"The city estimated it costs about $100 a year per employee to use its current roster of Microsoft products."
$100 per year is such an insignificant cost for something as vital to their productivity as their software. If the employees lose any time at all to learning to operate in the new environment it is all but wiped out.
While saving $280,000/year sounds pretty significant, with 20,000 staff as the article suggests you only have to make a difference of 14 dollars per year to realize those savings.
14 dollars per year is maybe 0.03% of an city employee's salary. I don't have a concern if they wanted to move for technical reasons, or if it was because it was more efficient, or if they just thought it was better software. But to save 14 dollars per employee per year and only recover the cost of migration after 3 years. That's dumb.
Hope this doesn't turn out like the last time Boston tried a significant migration away from Microsoft.
"When the state information technology chief of Massachusetts announced in 2005 that the state was going to standardize its computer document format to be more compatible with open-source software-software that isn't controlled by a company-than with Microsoft products, loud choruses of support and outrage ensued, closely followed by the announcement of an investigation into the chief's apparently perfectly legal state-funded travel for participation in open-source software conferences, followed by a new state-government announcement that it would work with Microsoft to stay compatible with the company's document formats, followed by an announcement from Microsoft that it would bring its document format closer to an open-source format."
> followed by the announcement of an investigation into the chief's apparently perfectly legal state-funded travel for participation in open-source software conferences, followed by a new state-government announcement that it would work with Microsoft to stay compatible with the company's document formats
In other words, it's just safer to stay with Microsoft. You really don't want well-funded groups investigating every single activity, making you dig up every single receipt, and sponsoring your opponents, do you?
I sincerely miss Outlook now that I'm at a company that uses Google Apps. The gmail web interface just isn't usable the way a real mail client is, and using an IMAP client is never as good an experience as native Outlook/Exchange. And that's just for mail. When you add in calendaring Outlook gets even better in comparison.
Huh, my experience is the exact opposite of yours. I find the gmail interface much faster and easier to use, plus searching email actually works. Have you enabled the advanced keystrokes in gmail?
As far as calendaring, I never really figured out how to use it that well in Exchange, Google's seems so much easier to me.
How are "advanced keystrokes" in Gmail going to be easier or better for someone when all of the keyboard shortcuts are completely inconsistent with every other application (web or otherwise)? Here they are - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en&ctx=ma...
I just can't imagine how anyone could find Gmail to be easier, given that all of the functionality is hidden behind unlabeled, non-obvious buttons that are spread out all over the screen. In Outlook and Thunderbird, the vast majority of action-inputs are very clearly labeled and keyboard access is made obvious by an underlined letter or a tool-tip that shows you the shortcut (unlike Gmail).
How could it be easier, when I can drag three attachments into a new Outlook message and hit send quicker than Gmail can even upload the attachments that I dragged to it?
How could it be easier, when I click "Inbox" and then I can't use the keyboard arrows (or Tab) to move to "Starred", "Important", "Sent Mail", etc? I guess I have to learn some non-obvious keyboard shortcut.
Huh? Have you hit the ? mark? Gmail's key-bindings are set up to be as fast as possible, and are faster to type than a normal desktop app, as you don't have to worry about eating up characters meant for a text box somewhere. I really suggest you give it a fair shot. I like it a lot better than any desktop mail app I've ever used (and that's been quite a few).
For example: To go to "Starred" hit "g" then "s". To go to an arbitrary label, hit "g" "l" and then you have a drop-down list of labels, with autocomplete. Seems nicer than tabbing about. To compose, hit "c".
Though there's a lot more to UX consistency than keyboard shortcuts...since we're on the topic...I wonder if these Gmail shortcuts are even consistent within Google's own offerings. Anyone wanna look?
Interesting they got that deal done. Assume for safety sake a 20% to 30% overrun and now you're at $1 million. And if for some reason your savings take a little longer than you thought to get there (don't they always?). Plus add in the opportunity cost of having to focus on this and retrain your workforce on Google vs MSFT that they all know. Then there's always the risk that any big project is the 1 in 10 that goes completely haywire. I just don't usually see enterprise deals with this long of a payback window getting done (based on $$'s alone anyway - without some other compelling reason)
Just curious on the dynamics of the deal not the Google vs MSFT component.
