Boston Replacing Microsoft Exchange With Google Apps

netbuzz writes "The city of Boston, which employs 20,000 people, has become the latest large organization to switch from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. The city estimates that the move will save it $280,000 a year. Microsoft's reaction? 'We believe the citizens of Boston deserve cloud productivity tools that protect their security and privacy. Google's investments in these areas are inadequate, and they lack the proper protections most organizations require.' More and more customers aren't buying that FUD." Hopefully they'll be more satisfied than Los Angeles was (PDF).

Comments

What they should have said was

[Anonymous Coward]

What they should have said was, "We believe the citizens of Boston deserve the productivity gains that come from the ability to wildcard search through emails."

Good

[Ziggitz]

Google apps aren't really that powerful, but then I've never considered any of Microsoft's office products to really be professional tools. Even in college when I wanted to produce papers I'd use some laTeX or DITA editor. Word, Excel and the rest always felt amateurish. If you're going to use poor amateurish WYSIWYG tools you might as well use the free ones.

Re:Good

[steelfood]

Word is fairly underpowered for professional writing, but if you were an accountant, you'd be hard-pressed to find a replacement to Excel.

Microsoft Office's professional products are more Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, and Access. Word is just something to round out their offerings, an easy-to-use, amateurish but sufficiently featureful product that'll get their foot in the door.

Re:Good

[BasilBrush]

You seem to be confusing professional with academic. It's hardly a big surprise you used LaTeX at college. It would be a lot more surprising if you'd been a professional using it.

Re:Good

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Excel is pretty good. (I didn't know I could say anything nice about a Microsoft product.)
If you walk past my office, and hear me swearing at my computer chances are I am using word. If you hear me saying "Stop fu*king helping me!" then you know for sure.
It has gotten so bad that when i have to write documentation, I do all my writing in something simple like notepad++, then copy and paste into word. do a little formatting, maybe a screenshot or two, save and send. This method makes Word a lot less painful.

Re:Good

[Frosty Piss]

If you hear me saying "Stop fu*king helping me!" then you know for sure.

You do know that you can customize features like the one you're bitching about? You do know you can turn them off, right? Indeed most of the things that people bitch about with Word are completely customizable. But don't let reality get in the way of your Fan Boi rant...

Re:Good

[Sir_Sri]

Take some courses on how to use word.

It has a lot of powerful features that are worth using, that are in no way obvious what they do, or how they work, and you don't even know what it's capable of unless someone shows you.

We (a university) offer a first year course that covers the basics of Word and Excel for just this reason, and it's narrowly focused on the academic world.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

And you seem to have a false dichotomy. As a /professional/ academic, I do use LaTeX.

Re:Good

[Kalriath]

We have a 0% message loss rate with Exchange. What's your point? Email is also delivered virtually instantly, provided our internet connection doesn't fail.

Almost like the Exchange administrators wherever you worked were complete imbeciles or something.

Re:Good

[Kalriath]

Unfortunately the reality is, in the wrong hands pretty much any solution can seem shitty. Doesn't matter if it's Exchange, Postfix, Sendmail, Exim, or even Google Apps (I've managed to bollocks up my Google Apps configuration a few times).

And I would agree, older Exchange versions were a dog (like 5.5 etc). It's come ahead by leaps and bounds since then though.

Why is the FUD FUD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Still sounds pretty valid to me.

Re:Why is the FUD FUD?

[SirGarlon]

I've read Google's privacy policy. To say privacy is a concern with Google's services is not FUD. It's a gross understatement.

Re:Why is the FUD FUD?

[Enderandrew]

The issue is that Microsoft's privacy track record is worse.

When George W. Bush demanded all search engines hand over search data tied to IP addresses for all users, Google was the only search engine to refuse. Microsoft handed that data right over.

Microsoft has ad campaigns suggesting Google employees are actively reading your email, even though they know that is an outright lie, the very definition of FUD.

Even worse, Microsoft is a hypocrite because they scan your email to serve up contextual ads as well.

Microsoft also has a patent on selling your private data to the highest bidder.

