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Comments: 266 +- Technology: Los Angeles Goes Google Apps With Microsoft Cash on Thursday October 29, @09:19AM
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by
samzenpus
on Thursday October 29, @09:19AM
from the cloudy-day dept.
from the cloudy-day dept.
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technology
Dan Jones writes "The Los Angeles City Council has approved a US$7.25 million, five-year deal with Google in which the city will adopt Gmail and other Google Apps. Interestingly, just over $1.5 million for the project will come from the payout of a 2006 class action lawsuit between the City and Microsoft (Microsoft paid $70 million three years ago to settle the suit by six California counties and cities who alleged that Microsoft used its monopoly position to overcharge for software). The city will migrate from Novell GroupWise e-mail servers. For security, Google will provide a new separate data environment called 'GovCloud' to store both applications and data in a completely segregated environment that will only be used by public agencies. This GovCloud would be encrypted and 'physically and logically segregated' from Google's standard applications. Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?"
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Submission: LA City goes Google Apps (with Microsoft cash) by Anonymous Coward
Necessity is a mother.
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Cannot parse title (Score:5, Funny)
I thought "Microsoft Cash" was a new marvellous Redmond product I hadn't heard of.
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... marvellous Redmond product...
When has that ever happened?
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When has that ever happened?
Windows 95.
Why segregate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Are the government servers more reliable, or more secure than the regular servers? If that's the case, what does that say about the peons who don't have access to it?
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I wouldn't be surprised if it had something to do with the Federal Information Security Management Act, from TFA:
Google has pushed Google Apps as an option for government agencies, promising to ship a product called Government Cloud, which will be certified under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), sometime next year.
I would guess that some provision in it [wikipedia.org] requires segregated data servers, just in case the public consumer computer gets 'owned' by a cracker, that the government network is not instantly vulnerable.
That's just guessing, it could be for any other number of reasons. IANAL, I am not a network engineer or security expert, and I only scanned the article to get some free, pointless, anonymous informat
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Re:Why segregate? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Why segregate? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's probably a mix of FIMSA and public accountability/recordkeeping laws. Consider that one of the points made when Palin's Yahoo! email was "cracked" was that it was illegal for her to use that account for any kind of government business due to an accountability law in that state. Likely similar considerations are at the root of having a separate government cloud.
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It's a mystery to me what "satisfactorily stable" consists of for people who point out availability as a problem with cloud solutions. As a rule, enterprises don't publish their internal downtime statistics, but I can tell you that for a large chunk of them, it's far worse than the occasional Gmail outages. And no one who makes that argument ever seems to look at the necessary companion to stability, which is cost. What does it cost you to be satisfactorily stable running internally? For most businesses
Re:Why segregate? (Score:4, Informative)
You can always pop/imap your email from google and can use offline access with google email/calendar/docs.
We changed over to google apps here at work and the offline access has been good for us here.
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HOLD UP (Score:3, Insightful)
Does this mean I will be losing some of the 7385 MB available for my inbox space? I'm already using a whole 1% of that!
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Still shows 0% for me :). I think I'm using like 44MB total.
Google has to be using some compression or something though. My Lotus Notes mail file at work with a similar message volume is 600+ MB.
I find it ironic though when they determined at work that we all needed to clean up our mailboxes in anticipation for a 250MB quota. Google manages to give me 7GB and with our own dedicated server our admin wants me to stay within 250MB. Something just seems wrong about that.
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That's not the reasoning for our case (I used to co-admin the email system where we're at but have mostly given up my influence there after just taking on too many other systems so that I didn't have time to work with it anymore). For a long time we monitored anything with an image coming in to make sure that it wasn't the type of stuff you mention. Eventually though the man-time required for that just became too much. I still admin the filtering gateway but not the actual server anymore.
No, in our case
Cloud? (Score:5, Informative)
Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?
No. Someone's just getting a dedicated data center hosting scalable web apps. Nothing new.
Of all the places on the interwebs, I would hope /. could refrain from the marketing babble.
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Re:Cloud? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Cloud? (Score:5, Funny)
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Cloud computing = batshit insane (Score:3, Insightful)
"Cloud Computing" is just web based thin client with the servers outsourced to a 3rd party who you then trust to run their services scalably. The reason it hasn't been done before is simply that it's batshit insane and before you added marketing hype you'd lose your job even suggesting something as asinine. You simply don't put your day to day operations at the mercy of yet another 3rd party (and unlike basic utilities these services aren't simple and service levels are a bear to negotiate).
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My prediction. (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest thing is space. In my(admittedly modest; but definitely nonzero) experience, users really, really hate dealing with storage quotas and love doing things(like storing files in the form of email attachments) that bump them into quotas. Unless the LA IT guys were unusually generous, or their deal with Google unusually stingy, most user's quotas will probably go up substantially. Plus, with Google doc's sharing functions, there will hopefully be much less attachment clutter eating email quota space.
Aside from heavy users of particular Office functions, who will almost certainly end up retaining local copies of office one way or another(whether it be official IT department policy, or local departmental budgets, or some other means), most people will probably care more about not bumping into quotas than anything else.
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There will be a subset of users who will hate it, mostly serious Excel jockies and the extremely change averse, but on the whole it'll be pretty popular..
More people than you think will hate it. The average, desk-bound, minimum-wage Excel/Outlook jockey will bitch at any change. Note that these people bitch if you get them a new computer, or even if you move the coffee machine to a new room down the hall. They bitch at every change, every day, all the time. These people are, in a lot of organizations, far more pervasive than you might think.
Passing the Buck (Score:4, Insightful)
Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?
No.