There's a lot more to it than that sentence makes it seem.
Even if they didn't go with Google Apps, they'd switch off their legacy Exchange eventually, which could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can't just download and install the newer version, the way you'd upgrade from OS X 10.6 to OX X 10.7. You have to go through a migration process. And you want it to go seamlessly, including a temporary coexistence mode, so you really should hire specialized consultants. For example, here's reference material on migrating from Exchange 2003 to 2010:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd638130(v=exchg....
MS Exchange is dated software, coming out with new versions regularly: 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013 (not yet production ready), and typically organizations keep whatever version they initially bought (say, 2003) rather than go through the pain of upgrading. So even if you were to migrate from Exchange 2003 to 2010 it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for consulting services in the process. And you're doing all that for software that was released in 2010, probably built in 2008-2010, so it's literally 5 years old software you're installing in 2013, that's only going to start getting more out of date. That's one of the advantages of Google Apps and SaaS: once you go with Google Apps, you'll never have to upgrade, and you'll always have the most up-to-date version.
I'm working at a global mega corp still on office 2003. To upgrade 140k employees to a system and actually make it work takes years. Making tech decisions that align with corporate release schedules is an unbearable thing. You will always be years out of date because of the need to formally meet the requirements of 10s of thousands of business groups
I agree, I'd be interested to see what happened in negotiations.
Also, while they may save $240k per year in money they don't pay to Microsoft, I imagine anyone selling enterprise software would argue that there is money you will save from a theoretical increase in productivity from using their products, after everyone's been trained.
I think the productivity argument favors MSFT. The time to retrain current employees. The fact that 85% of new employees will have "Proficient in MSFT Word, Excel and Powerpoint" on their application/CV/resume too. "Google Apps? Ain't nobody got time for that!" (ok maybe I shouldn't have added that)
I wouldn't be surprised if Google agreed to pay for overruns. The revenue is recurring and the expenses that can overrun should be limited to one-time training / switching costs.
"Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss." -- The Who, "Won't Get Fooled Again"
I don't see why a city government migrating form one proprietary software vendor to another is considered newsworthy. I would be more impressed by something like, "City of Boston drops Microsoft for local hosting provider running free software".
Well, that's your own fault for having a binary point of view about something. It's plenty newsworthy to people with more bits (or at least people whose MSb isn't whether or not the software someone else is using is proprietary).
>I don't see why a city government migrating form one proprietary software vendor to another is considered newsworthy. I would be more impressed by something like, "City of Boston drops Microsoft for local hosting provider running free software".
That is because, for some, it's less about promoting software freedom and more about taking Microsoft down. That's why we have SJVN on the ZDNet "Open Source" blog promoting Chromebooks and Google Docs which are less "free" than Windows and MS Office because of being completely locked down and being tied to Google's Cloud.
The problem with having the goal of taking Microsoft down is that some new, potentially abusive, power will probably rise in its place. What really matters is people's freedom. You seem to realize this, but I thought it would be worth pointing out anyway.
Money wise, it's good since it saves them a lot of money in the long term, but I still wish all government institutions would switch to open source software wherever possible.
And by wherever possible I don't mean that some users might be "inconvenienced" by some menu change. I mean when an open source alternative actually exists.
But even then, if the government is willing to spend money to get people or companies to build that software, they should make it open source after that.
I agree with your general principle. However, Boston is purchasing a service and not a software product. There is a lot of overhead and expertise needed to purchase and maintain the machines that would run any open source competitor. That isn't as big of a problem when going with something like Gmail.
>Money wise, it's good since it saves them a lot of money in the long term,
I know that's what the article says, but I'm wondering if they truly put Google Apps up against Office 365 which would be an apples-to-apples comparison? It seems more like they put Google Apps up against an on-premises Exchange + locally installed productivity software suite which is not a good comparison
Microsoft has actually been forced by their competitors (especially Google) in offering a competing offering by way of Office 365. You can have hosted Exchange for $4 per user per month. It's been in production for years, and in the last year has really worked well for my organization.