Google isn't giving your private data to anyone. They just serve you ads. Microsoft outright sells your data to people without your knowledge. And when they know they can't compete with Google on price, their only response is FUD.

http://rt.com/usa/yahoo-microsoft-campaign-political-862/

Re:Why is the FUD FUD?

[Dishevel]

I switched my company over to Google Apps.
30 Users. With Drive for sharing, Groups and aliases. It works really well for us with extremely simple administration and really good uptime.
Simple, Flexible and inexpensive.

Re:Why is the FUD FUD?

[adcm]

When George W. Bush demanded all search engines hand over search data tied to IP addresses for all users, Google was the only search engine to refuse. Microsoft handed that data right over.

Of course, this was MSN search in those days, so there were only about 14 people's search records apart from a few million searches for "google toolbar"

Re:Why is the FUD FUD?

[dtw]

Its not like there are not many alternatives, both free and commercially supported, which could be migrated to if they really wanted to drop that fee.

How about Lotus Notes?

Not a smart idea

[elabs]

Organizations get pretty desperate to cut costs but when they do things like this they end up spending WAY more, both in time and in money.

Re:Not a smart idea

[MightyMartian]

I guess it depends on what you expect out of an email system. One thing is for sure, Exchange was always a rickety beast, and the level of codependency between Exchange and other elements of Windows over the last few versions have gone through the roof. For basic email and scheduling, I'd gladly leave Exchange behind, but we have a government contract (I'm in Canada) which strictly prohibits the storage of certain highly sensitive data outside of Canada, and the last time I contacted Google about it, they just brushed it off. So, here I am, getting ready to upgrade to Exchange 2013.

Microsft are the acknowledged experts on FUD

[accessbob]

Get the Facts guys...

Only $280k?

[CAIMLAS]

I suspect that number is wildly conservative. That's crazy, when you consider the costs associated with:

* Multiple FT "Exchange Admins"
* Needing people on-staff who actually understand email
* If they were using something like Forefront and/or additional spam services as well (additional $$$)
* Dozens of servers they no longer need to maintain maintain and replace
* Tens of terabytes of fast, redundant storage they no longer need to keep on-premises

Due to the cost of such a large migration (will they be migrating existing mail, I wonder, or just keeping it on a network-mapped share for archival access?) I have to wonder how long this will take.

I'd have thought the per-year savings would be closer to a million than a quarter mil, personally.

Re:Only $280k?

[DaHat]

TFA says it will still cost the city ~$800k to make the move... the $280k is reported to be the savings from dropping what they are currently doing.

That's a whole lot of money to what? Move a large bit of data to the cloud, retire a number of on-prem servers and re-train people?

Re:Only $280k?

[DogDude]

You're assuming that the Exchange servers are handled in house. That's not necessarily the case.

Re:Only $280k?

[steelfood]

I'm still waiting for the Linux version of Active Directory. Until then, I don't think they're going to have an easy time moving away from Exchange.

Re:Only $280k?

[timmyf2371]

I believe Samba now supports Active Directory.

But AD on Linux doesn't equate to an easy migration from Exchange. In the business world, Exchange is still king and the integration between email, calendaring and the Outlook client has not yet been replicated in an effective manner by its competitors.

Re:Only $280k?

[dgatwood]

TFA says it will still cost the city ~$800k to make the move... the $280k is reported to be the savings from dropping what they are currently doing.

The only problem is that Google Docs are not guaranteed. You don't have a contract with Google that says, "We agree to provide this forever." WIth Office, assuming you don't choose to go with their rental model, you have a copy of a piece of software that you can just keep using.

So in five years, when Google realizes that even though Docs is popular, it isn't making them any money, they'll decide to yank it with six months notice. When Boston gets to spend way more than that $280k to move back to an actual purchased office suite on an emergency basis, we'll all say, "So much for big savings."

Software as a service is fine for things that aren't mission-critical. As soon as your workflow starts to depend on it, it's a fool's bargain.

Re:Only $280k?

