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Microsoft's Office 365 For Government Heralds New Google Fight
Nerval's Lobster writes "In a bid to expand the reach of its cloud services, Microsoft has introduced Office 365 for Government, which features the same cloud-based productivity tools as Office 365 but stores data in a segregated community cloud. Google and Microsoft have been locked in vicious battle over the past few years to score cloud contracts for government agencies. Microsoft hopes its support of standards such as ISO 27001, SAS70 Type II, HIPAA, FERPA, and FISMA will help to give it an edge in winning those contracts."
I like how FIPS-140 isn't mentioned as a supported standard.
Yeah, use our cloud, it's probably secure.
I am in the UK and anything based in the USA, or controlled by US companies is by default insecure.
Sorry guys but anything your spooks think they can get away with fooling around with is not suitable for anything remotely confidential. That won't stop some crook who happens to work stealing it, as happened in NZ but we have to at least try.
And that is before we get into your commercial 'confidentiality' practices...
Perhaps you guys might consider offshoring your secure storage to somewhere with some decent Information Governance regulations.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
As a consultant who works on projects for govt, I hate Office 2007 and it's "collaboration" features which are pretty much non-existant. I would love to use Google Docs but we cannot due to the proprietary nature of our work. I'm pretty sure there's an Enterprise edition of Docs that can run more locally but I work for a Big Company (TM) so getting such software is probably impossible. I'm just waiting for Office 2011, which I THINK they're rolling out on the new Win 7 machines. Still running XP personally.
Yes, because using a different program to read and write a Microsoft .doc is so utterly complex we all might as well give up.
Microsoft hopes its support of standards such as ISO 27001, SAS70 Type II, HIPAA, FERPA, and FISMA will help to give it an edge in winning those contracts.
*laughs* Okay, seriously, you made half of those up, didn't you?
Hey, guys, look at my cloud app stuff! I'm compliant with ISO 8675309, TRS-80, THX 1138, HAL 9000, HERPY, DERPA, NIMROD, OSHA, FERMI, and CERN! Hee hee!
well, you're exactly right. if your word file is a grocery list, then it doesn't matter if its .txt, .docx, or whatever. But when your files start to get extraordinarily complex (hundred+ pages, tables, figs, headers, footnotes, track changes, comments), then translating from .docx to something else will be a mess and you might as well give up.
Maybe that's the strongest reason for them not to be in proprietary formats.
Hmmm...yes, because Microsoft is all about standards compliance...
You'd be surprised how easily people learn google docs vs office. It's a matter of magnitudes difference in how easy it is to teach people google docs, not to mention that so many more people have gmail than hotmail it's just making life easier.
As a consultant who works with govt often, I really really hope that microsoft wins this battle. Right now all our document production is office based, and if we need to account for an entirely new office suite (google docs) then it's another magnitude of (nonbillable) complexity.
If I understand what you are saying, it is to keep using a broken system, because fixing it is too much of a pain. I would normally expect to hear that from politicians, but not the consultants themselves.
What I would like to see is the government demand open formats so that they aren't locked in to any one vendor's product because the conversion cost of the documents themselves is too high.
As a consultant who works on projects for govt, I hate Office 2007 and it's "collaboration" features which are pretty much non-existant.
You mean your clients haven't paid for the collaboration capabilities. With the right version of the suite, it offers both Groove-based collaboration and collaboration via SharePoint Server. In fact, all Office 365 really offers in this department is a hosted instance of SharePoint, but you still have to set it up how you want it. Funny thing about electronic collaboration tools, though -- if nobody else is going to use them, then there's no point in you using them, either.
I'm just waiting for Office 2011, which I THINK they're rolling out on the new Win 7 machines.
Office 2011 is a Mac version. You mean either Office 2010 or the version that will be coming Any Day Now.
Breakfast served all day!
Guaranteed victory: don't massively change the interface of your applications for business users without giving them the ability to keep the present version, especially when those changes dramatically change functionality or usability (in case you didn't get the reference, see gmail).
It may be a simple request, but Microsoft is absolutely OWNING you in this realm, it's called consistency and stability. They've done office productivity software for a long time and they got this one right (don't like Ribbon + other bad UI choices?, keep using 2003, and here's a service pack that makes 2003 work with 2007 files!). Learn from them. The cost of re-training thousands of employees because they're used to using software version 1.0 after you FORCE them to upgrade to 1.0.0.0.1b with fancy new UI is more than enough to justify never using your products, ever again.
Most accurate and appropriate video ever, and a precisely why Office 365 threatens Google at all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4EbCkotKPU.
Uh, office 2011 and win 7? Pretty tricky to run office 2011 on win 7...
Part of the insidious nature of lock-in is that there is a tendency of some users to see it as its own form of 'normal', with the more open options being the source of the pain or expected pain incident to breaking out of the lock-in.
Have you never considered that Google Docs can be edited in place and thus don't have to be passed around, or constantly uploaded and downloaded? Or that if one really insists on using a local editor, the standard-compliant ones virtually remove the iterative formatting errors incident to this kind of portability?
The nightmare wrt google docs is writing a doc in word, passing it to google docs for somebody's editing,
That's the nightmare for ANYONE trying to inter-operate with Microsoft.
And since it's the result of deliberate efforts by Microsoft to fight open standards, it should result in them being banned from government tenders.
http://www.adjb.net/post/Microsoft-Fails-the-Standards-Test.aspx
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/index.php?topic=20051116124417686
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/1how-microsoft-fought-true-open-standards-i/index.htm
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
As a consultant who works on projects for govt, I hate Office 2007 and it's "collaboration" features which are pretty much non-existant.
You mean your clients haven't paid for the collaboration capabilities. With the right version of the suite, it offers both Groove-based collaboration and collaboration via SharePoint Server. In fact, all Office 365 really offers in this department is a hosted instance of SharePoint, but you still have to set it up how you want it. Funny thing about electronic collaboration tools, though -- if nobody else is going to use them, then there's no point in you using them, either.
What is this Sharepoint based collaboration? When our Sharepoint admin said we were going to get collaboration for Office Docs via Sharepoint, I assumed it was live sharing like Google Docs, where multiple people could edit documents simultaneously, but what it turned out to be is a version control system - one person can check out and edit the doc while others can only get a read-only copy until that person checks it in.
Our admin said this is way Office collaboration works. Maybe I've been spoiled by Google, but is it true that Office collaboration in Sharepoint is just a version control system?
MS + .gov + standards = HERP-A-DERP
You're talking about desktop publishing, which Word is completely shit at, especially if you have to collaborate with other people.