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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.
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?
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.
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
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
Err this is for web based stuff so no even with Microsoft they can update at a whim.
Not sure what your yammering about TOC's is about. The feature is still right there: http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=106342
Just wait...PIVOT CHARTS! The thing we hate to use, must use, that G docs doesn't use. THAT should make life interesting LMFAO
Google Docs added the important thing, pivot tables, last year. The lack of this was a show stopper for many users earlier.
PivotChart is a trademark of Microsoft, and is just making a graph of a pivot table. That's easily done anyway.
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.
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 !
The slowness is easily fixed by ditching dialup and getting a decent internet connection. The immaturity is fixed by the realization that it does ~90% of what people actually use. Power users won't like apps, but for most workers it's enough. I keep my financial administration (which uses a number of scripts and graphs) in Excel, but most other documents are in Apps.
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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.
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.
In AC's defense. I had a 48,000 word doc in gdocs that would ROUTINELY start to freeze and stutter. Chrome claimed that tab was using 800 MB of memory. FF had similar numbers. I do not know if this is a side effect of having a 100 page doc in JS or just crappy JS.
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.
The slowness is easily fixed by ditching dialup and getting a decent internet connection.
some people can have dialup or hughesnet, which is basically equivalent to ISDN plus a lot of latency if you use it all the time given your allotment.
I keep my financial administration (which uses a number of scripts and graphs) in Excel, but most other documents are in Apps.
I can't help but notice that your most sensitive information is therefore processed locally.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A TOC without page numbers is pretty useless for a printed document.
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
*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.
The problem is that sometimes the dialup is the only connection you have. And even if you have a T1 connection, there is no guarantee that it will be available 24/7. And according to Murphy, it will fail just when you most need that key document you left in the cloud.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I would imagine that, since the DOI is actually giving Google money, unlike a lot of us, they'll have a lot more leverage concerning when updates happen.
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.
Then you probably shouldn't be using a cloud solution. However, the Department of the Interior is NOT on dial-up, so this argument is batshit retarded.
"...And even if you have a T1 connection, there is no guarantee that it will be available 24/7. "
Protip: Read the entire comment before you answer it... Even enterprise-level connections can fail.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
"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
I keep my financial administration (which uses a number of scripts and graphs) in Excel, but most other documents are in Apps.
I can't help but notice that your most sensitive information is therefore processed locally.
It may seem that way, but the actual reason is that the spreadsheet I use has a number of homemade VBA scripts to make like easier for me.
Some of these scripts I could duplicate with apps (though Google's apps scripting is a lot more complicated), some I cannot because they rely on Excel-specific GUI elements. Same reason it's still in Excel and not in OOo/LibreOffice file format yet.
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"...And even if you have a T1 connection, there is no guarantee that it will be available 24/7. "
Protip: Read the entire comment before you answer it... Even enterprise-level connections can fail.
... and it'll probably fail at the same time all the internal server connections will fail, which would have had the "local" files had they chosen a client-side solution.
FWIW, I trust Google's infrastructure a lot more than I trust an average non-IT company's.
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