Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
Bought a decent mail server?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
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.
Palm trees and 8
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.
Palm trees and 8
Then the headline would have read 'NYC Schools waste Millions on tablets no one uses'
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I am not a Microsoft fanboi by any stretch and those were all valid criticisms of Exchange 2003 and prior, however Exchange 2007 and later have a pretty clean architecture and good support for open standards. The only real argument against is that, it is very expensive and you might really only need mail in which case you can get carrier class mail handling with FOSS.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
This is the same IT group that closes its employee payroll information site on nights and weekends. Yup, you read that right -- the NYC DoE "Payroll Portal" where 80,000+ employees check their pay stubs is only open during business hours. It's never been clear why that is -- they couldn't possibly have people pulling the data manually for each request, could they? So you teach all day, go home, apply for an apartment, and can't get your pay stubs at 8 p.m. from a system that is touted as convenient and accessible over the public internet.
Point being, this is a function that is probably short on resources, but also fails to make the most of the funding and systems they do have.
Like which decent tablet is significantly cheaper than an iPad?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
"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.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Currently trying to find any kind of Open Source collaboration Server - I can assure you that the software costs alone are within 5% on any of the decently known and supported alternatives such as Zimbra, Zafura, eGroupware, open-Xchange etc. Zafura is the closest in terms of quality, but based on my testing, I have noticed that with my 15-user test groups (all users using at least three devices to sync continuously) Zimbra is the closest to Exchange in terms of efficiency, and if you remove OS resource usage I have noticed that the Exchange daemon is the most efficient. I hadn't gone through any kind of upgrade testing to see how easy that is (which could alone still sway me away from my current direction of updating Exchange) but when compared to how much easier it is to tie Exchange into Active Directory and properly apply any domain-controlled policies to clients, Exchange wins hands-down in any system that isn't wholly unix from the ground-up.
In conclusion, you are misinformed if you think any kind of FOSS system can compete with Exchange. If you want any kind of collaboration utilities (Calendar or Contact sync and grouping, etc) then you discard the F part and usually the OS part too - and the supposed knights of FOSS are even more greedy than Moneyholesoft from Redmond. At least Redmond allowed us a 3-month trial with 60 users to test out compared to the others. VMWare let us try Zimbra with 30 users for 30 days before they wanted to charge us - nobody else would even let us trial their packages at all.
Erutangis ym si siht.
You really think so? Microsoft sell Exchange to some of the largest organizations on the planet. It might not be my choice of mail server, but I don't think blaming the software is the right think to do here. There's plenty of evidence that Exchange can scale - it might need powerful hardware, or specialized configuration but it's clearly possible and widely implemented.
The real trouble here was not not the choice of software. Rather it was a failure to anticipate the growth and react to it before it became an issue. That's a very basic SysAdmin issue for any software, proprietary or otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
We're not finding iPad/iPhone easy to manage at our business. The available management policies are very meager compared to BlackBerry handhelds. Too many things require iTunes, and iTunes is a bear to deploy, update, and manage. When the iDevice malfunctions, diagnostics and repair attempts are very limited. And if we need to do a service/warranty exchange, pain results. They won't ship an FRU; you have to go to a store. And apparently Apple's corporate policy forbids stores from telling customers if they have stock of FRUs, so the only way to find out is to drive to each store and try.
This is not saying that Android or Playbook tablets are any better (we haven't even tried those yet), but iDevices aren't all lollypops and rainbows either.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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.