Boston Replacing Microsoft Exchange With Google Apps 251
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'm not suprised (Score:4, Informative)
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:Why is the FUD FUD? (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [rt.com]
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
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:I'm not suprised (Score:4, Informative)
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:Only $280k? (Score:3, Informative)
its called samba4
Re:Only $280k? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [microsoft.com] 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 [erikberg.com] 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:Spreading FUD with Facts? (Score:2, Informative)
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/ [techrights.org]