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).
So, when are they switching to Office 365? (Score:1, Interesting)
Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Of note... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why is the FUD FUD? (Score:2, Interesting)
No shit. I don't even use google for my personal email. I have an account...its where I let the spam go.
Microsoft, as much as I dislike exchange, is right here. Its not like there are not many alternatives, both free and commercially supported, which could be migrated to if they really wanted to drop that fee. However, going to a third party controlled cloud? Not just that, but the major one that so many people are using that it is, quite litterally, one of the biggest and juiciest targets in the world?
No thanks.
Re:Why is the FUD FUD? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Of note... (Score:5, Interesting)
An equally interesting link would be: http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/ [techrights.org]
Where they show that Consumer Watchdog is actually a PR/lobbying firm hired by MS.
Re:Why is the FUD FUD? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Only $280k? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.