Slashdot Mirror
Google Apps Beats Office 365 For US Dept. of the Interior Contract
angry tapir writes "The U.S. Department of the Interior has picked Google Apps to provide cloud-based email and collaboration applications to about 90,000 staffers, choosing Google's services over Microsoft's Office 365. Google had sued the U.S. agency in 2010, claiming its requirements for the contract tilted the scales unfairly toward Microsoft. Google eventually dropped its lawsuit last September."
i can't wait to see what the MS shills have to say about this :)
Nice, but no. Google does not support CISPA. Your marketing efforts are going to backfire here.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Antiwar is not a source. Try again.
This shouldn't come as any surprise, since Google didn't have an outage due to a "leap year glitch". Any wonder why they skipped over Office?
I personally don't like the google apps and prefer much better the zoho solutions. I think Google apps are incredibly slow and immature, I cannot understand people using them not to say government departments.
The lesson here is that modern software should be accessible. Google invested a lot of resources over the past few years to revamp their collaboration suite. The Docs/Drive interface which we all see is just one example. Take a look at the source code beneath. They've coded up ARIA, they've done appropriate testing for keyboard and focus management. Essentially, they followed WCAG2. Funny thing is that it took some embarrassing incidents years ago to get them on this path.
You want another example of how important making usability a focus of software is? Take a look at Apple -- their iPad's accessibility features are far better than those packed into Android tablets. Look at the mobile space: Blackberry thinks a11y is important but not important enough to make it a focus; Google thinks a11y is important but not enough to catch up with Apple. Guess who gets the perks there?
Microsoft certainly thinks a11y is important and as a result they've been the only choice for agencies for a long time. Anyway... that's the lesson.
I had very much forgotten about that "glitch". Gee even first year programming students get screwed over that one and learn their lessons!
I'm glad someone in the US dept of interior didn't forget about that glitch though!
OK, fine. I'll quote the Google policy that prevents their support of this political endeavor: "Don't be evil." It's in the mission statement. It's not negotiable.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What is the matter with these people? Anybody can load Libre Office, for free and legally, then use the thing for the rest of their lives without paying a cent. It is good old traditional office software, easily used by anybody familiar with any other office suite. No internet connection is necessary for normal use. There are no glaring security holes. How can these dopey bureaucrats pass up a deal like that?
Still want to argue about this?
The official statement of "we are watching where it leads before pulling our weight" and one politician claiming that they are secretly on his side doesn't make google suport CISPA. If google really supported it I think more than one politician would use it to bolster his arguments.
If Google's record on Google Docs and Gmail is any indication, they tend to update on *their* schedule (vs. any organization's schedule) and they freely delete key features (TOC in Google Docs comes to mind!).
Not sure why anyone in government would choose to have software they don't control the key feature set for.
In MS software, at least I could not update and not get the new misery until I felt like it. In Google's world, you get it when they tell you you'll get it and the changes they make, you'll just have to live with.
How anyone at Google could imagine a Docs rev without TOC (and it actually reformats old docs if you let it to remove existing TOCs) made sense, I can't imagine. But this is what you get if you let someone else control release schedules and inflict their current idea of feature set and UI on them on their timelines.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
And it's not even the first time MS has made that mistake. They did in with the Zune in 2008, then made the same mistake with Azure.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Because others are using monopoly-Offices closed format, how can they work together?
Just wait...PIVOT CHARTS! The thing we hate to use, must use, that G docs doesn't use. THAT should make life interesting LMFAO
This story sounds kinda like it was posted on Slashdot basically to get people to say "Go Google! Suck on that Microsoft!", thereby retaining the status quo and ensuring continued readership.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
Google has admitted that it is lobbying on theCyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), The Hill has learned
Here’s Google on its public stance on CISPA: “We think this is an important issue and we’re watching the process closely but we haven’t taken a formal position on any specific legislation.”
Google is not alone in supporting CISPA, if it in fact does, as it will join tech giants Microsoft and Facebook in doing so, among others.
Still want to argue about this?
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
And the end of your first quote:
Google has admitted that it is lobbying on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), The Hill has learned, but the company is not saying what position it is taking. Therefore, it is difficult to parse what effect its lobbying may have.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
You are right: there are no essential features lacked by Open or Libre Office. By essential, I mean stuff needed to present information. Therefore, Government departments could easily mandate that only that feature set is used. But the Microsoft argument is that if "free" means it only does 99% of what expensive does, free is worthless (even if the 1% is unnecessary.)