They're switching to a managed service that works with open source software and open file formats. That's not too shabby. Open source is great, but it doesn't come with experts to manage it. Boston's job isn't to run a data center, it's to run a city.
>And by wherever possible I don't mean that some users might be "inconvenienced" by some menu change. I mean when an open source alternative actually exists.
As long as they are promised a timely customer service from Google, I think it is a great move in terms of savings. Although I don't see the switch to Google Docs from the Office Suite ending well. Also if they are going through such great lengths to switch everything to Google, then why not save even more by using the Chrome OS instead of Windows?
Same here. I think most of these folks have never used paid Google Apps accounts, and extrapolate from their gmail.com experience. Google has follow-the-sun, toll-free support and those folks generally do know their stuff.
We had 100+ paid accounts (even paid for postini archival service) at a previous job, and phone support was rather poor, if you managed to convince them to work on it. Most of the time when we called, they just told us to file a support ticket.
Maybe their support has improved quite a bit in the last 2.5 years, or maybe we just weren't a large enough customer. shrug
The problem is you aren't sticking with the narrative folks here are comfortable with. This particular Internet forum assumes Google has zero support, even though this is pointed out as false in literally every Google thread. This despite HN users genuinely believing they are smarter and have higher-minded debate than other forums.
"What’s more, Cain said, Google’s contract terms are much simpler than dealing with Microsoft. And since Google updates its software via the Internet, which Microsoft only recently started doing with some of its products, it means clients won’t be working for years on outdated applications."
This is just willfully ignorant. If you have Exchange, you probably have Active Directory. You can update Office various ways. I updated 1000 computers from Office 2003 to 2010 without touching any of them. I can also push an update to all our computers only downloading the patches once, not with 1000 computers downloading the same thing all at once.
I haven't seen Google Docs mass controls, but with AD and Office I was able to fix a PowerPoint video acceleration issue with a subset of our machines. Otherwise I'd have to change a setting for every person who logged into these particular machines. I realize that I may not have had this problem with Google Docs. However, we've found that we can't replicate what is done with PowerPoint in Google Docs.
I'm sure many people were pissed with Office 2010 since the 'upgrade' from Office 2003 to 2010 was a full-price affair (see http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9143103/Microsoft_dum...). (EDIT: that was for retail, but you get the idea). So, while your 1000 machine deployment was technically straight-forward, it was probably ~ $100,000 for the software, plus your time (with patching!) financially. Lots of large companies and government find that cost not worth it given the benefit and they ultimately end up with outdated versions.
Google is killing microsoft in the government sector, since I'm helping pay for all this I can't tell you how happy I am that they're saving money. GSA went Google and is saving millions.
And yet, Office revenues are up 7% in the last quarter and Google's revenues from Apps/Docs/Email is still only a few percent. The government is a lot bigger than a few departments.
Nice try, microsoft
"data from 2012 that shows of 42 federal government contracts that both Microsoft and Google competed for during the year, Google had more than twice the success than Microsoft. Of the deals, 23 were won by Google and 10 by Microsoft."
I know, we provide their SSO & 2fa solution for access (mail.google.com/a/gsa.gov is a public website as is secureauth.gsa.gov) along with many other government agencies.
I've done many identity provider installs, google apps always goes great, office 365, not so much. MS requires them to have adfs which is basically a horrible offering (want to get rid of exchange, here, install all of these adfs servers on premise). Don't get me started.
Isn't it fun to explain that to provide SSO to Office 365 you effectively need 8+ ADFS servers and a couple of pairs of load balancers (or NLB) spread across at least two data center locations?[1]
At least now dirsync is 64-bit so they've removed the "don't run this on your ADFS server" bit.
and there's the little part about adfs not including any integrated two-factor for external users. Someone can basically sit here all day and bang away at mail.google.com/a/doi.gov with accounts like Bob_Abbey@ios.doi.gov or Ken_Salazar@ios.doi.gov (just google @ios.doi.gov) and it'll never lock out access from your ip.
>Of the deals, 23 were won by Google and 10 by Microsoft."
Nice try Google(?!)
That is a pretty bad comparison without the sizes of the user base of each deal.
