Google Apps Beats Office 365 For US Dept. of the Interior Contract 245
angry tapir writes "The U.S. Department of the Interior has picked Google Apps to provide cloud-based email and collaboration applications to about 90,000 staffers, choosing Google's services over Microsoft's Office 365. Google had sued the U.S. agency in 2010, claiming its requirements for the contract tilted the scales unfairly toward Microsoft. Google eventually dropped its lawsuit last September."
Re:Google does government favors, gov does back (Score:3, Informative)
I'm pretty sure /. just ate my post on this one... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm pretty sure /. just ate my post on this one (Score:5, Informative)
And it's not even the first time MS has made that mistake. They did in with the Zune in 2008, then made the same mistake with Azure.
Re:How about 'disappearing features'? (Score:5, Informative)
Err this is for web based stuff so no even with Microsoft they can update at a whim.
Not sure what your yammering about TOC's is about. The feature is still right there: http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=106342 [google.com]
To a bureaucrat (Score:5, Informative)
You are right: there are no essential features lacked by Open or Libre Office. By essential, I mean stuff needed to present information. Therefore, Government departments could easily mandate that only that feature set is used. But the Microsoft argument is that if "free" means it only does 99% of what expensive does, free is worthless (even if the 1% is unnecessary.)
Take presentations. Almost all presentations would be precisely as meaningful if the slides were done in Wordpad with additional images. But, like medieval scribes, Microsoft has persuaded people that unless every page is an illuminated manuscript, the content is worthless. The arms race in manuscript production continued right up until Gutenberg, when people suddenly realised that movable type was easier to read. I await the day when some unknown 5-star general suddenly realises that Powerpoint is a waste of resources, though I doubt it will happen in my lifetime.
Great Email but good luck with those docs (Score:2, Informative)
We use Google Apps at our school and while I love the mail, contacts, calendar, and free storage part, migrating Office docs is very poor. The converter does a bad job with tables and images. I tried to create a table layout with different column spans in a Google doc and gave up. I almost got it going in their spreadsheet doc but soon found out that you can one have one font style per cell. I gave up and went back to Word and shared the doc through Skydrive. I confused some people but in the end it got done.
With each day I'm beginning to regret my choice to move to Google Apps, especially now that Microsoft is offering 365 free for school come this summer. It's integration with Office is pretty slick. Yes I did try Google Cloud Connect but go read up on the proxy issues that thing has. Then again typical Microsoft always a few year's late to the game.
Re:ooh (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just about making positive posts about Microsoft that bring out the "shill" cries.
It's the:
1. New user with 10 posts
2. Vacuous pro-msft post - just content-free
3. Cheerleading
4. Rushed to the top of the page.
Having all these qualities in one posts guarantees that it's just a shill post. I caught one last week that was a first post.
Then there's the post that shows up in the top that is an obvious canned response that is so detailed and over-edited ahead of time, that it could not possibly be typed in by hand in the 30 seconds to beat the second post. Recoiledsnake was infamous for doing this, especially if it involved Metro. He hasn't done it since he was called out on this.
The theme that bonds these two types of posts together is their utter impersonality. They contain nothing of their authors' personalities. They are fake, the signature of the astroturf post.
--
BMO
Re:To a bureaucrat (Score:5, Informative)
I await the day when some unknown 5-star general suddenly realises that Powerpoint is a waste of resources, though I doubt it will happen in my lifetime
The military calls it "death by powerpoint". Gen. James N. Mattis & Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster are such commanders that have banned or severely restricted use of powerpoint under their command.
They found that their staff was spending more time preparing fancy slides than actually analyzing information or planning missions/operations. So they scrapped it.
Re:There are no glaring security holes, LOL (Score:3, Informative)
From http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/system-requirements/ [libreoffice.org]:
For certain features of the software - but not most - Java is required. Java is notably required for Base.
Also, they're reducing Java dependency, but it obviously takes time until LibreOffice is fully c++.
http://mrpogson.com/2010/11/10/reducing-java-dependency/ [mrpogson.com]