pay to move the data from one system to the next, and deal with conversions and such.

Microsoft basically said 'Look, if you switch, we'll help you with the conversion for FREE!'. I'm not sure about MS's policies, at this company, we 'waive the setup fee' all the time, which is just a different name for the same thing. The setup fee for us is to deal with the issues of getting them converted from their old system to ours.

We never expect to collect it. Its a flag by the sales people, if a sales person collects the setup fee, watch out, thats the salesman flagging the account as obnoxious fucks that are going to be so difficult to deal with, we're going to have to charge them a setup fee to account for the amount of time we'll be wasting on them above and beyond what we would normally do for a new customer.

To our sales people, its simply a feature. 'You know what, I want you guys as a customer, I'll wave the setup fee ... I'll have to get approval, but for you guys, I don't think it'll be a problem' ... of course, all our sales people are told up front not to collect a setup fee unless you expect a problem or there is something specific thats going to require more work. If its something specific, they are instructed to bill it as something other than the plain Jane setup fee, such as document conversion or something like that ... but most of the time, we just don't charge a setup fee. We'll loose some money up front, but if they stay with us more than a couple years, its well worth the up front loss to reel them in.

Adobe vs Quark

[LoudMusic]

This sort of thing happens in education. Software producers know they need to plan for future users so they give it to the kids who they hope will buy it. Some coworkers of mine at an advertising agency said their professor called Quark (makers of QuarkXpress) asking for educational discounts for 30+ licenses and were told there was no discount. At the time the license cost was something like $1200 per seat. So they called Adobe and asked for educational discounts on InDesign, new at the time, and Adobe just gave them everything they wanted at no cost.

Worked in their favor too. When those kids hit the working world they only knew InDesign and their employers were forced to switch. We did. And never looked back.

"Then Adobe hit the market in 1999 with a program called InDesign (now used by Inc.). In 2003, Adobe launched its Creative Suite, which rolled in products such as Photoshop and Illustrator with InDesign. Quark couldn't come close. Its U.S. market share tumbled from 95 percent to just 25 percent ."

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100401/can-quark-turn-the-corner.html

If you want to sell your product give it to the educators.

Re:Adobe vs Quark

[Megane]

It also didn't help that Quark was waaaaay late with converting to run on OS X. (I joked to myself that it should have been renamed to "Quark 9press".) 2003 sounds like about the right timeframe for that to hurt them. Adobe CS would have been an extra one-two punch.

Re:Adobe vs Quark

[Dcnjoe60]

This sort of thing happens in education. Software producers know they need to plan for future users so they give it to the kids who they hope will buy it. Some coworkers of mine at an advertising agency said their professor called Quark (makers of QuarkXpress) asking for educational discounts for 30+ licenses and were told there was no discount. At the time the license cost was something like $1200 per seat. So they called Adobe and asked for educational discounts on InDesign, new at the time, and Adobe just gave them everything they wanted at no cost.

Worked in their favor too. When those kids hit the working world they only knew InDesign and their employers were forced to switch. We did. And never looked back.

"Then Adobe hit the market in 1999 with a program called InDesign (now used by Inc.). In 2003, Adobe launched its Creative Suite, which rolled in products such as Photoshop and Illustrator with InDesign. Quark couldn't come close. Its U.S. market share tumbled from 95 percent to just 25 percent ."

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100401/can-quark-turn-the-corner.html

If you want to sell your product give it to the educators.

And yet all of those kids coming out of college knowing linux hasn't forced companies to switch to it. The reason that your example worked was because companies were not entrenched in QuarkXpress or InDesign at the time and therefore the kids coming out set the standard, not the companies. Apple tried the same approach with education - giving steep discounts to schools and universities on their equipment, but that didn't change the business market, at least not much. Why, because for all practical purposes, companies where the difference in price between a Mac and PC or QuarkXpress or InDesign, aren't big enough to influence the market. Now, a fortune 500 company making that decision is a different story and they will look at more than just the initial cash outlay.

Re:Adobe vs Quark

[ustolemyname]

Precisely, for companies the cost of the software is trivial.

If your employees are 25% faster using product B instead of product A, even if you have product A you buy product B.

And I would like to the availability of Linux is a significant part of the reason it has pushed traditional unixes out of business computing, and holds onto the lions share of internet facing servers. You may notice that the majority of people coming out of college don't know what Linux is, they use Windows. Those who know Linux only a portion of CS grads, who then go and work in serving people who want windows. And I'm not sure about you, but I've increasingly had to support clients running OS X on all new purchases, so I think the "I want to use at work what I'm used to" does play into the business OS market.