"The other cities that use Google Apps are tiny: Orlando, Pittsburgh, etc ..
In public education, the big ones also use Office 365. The entire State University of New York (700,000) use MS Office.
It is true more Federal agencies that use Google Apps -- but the big ones use Office 365. For example, the Dept of Interior (80,000) uses Google Apps, but the Dept of VA (600,000) uses Office 365.
For example, Google supplies email system for tiny Orlando with 3,000 employees
You may therefore be right that "Google Apps is winning its share of government deals". You may say that Google Apps clients include Orlando and Pittsburg. But how do you compare those 2 tiny cities with New York and Chicago??"
Also, not sure why people are cheering on the migration from Office which is primary used for local files to a cloud service where your account and documents are at the complete mercy of the cloud provider.
"The entire State University of New York (700,000) use MS Office."
This is incorrect and I wish whatever source this comes from would get corrected.
Both Google Apps and Office 365 are made available to campuses through streamlined contracts signed at the system level. It is up to each campus to pick which one they want to use.
I'm on a campus that chose the Google offering. We got rid of local storage for student files on our LAN in favor of promoting cloud storage and have outsourced all student and alumni email to Gmail. We're not the only ones in the SUNY system.
I'm afraid that article is not accurate at all. When reading something about SUNY if it mentions an IT decision being made system wide it's most likely inaccurate bullshit. Nearly every campus has it's own disjoint IT and outside of strong suggestions and price incentives each campus can make it's own choices.
Examples: Oracle is effectively "free" for campuses so why not use that? And using something like Banner or Blackboard lets you ride on existing contracts and share dedicated resource centers. But it's not mandated and there are non-Blackboard campuses (as an example).
There is no Office 365 global movement or mandate in SUNY. It's simply one of two choices IF one decides to use them. It just means each campus doesn't have to bother putting together their own contract as SUNY central took care of it already.
Those two numbers aren't comparable. One is based on Office's revenue of the prior quarter, and the latter is based on Google's entire revenues. Why'd you bring them up?
"Google's revenues from Apps/Docs/Email is still only a few percent"
As an example Google gives away service to education so their revenue from that would be $0. As does Office 365 (at least that is what we were offered).
Many copies of Windows and Mac based Office of course is still purchased as frankly Google Docs and 365 are only appropriate for simple use cases.
Remember. If you do everything in your browser, no body cares about whether you're running Windows, OSX, ChromeOS or AmigaOS. That's the point. Get everyone on the web. Force your entrenched competitors onto the web we're they'll be vulnerable to the inevitable openness the web brings.
The primary purpose of Gmail seems to be get people to sign in so that all their web searches can be tracked by Google across computers to users' Google Accounts so that ads can be targeted, not to mention to force Google+ on users. I think it is pretty successful at making people do that.
And the primary purpose of Exchange Server is transfer gobs and gobs of money from unsuspecting organizations to Microsoft.
Locally hosted Exchange is insanely wasteful. Organizations continue to believe that a $25 lock on some closet is "more secure" than a real datacenter and insist on paying 3+ intermediaries' markup on outrageously expensive software licenses and servers, racks, UPSes and other accessories. They buy servers which they barely use, and what cost savings there is gets wiped out by VMWare licensing fees if they decide to do virtualization. Then they've got to pay another company to bring technicians out to maintain the server, change the UPS batteries, etc, at a cost of $100+/hour.
All of this could be so much more cost-efficient at scale. GMail may be a privacy concern, organizations' insistence on hosting their own email is maddeningly, mind-bogglingly wasteful considering they could get the same functionality for a few hundred bucks a year.
Someone needs to make a real open-source competitor to Exchange so people who insist on hosting their own stuff can at least stop throwing away money that could employ people on Exchange licenses. I understand that IMAP exists, but no one actually wants to use Thunderbird.
>There are thousands of companies that host Exchange for you. Or you have Office 365.
But so many small business owners believe (and are reinforced by their IT consulting companies who profit from that belief) that everything must always be hosted onsite.
>Why should "someone" else waste a huge amount of their time and effort on something that you think should be done and given away for free?