[technosaurus]

its called samba4

Re:Only $280k?

[gbjbaanb]

I don't know - Thunderbird and the Lightning calendar plugin do me just as well as Outlook and its inbuilt calendar does (better actually, since Outlook decided you didn't need to know what appointments you had coming up tomorrow something I found useful for early meetings)

Link the calendar with gmail calendar, and the email with gmail emails... you've got pretty much 100% of the functionality Outlook gives you. (without the flipping Facebook integration Outlook 2013 now shoves at you, or the integration with skydrive). I use it (when I can't be bothered to read my mail using my phone, which seems to be my default view of Gmail nowadays) and it just works.

If you need centralised user accounts, OpenLDAP does that, though its tricky to make that work with a bunch of Windows clients, it does work though its not out-of-the-box. This is how it should be, after all AD is just a fancy LDAP server anyway, but with a special Windows-only protocol that Microsoft had to hand over as part of their agreement with the EU (IIRC). Good to see the Samba team has finally waded through the walls MS must have put up and got samba 4 working as a full AD server.

Re:Only $280k?

[batkiwi]

When people say AD they don't mean the LDAP part with centralised user accounts. That's been doable for ages.

When windows admins talk about AD, they are talking about all of the things that you can do with group policy and how those policies apply to different containers in a hierchical or cross cutting way, depending on configuration.

With AD and GPO you can:
-choose who has access to which desktops or servers and at what level in a granular or structured way (web admins have admin on web boxes but not mail servers, etc)
-choose what machines have what software installed and in what way
-set things like storage quotas (mailbox or otherwise) depending on a user's position/job
-delegate a login server and storage cache depending on a user's physical location
-enable and disable OS features (developers get IIS and debugging, people in finance don't)
-configure access to shared mailboxes/other resources

So if Jim moves from finance to web development, you drag and drop is user into another OU and add him to 5-10 groups on the AD server. Next time he logs on his access levels, what software is installed, what mail he has access to, his quotas, etc all change instantly.

This CAN be hacked together with a bunch of scripts, a custom repository, NIS/openLDAP, and some other stuff in Linux, but it's not well documented, well supported, or something you can ask ANY linux admin to do and they will do it in the same way.

Re:Only $280k?

[Solandri]

So in five years, when Google realizes that even though Docs is popular, it isn't making them any money, they'll decide to yank it with six months notice. When Boston gets to spend way more than that $280k to move back to an actual purchased office suite on an emergency basis, we'll all say, "So much for big savings."

1) The estimated savings is $280k per year. So in 5 years they'd have saved $1.4 million. There's also a direct correlation here between savings and cost to move back to Office. If stopping using Office will save them $280k per year, then starting to use it again will cost them $280k per year. Yes there might be a spike to purchase licenses if/when they start using it again, but it'll be followed by a lull between upgrades driving the long-term average cost back down to $280k/yr. So unless there are other unforeseen costs of using Docs, even a brief 5-year stint with Docs will save them money.

2) Google has been by far the most benign of the programs/services I've seen which have control over your data. They let you export your files into various formats at any time. The only issue I have with Google is that they can or are peeking at my data. I have no worries about being unable to retrieve my data from them if they should decide to shut down a service. They don't play the "lock-in" game most of the other vendors are wont to do.

Re:Only $280k?

[socode]

Nice, except it doesn't really work that way in practice, and certainly not instantly. Setting up and maintaining the configurations comes with an army of people, who seem to hack it together with a bunch of scripts, a custom repository and each variant of Win has a separate team. In stark contrast our UNIX farms tend to have much more stable configurations, with much simpler convention-based deployment and environment management.

It's a lot less impressive when Jim's machine - after the obligatory 4 minute disk flashing after he logs in - will show an error message from a broken install on one of the third-party tools that are typically used to augment Windows or Exchange security, then will ask him to reboot to complete the software changes. If Jim's unlucky it might zap his roaming profile, and if he's very unlucky it might hose his machine, which means he's going to a lose a day while someone in a blue shirt comes over to cart his PC away. Otherwise he can just live with a few broken shortcuts and registry cruft.