Take presentations. Almost all presentations would be precisely as meaningful if the slides were done in Wordpad with additional images. But, like medieval scribes, Microsoft has persuaded people that unless every page is an illuminated manuscript, the content is worthless. The arms race in manuscript production continued right up until Gutenberg, when people suddenly realised that movable type was easier to read. I await the day when some unknown 5-star general suddenly realises that Powerpoint is a waste of resources, though I doubt it will happen in my lifetime.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
We use Google Apps at our school and while I love the mail, contacts, calendar, and free storage part, migrating Office docs is very poor. The converter does a bad job with tables and images. I tried to create a table layout with different column spans in a Google doc and gave up. I almost got it going in their spreadsheet doc but soon found out that you can one have one font style per cell. I gave up and went back to Word and shared the doc through Skydrive. I confused some people but in the end it got done.
With each day I'm beginning to regret my choice to move to Google Apps, especially now that Microsoft is offering 365 free for school come this summer. It's integration with Office is pretty slick. Yes I did try Google Cloud Connect but go read up on the proxy issues that thing has. Then again typical Microsoft always a few year's late to the game.
No wonder they won as they have been greatly working with the government lately. Hell, even secretly supporting CISPA!
You need to be forked in the temple, shill.
DOI's original RFQ specified that only Microsoft solutions would be considered
Only after Google sued them (and then dropped the lawsuit) that DOI agreed to drop the "M$ only" clause
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Guess they don't care about security. Which is especially puzzling, seeing how the DoD just said it's own network was litterally the playground of foreign nations.
Anyone else misread that first part as "Google Apps Beats Off"?
If government is supposed to be by, of and for the people. Does anyone see a problem with placing govt. data on the infrastructure provided by a private for-profit institution?
Why have we gotten so used to this? Use of Google Docs was -outlawed- for public administration in Denmark not long ago and there are cases on Norway regarding the same thing working their way through the justice system right now.
Geez. You'd think that one guy at Microsoft who writes all the software would have remembered last time he made that error and not duplicated it.
Google publicly admitting that they're lobbying for CISPA would be extremely bad for Google's PR. Being against CISPA would have pretty much no negative PR for them, in fact it would likely earn them heaps of positive press. The fact that they refuse to state their position pretty much means they're lobbying for CISPA.
Am I the only one thinking that a Government department - which will undoubtedly deal with privileged information at some point - should not be using a system which is designed to take said information out of their control?
For the record, I have participated on the MS team that bids government contracts. Not recently but many many years ago, when the climate was reversed.
MS: "We would like to bid on this project" govt: "No you cant, it must be SUN" or "no you must be ???" I can't even remember what the it was called, that is how truly relative it was, not relative then, forgotten about now. oh yeah, POSIX. Anyone even remember it?
So anyhow, despite objections for years MS became the standard anyway for quite a while.
If you can blame it on sleazy marketing then, why can't you blame the present shift on the same thing? The fact is he who does the best/most lobbying wins.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Why would I want government documents stored on a google or Microsoft server?
It's fine if the government owns and controls the server but if it doesn't we have a problem.
MS office or whatever you're using tend to run entirely on the local system or at least within your network. So its pretty much in the control over the organization that purchased it. But google docs runs on google server farms and my understanding is that MS 360 or whatever they're calling it does roughly the same thing.
That's a problem. If this is a micro cloud that will be completely owned and controlled by the US government, it's fine... but I worry that this is all getting routed through a generic google server farm. And that's a recipe for disaster.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Other than the security nightmare called the Oracle JavaRE which it sits upon and is mandatory (for the office wizards) if you are to get any real use out of Libre Office, A product that together with Adobes Acrobat have consistently dominated the malware remote security exploit successes.
i would also rather not have "security updates" from a company that seems its acceptable to randomly offer me browser toolbars from seedy companies everytime i install their "security fixes", real professional stuff there, am i getting fixed or nailed this month ?.
So when LibreOffice gets rid of Java you might see it more, until then its just not worth the pain of maintaining Java for an office spreadsheet and a few docs.
msn, bing?
ms seem just not that good with web stuff.
Zune wasn't their fault. After they chose and started using the chip that causes the issue, it became a known issue of that chip. Expect to loose usage 12/31/2012 again as well.