What it has done is given IT administrators the opportunity to pass the buck when there's a problem with a system. Now when the e-mail system goes down for hours and employees can't access crucial data, the IT admin simply points at Google and says "it's not my fault or my problem".
That's all cloud computing offers. Unless you're a bit paranoid, in which case it also provides a single-point of attack for the government to eavesdrop under the banner of "keeping America safe".
Re:Passing the Buck (Score:4, Insightful)
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the IT admin simply points at Google and says "it's not my fault or my problem".
I'm not sure who you mean by "the IT admin"? Is that like a buggy-whip maker?
One of the big advantages that makes remote hosting with a standard application infrastructure (which is all "cloud computing" is in this context) attractive is that you get to fire most of your admins because you no longer have much in the way of in-house servers.
One of the reasons why this is happening now is because after a decade of of living with
Finally open goverment (Score:3, Funny)
California's letter to Microsoft (Score:3, Funny)
Dear Microsoft:
Forget the fact that you overcharge
us, we can overlook that. You were
counting on your monopoly to
keep us as customers and that's not right.
Your products, however, are shoddy and
outside the realm of
usability. We will switch to Google.
Love,
California
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"If I understood this right, Microsoft was found guilty of using their monopoly in the OS sector to gain monopolies in other sectors"
MS wasn't "found guilty" of anything because it was a civil -- ah forget it.
Sorry if I didn't use the proper legal expression. I'm sure everyone understood.
So, what are these "other sectors" that MS now enjoys a monopoly in?
At the time they were found "guilty" of leveraging their monopoly in the operating system market to gain market shares in the browser market. Microsoft had essentially managed to gain a monopoly in the browser market. They could not have gained that monopoly without illegally leveraging off their monopoly in the OS market.
The fact that they no longer have a monopoly in the browser market is an indication that the ruling had the
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"At the time they were found "guilty" of leveraging their monopoly in the operating system market to gain market shares in the browser market."
Well, the US courts' position on IE is a bit muddled. In an earlier case Judge Jackson's ruling about MS bundling IE with Windows was overturned on appeal.
The penalty was overruled but not the finding of facts. There's no question that Microsoft was found "guilty" of using their monopoly in the OS sector to gain a monopoly in the browser market.
"The fact that they no longer have a monopoly in the browser market is an indication that the ruling had the intended effect."
I don't see how. Has MS eliminated IE from Windows? Has it been including firefox?
Maybe you don't remember about Microsoft preventing retailers from supplying Netscape with Windows and making changes to the OS that would break other applications? Do you not remember the Microsoft-only OS calls that IE would use which would make it perform faster?
The fact that they no longer use these practices is an
Re:The times are changing - Yes, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
You neglect the effect of the close call that MS experienced that tempered, somewhat its proclivity for using the Mafia business model. Remember even under the W, supposedly MS was under judicial restraint. Those factors had to play a role in allowing competition to reappear*.
* However, if you look at the netbook experience where Linux suddenly vanished (supposedly completely) from its initial dominance one can see hints that MS is probably back to its old game, but the environment has altered in the interim.
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Re:The times are changing (Score:4, Insightful)
I think this is a step towards relieving MS of their monopoly, even on OSs.
How long until LA city employees don't need Windows for anything. If everything they do is in the browser, they can use Linux (maybe in the guise of ChromeOS)
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With the advancement of Google and open-source software,
Oh yes, Google and Open Source Software... the kind of Open Source Software that's so secret they won't release the source code to.
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At times A through B, LA purchased software from Microsoft. At time C, which is after times A and B, they sued, asserting that Microsoft used their market power in the interval between A and B to overcharge. They one. At time D, which is after A, B, and C, they purchased a product from a competitor which was not offered in the A to B interval.
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Re:Monopoly position to overcharge for their softw (Score:4, Insightful)
No, actually it's nothing like that. Reading a book doesn't require anything proprietary and it doesn't have to work with other software, etc.
But I'm sure you have more knowledge about the case than the judge who made the decision.
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No, actually it's nothing like that. Reading a book doesn't require anything proprietary and it doesn't have to work with other software, etc.
Neither does your OS. It wouldn't be good for business, but there's no requirement that the OS must work with anything else. How is your statement relevant to my analogy, again? It's like arguing that I've made a false analogy because JK Rowling is a woman and Bill Gates is a man - it's true, but irrelevant.
But I'm sure you have more knowledge about the case than the judge who made the decision.
If a judge correctly interprets an immoral law, does that make the law alright? Stop begging the question. I'm arguing what's right, not what's legal.
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Given your political views, I can only suggest you emigrate to Somalia. In that paradise, there is no central government controlling the market, and people are make any associations they want, No society will take your rights away.
Re:Monopoly position to overcharge for their softw (Score:5, Insightful)
Your JK Rowling analogy is missing the part where JK Rowling buys up every other publishing company, shuts them down, turns the book industry into a harry Potter monoculture, and makes Harry Potter the only book series on the planet aside from a few hold outs that have the creativity to write their own books.
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Not the same at all. There are millions of other books to choose from because Rowling's does own all the printing presses.
It is the same. Re-read my post. I said a monopoly on Harry Potter, not a monopoly on books.
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Re:Gmail is not ready. (Score:5, Informative)
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Blasphemy! Obviously he's better than Google, and handles millions of users from his mom's basement using a server running on a classic Gameboy!
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Citation needed. What theoretical "business-class" SLA are you holding Google to, and can you demonstrate that they haven't met it? Doing some hand waving about two or three outages this year, without quantifying how long they were, or what percentage of users were affected, is insufficient.
If unusually high availability of e-mail/documents is truly that import
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