For the same reason any open source software exists. It'd basically be the Outlook component of LibreOffice. And no, I'm not saying "someone make this for me for free!" I'm saying this is a gap open source has yet to adequately fill and I'd be interested in filling it.
Are you speaking to a specific type of company? Plenty of companies "locally" host Exchange in full-blown data centers (some colos, some not) and use those machines to serve hundreds or thousands of users.
Businesses big enough to want sophisticated email and calendaring but small enough to need an outside IT contractor.
Most of the places where I've seen this scenario had between 10 and 50 employees. There are a lot of companies in this range, and the only software company that seems to be catering to their needs is Microsoft (which is drastic overkill in functionality, complexity, and price compared to most of their needs).
>And the primary purpose of Exchange Server is transfer gobs and gobs of money from unsuspecting organizations to Microsoft.
Apple's and Microsoft's business transactions(except for Bing) are upfront. You pay us this much money and you get this service. Google's is a more subtle "use this free service and we'll track your behavior and try to profit off it, if not we'll kill it".
>All of this could be so much more cost-efficient at scale. GMail may be a privacy concern, organizations' insistence on hosting their own email is maddeningly, mind-bogglingly wasteful considering they could get the same functionality for a few hundred bucks a year.
There are thousands of companies that host Exchange for you. Or you have Office 365.
>Someone needs to make a real open-source competitor to Exchange so people who insist on hosting their own stuff can at least stop throwing away money that could employ people on Exchange licenses.
Why should "someone" else waste a huge amount of their time and effort on something that you think should be done and given away for free?
"Apple's and Microsoft's business transactions(except for Bing) are upfront. You pay us this much money and you get this service. Google's is a more subtle "use this free service and we'll track your behavior and try to profit off it, if not we'll kill it"."
Because upgrades, support incidents, and software assurance are free, and they will give me the manpower to run it all? Where do I sign up? :)
I work with many companies that are still happily running on a 13 year old Windows OS. They don't pay Microsoft for upgrades, support incidents or software assurance because all of that is optional.
With Google, you will always be the product - and you have no choice in that matter.
Also I forgot: Google Apps for Business costs money and is ad-free, just like hosted Exchange. They eliminated the ad-supported Google Apps a few months ago.
I'm surprised that they're moving to Google Docs as well. From my experience Google Docs does not fare very well in government & enterprise settings where people are used to Microsoft Word.
From what I can tell in government (my side of the vast government) no one uses Word beyond the sheer basics. No macros, no fancy "decimal tabs", WordArt, gradients everywhere, any of that.
For what 95% of people are doing Google Docs is more than sufficient.
That might be true in general as far as client features go, but I do know that at least the DoD is a heavy user of the identity and access management services which effects what you can do with an Office document. That rules out Google Docs for anyone that is already or planning to do that.
Shipmate, I'm in the DoD. Maybe you're talking about OSD, JS, Army, Air Force or something else though.
Edit: Also, doesn't Google Docs have controls to limit sharing of online documents to certain persons, groups, or teams?
The big concern I can think of is PII spillage, but honestly I think I trust Google more than I trust random GS-13s with their externals and laptops. DoD at least has PKI but in the Navy we're recommended to also use a password-based certificate for encrypted externals in case the CAC is lost, which kind of defeats the point since I'm sure the password is not going to be high-entropy.
Hopefully, advanced users are using features like merges, automation of data sources, templates and address validations rather than WordArt and gradients.
With minimal studying on their own, a smart office worker can be pretty efficient doing analysis with Excel Pivot Tables while avoiding a lot of red tape. I could see the switch to an office suite with reduced features getting in the way of work done by a lot of behind the scenes, unsung heroes.
I think that when actual exposure to how people use software is largely comes from support calls, it is easy to get an inaccurate picture of bumbling and general incompetence, rather than creative solutions to often arbitrary constraints on their tool sets.
I'm not a help desk. I'm using the same software these other people are using in an environment swamped with office documents.
We write memoranda and instructions, we make PowerPoint briefings, we use scads and scads of spreadsheets, and although I personally use and admire PivotTables, most don't.
