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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?
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?
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
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.
Yeah, because no one on Slashdot ever bashes Google, right?
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.