Re:Only $280k?

[Kalriath]

In all fairness, Google has a tendency to keep any retired services running for Apps users (Wave notwithstanding). If they don't, then they tend to migrate the data to a comparable service automatically (e.g. all Google Video data being migrated to Google Drive).

Re:Only $280k?

[Kalriath]

You do realise that Windows domains at greater than Windows NT 4 functional level don't have Primary Domain Controllers right? Are you saying that Samba 3 can act as a FSMO Master role server in a Windows 2003 functional level domain?

(The answer is no by the way - only Samba 4 can do this, and even then the functionality is still buggy according to the Samba project).

Side note, SMB isn't used for domain communications, it's LDAP/S and Kerberos (well, Kerb5 or whatever it's called). Your post appears to completely apply only to NT 4 domains.

Of note...

[somarilnos]

The link that suggests that Los Angeles was unhappy with their switch to Google does not, in fact, say that. The link is to a letter of a consumer group bitching to LA about their switch to Google. Given, by all accounts, things did not go smoothly, but maybe a better link would be this?

Re:Of note...

[Anonymous Coward]

An equally interesting link would be: http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/

Where they show that Consumer Watchdog is actually a PR/lobbying firm hired by MS.

I'm not suprised

[prelelat]

I do think that office 365 is a very nice response to cloud office suites but unless there is still a problem since that 2011 letter about the LA contract I don't know how they will break into that market. Google is a name that most IT people think of when they think of cloud processing suites. We started using 365 about 6-8 months ago and it works fantastically in my opinion. I also do know that other people have gone with google though because it's a big name and it does what it says it does. As far as I know there haven't been any complaints about google.

Does anyone know what happened between google and the city of L.A. after this was released? I hadn't heard about it. I would be interested to know what the security issues they had were and if they were able to be resolved. This letter is considerably old in terms of technology advancements.

Re:I'm not suprised

[desman]

I couldn't find anything recent, but this has a summary: http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/10/google-apps-hasnt-met-lapds-security-requirements-city-demands-refund/

It also appears that consumerwatchdog.org may have been hired by Microsoft to attack Google: http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/

Yeah, they'll save their 280,000, and more

[fustakrakich]

Until Google decides to pull the plug. Beware!

Re:Yeah, they'll save their 280,000, and more

[MightyMartian]

He's saying he's a fucking moron. He's just doing it in an obtuse, roundabout way.

Re:Yeah, they'll save their 280,000, and more

[OakDragon]

Are you saying Google Apps will bomb?

Too soon!

Re:Yeah, they'll save their 280,000, and more

[Bert64]

Considering Boston are paying them for the service, the likelihood of them dropping the email service is no higher than the likelihood of their ISP dropping their connectivity...
In either case, since the services are standards based they can easily migrate to an alternative, should the need arise.

MS could just as easily drop support for exchange, leaving them with a security nightmare that is intentionally difficult to migrate away from.

Re:Yeah, they'll save their 280,000, and more

[JDG1980]

How many paid services has Google shut down so far?

Google Docs and Drive are down...

[mystikkman]

Meanwhile, in delicious irony, Google Docs and Drive are down and inaccessible.

"Google Drive documents list goes empty for users "
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57583952-93/google-drive-documents-list-goes-empty-for-users/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=statusnet

https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=google%20drive&src=typd

Re:Just a thought

[nitehawk214]

Maybe Boston should worry about saving their city instead of saving a paltry quarter million dollars on a stupid exchange system.

Because their email system caused or allowed the bombings?

If we used the "why are we doing X when we have not cured cancer / stopped war / my favorite issue" argument for everything... then all of humankind's effort would be placed into a single thing... leaving us without food, housing, clothing or electricity.

Re:A better idea...

[foniksonik]

Uh booking meetings in a calendar is ~50% of the average corporate managers daily activity. The other 50% is attending said meetings.

Re:Spreading FUD with Facts?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except there were none, it was a privacy angle pushed by the MS lobby to attack Google. http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/