Even the famous "Access database that underlies the operation" is very rarely to be found around here. The only thing I've ever seen an Access database behind around here (besides the ones I personally use) are for FITREP processing in the Navy.
Perhaps surprisingly, much of the stuff you'd use "advanced spreadsheets as database" for end up being run by actual databases with website frontends around here, which makes office software even less essential; just make the ad-hoc query on the web page and export to Excel and you're done.
Maybe the requirements of the DoD are different than those of a city administration?
When the City of Munich switched from MS to Linux/OpenOffice, they had to port 21,000 macros [1].
95% of computer users aren't sysadmins, but if you use that logic to take sysadmin access away from 100% of computer users, you might regret the decision.
I've recently been forced to use the whole Microsoft ecosystem and it's awful. So many basic UX mistakes that make daily use painful. For instance in Outlook there's no clear indication of which emails I've read and which I haven't, so I just constantly miss emails.
Looking forward to more of the world switching to Google.
I hope that one day the notion of enterprise products will disappear completely so that everybody can happily use well-designed consumer products.
Do you really think this hasn't been asked by Boston or any of the other very large Google Apps deployments? The answer is a single Google Search away...
> Google Apps for Government includes dozens of security features specifically designed to keep your data safe, secure and in your control. This segregated system, for government customers in the U.S. only, was the first cloud-based email application to receive FISMA accreditation from the U.S. federal government.
I've seen enough horrors first (but mostly second) hand of small shops (admittedly not like the story, but I'll talk about what I know) running their own systems. They'll have 2-3 people running everything. From the mail server to setting up printers to replacing bad hardware components.
If I were in that boat, I'd beg and plead to put everyone on a disposable internet-only type machine and run webapps only. Then I could worry about security and reliability, which sadly gets last priority in most places :(
""Google's record with the city is nothing but broken promises and missed deadlines," the letter reads in part. "The Internet giant simply has not done what it said it would do and has tried to buy its way out of the mess it has made by covering the unbudgeted costs of the LAPD's GroupWise System that the department has been forced to continue using."
The mayor's office did not have any immediate comment as of press time."
I once convinced a CEO of a company with a few hundred employees to move from Outlook to Gmail.
For a while after I was a social pariah. My expense reports would go missing (want to find a Microsoft fan? look in accounting). My calls to IT (staffed with MCWhatever certified individuals) unanswered. The controller pulled me aside and said in a menacing Brooklyn accent I didn't know he had in him, "I would appreciate it if you would make this go away."
I learned a valuable about switching costs that day.
I once recommended a 12 person company move from a self-hosted, internal exchange server to Google for email. They ignored me until a truck hit a telephone pole and we lost email for 2 days.
I worked for a similarly sized firm a few years ago and we also moved from Exchange to Gmail, partly because we had had a few severe outages with Exchange for various reasons. From a technical perspective, the migration went pretty smoothly. But there were at least a couple non-technical people on the business side who always hated the new system, partly because Gmail didn't have the hierarchical folder system they were used to. (And I don't think Gmail had sublabels at the time.)
I feel you, nested labels is the easy answer to this. However, the better answer is teaching people about archiving and search.
People used to folder their emails because searching was terrible. Gmail's search is pretty good, so the best workflow in my opinion is to archive email once you're done with it, and search if you need something specific. I do use labels too, especially auto-labels, but I've found search to be more useful.
Still, some people are reluctant to change, and just want to do things the way they've always done it. So that's why nested labels exist.
Are you sure that isn't due to duplicates in Apple Mail? If I'm remembering right, things with labels (including "Inbox") will have copies in All Mail as well as each of their label "folders."
IMAP and POP use hierarchical folders and don't understand that a tax email might be marked as both "Government" and "Finances", or whatever your filing system happens to be.
I'm sure that could be an issue as well, but it's not causing the problem in my case.
I've found 1-2 emails in mail from a particular sender, where gmail was unable to find any results, even with their exact address.
I've likewise found perhaps 7/10 of a set of emails in gmail, and found the remaining 3 in mail (while confirming they had unique information not listed in gmail).
Actually, it has. You can nest labels. With the extra benefit a message can be in more than one folder if it pertains to two different subjects. Very powerful.
