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

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

[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

[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.

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?

[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.

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/

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: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.

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

[OakDragon]

Are you saying Google Apps will bomb?

Too soon!

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: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: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: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.