Apple, Android Devices Swamp NYC Schools' ActiveSync Server

longacre writes "Just a few months after the New York City Dept. of Education shelled out over $1 million on iPads for teachers, the agency has stopped accepting new users on its Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync server as it is 'operating near its resource limits' due to an influx of iOS and Android devices. A memo from the deputy CTO warned, 'Our Exchange system is currently operating near its resource limits and in order to prevent Exchange from exceeding these limits, we need to take action to prevent any more of these devices from being configured to receive email. As of Thursday, November 10th no additional users will be allowed to receive email via NYCDOE's Exchange ActiveSync.' Existing setups will continue to operate, and students will not be affected."

Comments

Best use of money?

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine what they could have done with the $700k they would have saved by choosing a tablet other than an iPad.

Re:Best use of money?

[ozmanjusri]

Bought a decent mail server?

Re:Best use of money?

[TWX]

I don't see what's specifically insulting Microsoft with, "Bought a decent mail server?" as a comment... It could be insulting the juggernaut from Redmond, or it could be insulting the hardware. It's a supposition on your part that the OS/daemon is being insulted.

Mind you, I would not be surprised if the software was the target, but that's mainly because I don't think that the service was originally designed for the kind of usage that it's now seeing. We also don't know from the summary what versions of things they're running, they could still be back on Server 2003 or the like...

Re:Best use of money?

[multimediavt]

Imagine what they could have done with the $700k they would have saved by choosing a tablet other than an iPad.

Bought a decent mail server?

My thoughts exactly! The devices aren't the problem, their proprietary commercial mail system that sucks is the problem. Nice to watch people eat crow when they tout the charms of commercial software and its scalability advantages and it epically fails and costs more money than a FOSS solution. Best quote I ever heard was from a guy talking about AD, "It's got to be complicated, it has to scale." Face-palm!!!

Re:Best use of money?

[smash]

Like which decent tablet is significantly cheaper than an iPad?

Re:Best use of money?

[laird]

"Imagine what they could have done with the $700k they would have saved by choosing a tablet other than an iPad."

The iPad is under $500, so it costs the same or less than any other decent tablet. Are you saying that there's a tablet that costs $150 that's comparable to the iPad? That is pretty hard to imagine. Don't forget to include the management costs - iPads are extremely easy for an enterprise to manage, because they integrate nicely into Exchange (e.g. you can define mail policies on your Exchange server, and iPads do what they're told - encrypt, require password lock, etc.). Android doesn't do this properly yet. That leaves the RIM Playbook, which aside from sucking has the same list price as the iPad. I guess you could save some money buying discontinued products that are being dumped, but that's not a great enterprise hardware strategy. :-)

If you want to complain about the project, complain that they didn't plan for adding one more ActiveSynch server so they had capacity to support their users. Given educational pricing, the software is nearly free, and even an overpriced server would have been a trivial percentage of the project budget.

Re:Best use of money?

[mosb1000]

He was saying that if they chose tablets significantly cheaper than the iPad, as the parent suggested, no one would use them. It's probably true.

Re:Best use of money?

[jbplou]

The problem could just be a lack of capacity planning. When management says we are going to add $1 million worth of iPads on to our mail system plus let users use iPhones and droids the mail admins should be evaluating their infrastructure.

Re:Best use of money?

[gad_zuki!]

Don't bother with this crowd. These guys clearly have no practical experience with Exchange and are the same people who have been yelling "ZOMG POSTFIX AND EVOLUTION/CHANDLER/THUNDERBIRD WILL KILL OUTLOOK" 10+ years ago.

As much as I dislike defending my vendors, I have to say the Exchange is surprisingly nimble and the number of devices I can support with a very modest server is pretty surprising. The idea that you're getting 10x the number of users on similiar hardware with a similiar featureset is the same bullshit these FOSS guys have been peddling for years. I just with the FOSS crew could write a usable, supported, efficient Exchange/Activesync replacement. That product doesn't exist and the current crop are all nightmares. Heh, there's a reason why they won't let you test this junk.

Triple the load =/= triple the servers?

[SlashdotWanker]

Issues like this are the reason you need to fully flesh out costs before flipping the switch on a large organization like this. almost every teacher I know has a smartphone of some kind and a lot of them are starting to get tablets. Why offer the service when you cannot fully offer it?