"...a message can be in more than one folder if it pertains to two different subjects"
That's not a benefit. It complicates things. Folders are simpler - one location, one parent, one place to go and find it. Average users can understand folders. Heck, expert users can use folders immediately without having to figure anything else out.
If nested tags are better than straight hierarchies for storing and finding things...where are all of the nested tag file systems? In a nested tag file system - would I have to go all the way to a settings dialog to create a new label like in Gmail?
Also, look at this guy's post about how "Gmail sucks when you have lots of mail" - and his response to someone recommending nested tags (Apparently, you can't just drag an email to nested tag.) - https://plus.google.com/105059362788808645801/posts/3amd9ZMi... All the web-app loving hipsters jump on his case for not "knowing the tool". I love it. How about just give us a tool that works like we expect? Who wants to invest time figuring out a new email client that has very questionable benefits?
I don't know how long ago that happened but if it happened today, I'd resolve that by going to Verizon and picking up a hotspot device. Connect the mail server to the hotspot and you have it working again.
I believe my mobile IP tends to remain the same for long periods of time but I was assuming they had a mail server off site which was relaying the mail to their exchange server which is how I do it. I wouldn't trust changing DNS settings to the mobile IP.
I use a remote data center email server because office/residential network connections tend to be unreliable. Even without the telephone getting knocked down, I get intermittent outages. I'd prefer to have mission critical services (like email receipt) working at a data center. This way the message is received and doesn't bounce back. Then, my local exchange server can pull the data when it's online.
So, I guess the mobile option wouldn't really work in this case unless you were sure the IP address won't change.
I wasn't at the company for much longer after that. No, I wasn't fired. ;)
The company was very East Coast, very sales-driven, not very tech-driven at the time. I don't like using age as a proxy for tech-savviness since there are plenty of tech-savvy older folks, but this was a bit of an older organization as well.
But yeah, people adapt. They will kick and scream and claim that their world is ending and then a month later they'll forget about the old way of doing things. (Or, as was often the case, IT just set up their Outlook to pull their emails from Gmail's servers.) And then the anger subsided.
>IT just set up their Outlook to pull their emails from Gmail's servers
I've noticed that using IMAP on multiple devices can cause Gmail to say that you're using too much resources. Tripped me when I first saw the limitations. I had not thought there were limits on Gmail. How did they handle issues where people might want to access Gmail from various devices? Google has some numbers and recommendations here[1] but I'm interested in how you handled situations like this in the real world.
I seriously doubt Accounting has Microsoft fans as such. They're very wedded to their tools and workflow in order to do their job because they spend their entire day on email and spreadsheets. Take away those and replace them with crippled alternatives like only Excel on the web, and they'll still hate it even if made by Microsoft.
How would a developer react if one day their vim editor was removed and replaced by EMACS or vice versa because of a mandate from the CEO?
No, it's worse than that. At least Emacs is roughly on par, in terms of capability. Replacing Excel with Google Docs Spreadsheets is like replacing vim with Notepad.
Maybe in accounting (who should have better tools, anyway) Excel is irreplaceable, but most other Excel users make all kinds of idiotic tables with it, all of them without even a single mathematical operation.
And that's to say nothing on the idiocy when those users decide they are empowered by their tools and decide they'll do math with them. I've seen more than one case where the AVG function was replaced with SUM and COUNT.
It's notable that that quote is not a quote from anyone from the LA government, but from Consumer Watchdog, the same group responsible for that weird Eric Schmidt ice cream man video. AFAIK it was only the LAPD that didn't switch over.
$100 per year is such an insignificant cost for something as vital to their productivity as their software. If the employees lose any time at all to learning to operate in the new environment it is all but wiped out.
While saving $280,000/year sounds pretty significant, with 20,000 staff as the article suggests you only have to make a difference of 14 dollars per year to realize those savings.
14 dollars per year is maybe 0.03% of an city employee's salary. I don't have a concern if they wanted to move for technical reasons, or if it was because it was more efficient, or if they just thought it was better software. But to save 14 dollars per employee per year and only recover the cost of migration after 3 years. That's dumb.
But it's definitely worth it for google.