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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).
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.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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?
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/
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Are you saying Google Apps will bomb?
Too soon!
Dark Reflection
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.
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.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
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"
Uh booking meetings in a calendar is ~50% of the average corporate managers daily activity. The other 50% is attending said meetings.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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/