Re:Adobe vs Quark

[sootman]

There was a little more to it than that. Quark took YEARS before they released a native version for OS X, versions 5 and 6 were not big improvments over 4, those updates were years apart, and they got really, really behind in features, especially the quality of their typesetting engines. And since the other 2 parts of the Holy Trinity of desktop publishing were both Adobe apps (Photoshop and Illustrator), InDesign's integration with them (like being able to import layered Photoshop files, rather than requiring flattened TIFFs or EPSs, and handling transparent layers instead of requiring clipping paths) sped up workflows like crazy.

Re:Adobe vs Quark

[Vegeta99]

Doesn't always work, tho. My (hell, most) school district used Apple computers. I remember taking math lessons on a IIe, and then being the kid who got out of math class to fix the IIe's, followed by LC IIIs, all the way up to some pretty schweet G4 workstations for Final Cut Pro (very good arts program at this school district).

Never bought an Apple computer, never even crossed my mind for a second. I don't want an iPod with my $1500 laptop. I want a $1000 laptop, with a number pad, thank you. Even at PSU, nobody ever used the Mac labs.

Speaking of PSU, we have our own email and student record management systems. We have distributed file servers accessible both via Windows and UNIX shares. What the hell kind of respectable state school drinks the M$ kool-aid? No IT program, Nebraska? Well, I hope you spent enough on your football program this year! *nyuk nyuk nyuk*

Re:Adobe vs Quark

[Anonymous Coward]

It may also have something to do with Quark being a miserable hellhole of a program. I cringe when I have to open our copy of it to work on some idiot designer's broken file.

I believe another slashdotter best summed up the experience of working in Quark with multiple button presses and concurrent eye gouging.

Re:Want Failure? To the cloud!

[eedwardsjr]

You have probably never used Lotus Notes.

Nebraska press release

[Anonymous Coward]

From the horses mouth - http://nebraska.edu/faculty-and-staff/e-mail-migration.html

This isn't for students - it's for staff. At least UNL (the Lincoln campus) migrated to Windows Live Email for students and alumni a few years ago, replacing the internal hosted system. Lotus Notes is a statewide installation for all University of Nebraska staff.

Why on Earth would someone...

[Anonymous Coward]

...need to be convinced to stop using Lotus Notes?

Sometimes...

[frank_adrian314159]

You gotta hang the pork chop around the neck of your ugly baby to get the dog to play with it...

Re:Now there's an "innovative" way to calculate RO

[anomaly256]

I'm no Microsoft fan, but c'mon, ANYTHING is better than Lotus notes, in every way including cost

Linux is FREE

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is FREE, as are most of the highly capable applications that come with it! If you can build entire e-comm and trading floors
around it, I'm sure it can run an office... in the right hands...

Why do people pay money for software, and so called 'experts' anymore? Pay for skilled Linux people instead!

Any university that is becoming MS-centered nowadays is taking a step back in my book.

MS could have sued to force use of office 365

[Anonymous Coward]

consider yourself lucky.

OMG Really?!

[Greyfox]

You must be a really, really bad salesman if you can't actually SELL any solution to a company that's currently using Lotus Notes. I'm pretty sure that if I approached any of the 3 companies that continue to use it, I could get them to pay me to replace their Lotus Notes installation with a digital picture of my left testicle. A picture of my left testicle, you see, offers more features and is more user friendly than Lotus Notes. Overall the user experience will be improved. Furthermore, my testicle requires far less support than Lotus Notes! I'm pretty sure that most users given a choice between a digital picture of my testicle and having to use Lotus Notes would opt for my testicle.

I suppose it's possible that Microsoft's solution might also not be as good as my testicle, but I can't imagine that it could be as bad as Lotus Notes. I mean, Microsoft would actively have to try to make their product suck to reach Notes' level of dysfunction. Lotus Notes actually makes OUTLOOK look like a fucking amazing mail application!

Re:Now there's an "innovative" way to calculate RO

[Monchanger]

Considering that they are going to pay 1/2 the yearly licensing fee, umm... yes, we will and it's true.