Yeah, 365 seems like a very appropriate name for a product that crashes on leap years.
Sorry, but "the glitch" did not affect office 365.
Geez, you'd think that high profile public failures would be a lesson to all the developers and testers.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
They are getting more govt. agencies on their systems.
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/01/noaa-moves-25000-to-google-apps.html
You'd think the programmers Microsoft hire would at worst go "Oh shit, that could happen to what I wrote", when they hear of the problems in other people's stuff.
*may* suck in the real world for a variety of reasons.
For X amount of data (less than a few million rows), excel is a perfectly adequate flat file database if don't need a relational database -- and many items don't. This isn't VisiCalc anymore on computers with 640k of memory.
Ajax? REALLY???? Most people I know who use Excel heavily are not programmers -- they are accountants. I know of about 1 in 50 accountants have any idea what the hell Ajax is, much less any ability to do anything with it. Why should I pay an IT consultant / IT department 1000's when I can do something that meets my needs in 10 minutes.
I'll grant that Access *might be* a better solution, but depending on analysis and presentation needs it may not be -- or again it may require programming in VBA or 10's of hours of work to get what you need.
Databases suck at analysis. SQL based crosstabs can be useful, but they also have major limitations if you are not going to drop to a programming language. God forbid you try something like finding a median of a dataset. Instead of =Median(data), its a 100 lines of code.
For smaller datasets Excel is a much better solution in many / most cases than a database solution if you don't need the relational mechanisms, joins, etc. -- which 90% of spreadsheets don't.
Libre Office's spreadsheet sucks. They cannot even get basic UI functionality that has been in all spreadsheets since VisiCalc, much less come close to the quality of Quattro of 15 years ago.
Hear hear! Two of the goals of government should be to remain open/transparent and save taxpayer money.... at what point does paying for office software (hosted or not) become beneficial to taxpayers over the high quality free versions readily available and well maintained? If they're not good ennough it would be far cheaper to staff a couple of LibreOffice developers to make required mods.
What idiot OK'd having productivity applications hosted off-site? Now a network outage means 90,000 people aren't working. Even at $10 per hour we're talking about almost $1 million per hour wasted on network outages. If their network has three 9's availability they'll only lose about $3 million annually to network outages. That's how bean counters look at it. They'll figure it's cheaper to suffer the occasional outage than to use something like LibreOffice. Unfortunately, networks tend to fail right before that grant application deadline and other critical times. This will be fun, indeed.
You provided a biased, crappy source. You have one guy claiming that Google is supporting it, and there's nothing corroborating that.
There's nothing to argue. You haven't provided anything to actually back up your point.
Not to agree with the troll, but Google does plenty of things that would be considered evil.
Unless Google Apps for Enterprise/Government are radically different from the consumer available apps, I'd say that was a poor choice. While I've never used Office 365 and exclusively use Google Apps for my day to day stuff, I feel like there is much to be desired if I were a business using Google Apps.
For instance, Google Docs is just plain poor. After four years now, their support for tables is still awful (which is just plain lazy, since the tables is really just HTML table/tr/td. You cannot convert text to tables, you cannot merge table cells, and you cannot easily perform group operations (i.e. style a column). This is just one example, but there are several other key issues, like printing, that are still well below what I would consider business-class ready. What's more, in my opinion they've actually degraded in their app quality because they've removed previously supported features like custom-css and edit-in-html, both of which were key selling points for when I first started using Google Docs.
Then again, this is just idle ranting from a person who's never even used Office 365 or Google Apps for Government; so what the hell do I know?
"i can't wait to see what the MS shills have to say about this :)
MS will sponsor a report that calls for the impeachment of U.S. Department of the Interior officials.
AccountKiller
Of course it did... Google == NSA. Why do you think Android-based phones are supported by the Pentagon for DoD use?
... of the accident of NASA's space shuttle Columbia.
The investigators found that the low density of information provided via Powerpoint slides cause the impression that the concerns from engineers were nothing but speculation that wasn't backed by the data. They found that the bullet points lacked any kind of information that could be use to suggest any kind of actual severity or criticality. In other words, any true information was lost in the format.
Any wonder why they skipped over Office?
Have you ever tried loading Microsoft's website in anything other than IE? The "Missing Silverlight plugin" isn't an Office 365 feature.