This is what you get with golf course deals

[Joe_Dragon]

This is what you get with golf course deals people out side of IT makes deals like this and tell IT to make it work with out giving them the funds to make it work.

This why IT needs unions so they can stand up and say NO! we can't do it with the funds that we have. I hope that they don't place the blame on IT for something that is not there fault.

Re:This is what you get with golf course deals

[laird]

"Unions work best for the health and safety of their workers. Anything beyond that is mob rule."

Add in "and are properly equipped and trained and resourced to do their job successfully". For example, air traffic control unions negotiated limits on how many hours controllers could be forced to work, and when they unions were broken and controllers were forced to work so many hours, with no breaks for even going to the bathroom or eating meals, endangering passenger's lives. And when teachers' unions negotiate limits on the numbers of students in classes, so teachers can actually teach students effectively.

Or do you think that the MBA who runs a company knows how best to do people's jobs, not the people who actually do the jobs?

Re:This is what you get with golf course deals

[laird]

The point of unions isn't that they render everyone angels, it's that it creates an organization that can negotiate in favor of worker's interests to balance the organization that already exists to support management's interests. So an IT workers' union could impose checkpoints in a process such that the workers could make sure that adaquate resources, training, tools, etc., were provided to allow the workers to be successful without working insane hours compensating for poor planning or resourcing. Yes, a good management team ought to be thinking of such things, but the software industry's track record is poor enough (only 10% of IT projects deliver what's required on time and budget) that giving the IT workers more leverage doesn't seem like a bad idea.

Get ready for the headlines

[betterunixthanunix]

Get ready for followup headlines a few months or years from now:

• NYC drops $600 million on new email system
• Consulting firm under investigation for defrauding NYC public school system in email debacle
• Should public schools have email systems?

This is a pretty standard situation in New York City: lots and lots of money is spent, with poor planning, sweetheart deals with incompetent firms, and then a bunch of fallout.

Go figure

[nurb432]

Lack of resource forecasting/planning will get you every time. Its not like they didn't know how many would be deployed and on what schedule.. geesh

Re:So wait a minute...

[betterunixthanunix]

I'm guessing that something's missing from the story here...

They were probably near capacity before the tablets were deployed. NYC has a lot of schools and a lot of teachers and administrators checking their email. The fact that tablets are involved is secondary; if 2000 additional desktops had been deployed, the systems would probably have been overwhelmed as well. My guess is that the email system was deployed years ago, possibly by a consulting firm that is now out of business, and that some poor IT guy has been trying to keep everything together on a shoestring budget all this time. The tablet deployment probably occurred without anyone actually consulting the IT staff to see if the system could handle the extra load, and probably by the same group of decision makers who ignored IT's requests for additional servers prior to the deployment.

Re:No better CAS topology experts?

[gbjbaanb]

part of the problem is that Exchange is not an email server (many people think that because they only use it for email). It's a "groupware" server that does email, calendars, notes, journals, todo lists, integrated MSN status, etc.

Now admittedly, all those things shouldn't be particularly resource intensive, but the Exchange systems that have been around for years always struggled to to simple things. I think that they made it better at resource usage, but then probably made it much worse by bundling in crap like MSN status updates and probably facebook integration by now too.

If they replaced Exchange with a straightforward mail server like Dovecot, they'd handle a hundred times those users with ease. Sure, they wouldn't have an integrated calendar... but which of those users uses the exchange calendar anyway, using some preferred iOS or Google calendar.

In short, Exchange should only ever be used if you're inside a corporate network and you're an all-Microsoft shop. And you're rich enough to buy the super servers and licences you'll need. For everyone else, stick with stuff that just does a couple of things very well.

Re:Teachers should just switch to gmail

[cryfreedomlove]

Spoken like someone who knows nothing about email systems.

I am guessing that there are strict restrictions on using external email to relay school information.

After all do you want your information on your childs health, disciplinary issues, grades, concerns over abuse, etc etc. to be stored on googles mail server? I sure as hell dont.

I trust my anonymity with Google more than with a B-grade IT worker at a school district. Imagine 2 possible scenarios:

1. Google does something with my email data i don't like.

2. A disgruntled IT worker at the school district sells my email data for drug money.

#2 is far more likely.