Umm... No. They'd be saving money compared to if they didn't get a subsidy and all other details were set in stone. You don't understand ROI if you forget that not-so-minor second part. And considering you're choosing between Microsoft and an in-place system, the savings have to be even more substantial since the cost to "transition" to IBM is $0.

Hopefully you weren't the PHB behind the deal or we're going to be seeing another story pretty soon.

Re:Now there's an "innovative" way to calculate RO

[tripleevenfall]

As a Groupwise user at work, I beg to differ.

Re:Now there's an "innovative" way to calculate RO

[perryizgr8]

true dat. i wonder how people are able to tolerate that shit for >5min. i mean, it gets non-responsive just for syncing. yes you can't do anything until sync is complete.

From Lotus Notes to Office 365?

[ilsaloving]

What, does the U of N specialize in courses on sadomasochism?

Re:Now there's an "innovative" way to calculate RO

[anomaly256]

I'd say that's normalcy bias. The same reason I think qwerty is more usable than dvorak despite dvorak being clearly technically superior and efficient

Re:Now there's an "innovative" way to calculate RO

[RightSaidFred99]

The added bonus of $250,000 makes for a sweeter deal while the University saves about 50% in annual email operating costs (from $1 million to $500,000).

They are getting $250k to make the transition _and_ paying 1/2 of what they were paying. It's not rocket surgery to see they come out ahead barring some colossal fuckup. Nothing in your theory is based on fact, you're just presenting FUD.

They should pay 100 times that amount

[wunderliebe]

and then some more. Those students are enslaved for life

Re:Now there's an "innovative" way to calculate RO

[Chrisq]

I'd say that's normalcy bias.

God I hate that bastardised word. What's wrong with 'normality' ?

Re:Now there's an "innovative" way to calculate RO

[Vectormatic]

i couldnt agree more, at my previous job they used notes for email/intarweb resources/databases, and i nearly whept tears of joy when i saw my machine at my current job had outlook on it

Re:Now there's an "innovative" way to calculate RO

[anomaly256]

"A return to normalcy" (i.e. a return to the way of life before World War I) was United States presidential candidate Warren G. Harding’s campaign promise in the election of 1920. Although detractors believed that the word was a neologism as well as a malapropism coined by Harding (as opposed to the more accepted term normality), there was contemporary discussion and evidence found that normalcy had been listed in dictionaries as far back as 1857.[1][2]

I've never understood why people crack over new(ish) words appearing in the lexicon. Language is an evolving mechanism. Where is it declared that once set in stone a language can't change? Why does it matter to you and people like you so much? I mean it's not like anyone 'axed' you a question. Do you accept 'lol'? The Oxford Dictionary does.

Bids

[Compaqt]

While I agree with you that that's the way it should be, I think the reality distortion field clouds the matter.

People seem to think MS Office is the only office product. Remember Google's lawsuit over the Federal one-contractor bid (MS)?

Same for iPhone, I think. The various government projects using iPhones and iPads? I'd venture to guess they didn't specify "generic tablet" but rather iPad specifically.

As seen by their jump to the Big Ten,

[ThatsNotPudding]

Nebraska will do anything for money. Anything.

one college rejects Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Recommendation April 20, 2011
To: Vice President Technology -
The Email Recommendation Team has completed several months of research, testing, vetting the options for replacing our email and calendar system. We have collected input from the college community in multiple ways: campus, center, department, committee and virtual presentations, surveys, online input forums, and focused discussions. It is our recommendation that our College select Google Apps, not only to replace our current email and calendaring, but to leverage the wealth of tools and resources the Google suite will bring to College.
Our recommendation is based on the following differentiators:

Functionality:Both platforms provide a robust and evolving set of features; it was impossible to base a recommendation on feature-by-feature comparison. Surveys confirmed our own assessment that ease-of-use was a high value for both students and faculty and staff. Calendaring was the number one feature noted by staff. A solution that is ‘device agnostic’ (will work equally well on laptops, desktops, tablets, etc.) was important to the recommendation team and important to those we surveyed.

The team uniformly found Google to be stronger in all these areas, as well as others. In fact, the common experience during testing was that the Google solution “just worked”, whereas functions in the Microsoft solution appeared to be less consistent and more prone to variation depending on browser and desktop environments.

Cost - While both solutions provide email and calendaring free to students, staff and faculty, the Microsoft solution charges for faculty and staff use of features like chat, office docs, spreadsheets, etc. To obtain the Microsoft solution with a feature set equivalent to Google’s free offering would start somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000 to provide the tools to faculty and staff. Total cost aside, our ultimate goal is to provide a collaboration environment that can be easily adopted across the college. The introduction of charges for a segment of the population creates a barrier in multiple ways. It has long been a question as to whether these solutions would remain ‘free’. It appears Microsoft is definitively moving to a pay-for-services model now, while Google still appears committed to the free model.

The team feels it is important to note that either solution will still require a significant investment in time and resources to transition well and establish a good support mechanism moving forward.

Support - It is our opinion that the Google environment will require less resources and investment to support. The ease-of-use noted above is a significant factor in assessing the need for end-user support. The number and range of enthusiastic endorsements we received from the college community who are already Google users reinforces that assessment.

Regarding administration of the system, Microsoft cites their solution’s strength is its ability to leverage an institution’s already existing Microsoft infrastructure. It became apparent during the set up of the testing environments that the Microsoft solution really is designed to leverage that type of environment. However, there is minimal Microsoft infrastructure in our College environment. The test environment for Google was a quick and simple “glitch-free” exercise, accomplished within hours. That was not true for setting up the Microsoft environment, which required multiple correspondences, a set-up webinar, and more than one session to trouble-shoot issues.

The team’s experience with the vendors during the assessment process also gave us an opportunity to assess the approach they would take in supporting us as an institution. Google provided a single point of contact who was extremely responsive. Replies to our formal and informal questions were full, complete and timely. Microsoft provided a point of contact, but also involved several others in resp

Javascript?

[GPS Pilot]

I understand that to a real computer scientist, VBA sucks. But I've done some interesting things with it. For example, I wrote a sudoku solver in Excel. You can watch the numbers in the spreadsheet cells change as it converges toward the solution. How could I do that in Javascript? I wouldn't know where to begin.

Re:Javascript?

[amicusNYCL]

How could I do that in Javascript? I wouldn't know where to begin.

At one point you didn't know where to begin in VBA either, but you learned it.

Re:Javascript?

[GPS Pilot]

Just as I thought... you have no real answers and you're totally blowing smoke.

Re:Javascript?

[DragonWriter]

For example, I wrote a sudoku solver in Excel. You can watch the numbers in the spreadsheet cells change as it converges toward the solution. How could I do that in Javascript? I wouldn't know where to begin.

Very easily (once you have the logic to do what you've already done.) In fact, an HTML+JS solution could be done that looked (the code) very similar to the Excel+VBA solution. Calculations aren't hard in JavaScript, and you use DOM references into HTML in JS much the same way you can use cell references to the Excel sheet in VBA.

Re:Javascript?

[amicusNYCL]

Seriously? I do Javascript programming every week. You're really asking me where to start learning Javascript? Should I direct you toward a tutorial, or maybe it would be a better idea to actually wait for the scripting documentation for Office 365. Whatever language they use, even Javascript, is probably going to be sandboxed somehow so the rules may differ from standard Javascript where you're able to access the entire DOM of the page.

And don't worry, I'm sure you'll be able to download a Sudoku solver. If you just like tinkering, there are also better tools available than an Excel spreadsheet with VBA. I used to write a ton of macros also, one of my first jobs was implementing all of the paperwork for an apartment management company in Excel, even reports and things. It was fine for the time, but there are way better tools available now. Knowing what I know now, in no way do I desire a return to the VBA macro days. I'm sorry if VBA is the only language you've used, but there are plenty of relatively easy to learn languages out there that can do a lot cooler things than a macro can.

Re:Javascript?

[GPS Pilot]

Ok -- I apologize for the miscommunication. I believe you about the superiority of Javascript. My only skepticism is that it can, say, manipulate the contents of spreadsheet cells the way VBA can. If there's a tutorial that says, "Here we'll show you how language X can automate repetitive tasks in Office apps, as easily as VBA can," I don't know of one.

Office 365 ... they'll have to start paying people

[bmullan]

Microsoft is so far behind in cloud/virtualization that they'll have to start paying people to use 365. What's the old saying... "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me" The "cloud" has very rapidly evolved and Open Source is a gigantic force there. Look at AWS EC2 and just check how many AMI's are linux based...

My search shows of ALL AMI's on EC2

-- only 820 are Windows
-- 5,762 are Linux (ubuntu, debian, redhat, centos etc)

Since AWS is by far the largest IaaS Public Cloud ... what does that tell you about what's being adopted in "cloud"