Minnesota Moving To Microsoft's Cloud 345
An anonymous reader writes "The State of Minnesota is apparently the first state to move into the cloud, agreeing on a deal to have their messaging and collaboration services delivered through Microsoft's Business Online Productivity Suite. The thing the article doesn't tell you in detail is that the agreement precludes the use of open source software, which could have saved the taxpayers millions of dollars. And once such a large organization goes Microsoft, it's difficult to go back. Isn't it interesting that these developments occur right before elections, as senior officials are trying to keep their jobs with a new incoming administration? What do you think, Slashdotters? Is this a good move for Minnesota? Or a conservative move that bucks the trend of saving money and encouraging open government and transparency by aligning philosophy and practice with at least the option of utilizing open source software?"
We see what you did there... (Score:2, Interesting)
And once such a large organization goes Microsoft, it's difficult to go back.
You need a large, thick, vertically and horizontally integrated businesses to handle large customers. But actually, unbeknownst to you, the average person has been going Microsoft for much larger, er, longer than you realize. Imagine the confusion that would ensue from switching to Linux - a Windows user who is used to tasks being performed for them on the bottom of their desktop may find themselves confused that the tasks are all on the top and they have to do much more work themselves.
DiNiro said it best in Ronin (Score:3, Interesting)
"lady, I never go into any place I can't get out of"
The cloud is a great idea combined with standard formats for data (XML, whatever). IT overhead is a headache. Running servers is a pain.
The data is the important thing, not how it's manipulated. This point needs to be beaten into people.
If you're foolish enough to move into a third party cloud without standardized data formats.. or a way to get out..
You'll wish being ambushed in a bar by spies was the worst thing that could happen :)
Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost (Score:3, Interesting)
Same reasoning applies: not having to pay for it is cheaper than buying it from a commercial software vendor.
Is that you, Mr. Ballmer? (Score:2, Interesting)
I started using Linux in 1995 and have been using it almost exclusively since 1998.
What confuses me every time I try to use Windows is how many tasks I have to do on the top of the desktop that Linux does for me automatically without any intervention from me.
Linux just works, Windows is continuously asking me to do something.
Linux is the lover from your daydreams, Windows is the nagging wife from your reality.
The difference is that in the software world dreams can become reality.
Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost (Score:5, Interesting)
The governor could get better support from his own in-house staff. My employer uses BPOS. We have 20,000 people on it, yet we have terrible support. The state of Minnesota has 36,000 employees. Something tells me the difference is not significant enough to get better support.
Consider (Score:1, Interesting)
Many government services need to be up nearly 24/7. Government employees are not paid well and their resources are nothing like those in the private sector. I speak from experience here.
It's nice and all to say that they should be using OSS, but really? Data centers are expensive. So flamebaity as the OP was, consider:
1) government entities need to invest in a really good database platform with upper echelon support and training options, as well as with a large community of mercenary experts you could bring in from anywhere in an emergency. SLAs for the government don't just lose money; you're talking about public safety departments, state/local/federal requirements for information access, etc. Waiting for forum answers is frequently not an option.
2) having employees with deeply technical skill sets and loads of experience is going to be hard; keeping them for any length of time is going to be harder. You are going to offer very little in terms of salary for doing actual work; benefits are good, but they really only matter if you're still relatively young career-wise. 25-year retirement plans don't matter if you have 20 years of experience already. Government employees also jump between positions a lot. This means the guy who developed an app might then become a sysadmin, then he might move to the HR department, then go work for the Clerk. You really don't get to call him in when there's an emergency. It's not his job and it's not his responsibility. That boundary is a requirement in government shops for liability positions. So that personal knowledge base is going to get flushed very frequently.
3) government IT supports dozens to hundreds of apps. Jails, fire departments, municipal services, judicial services and records, clerk apps (for elections and public record retention), public safety offices, tax information, property information, GIS and spatial databases for land parcels and property value assessment, not to mention any random social programs you have going on like substance abuse programs, public health departments, transportation bureaus, etc. If you think you're managing all of that on mysql, you're absolutely insane.
4) in-house development, while nice, tends to be impractical for anything that rates higher than "minor". You don't generally have career systems analysts who built the inmate tracking system from the ground up and documented their vast knowledge. These apps and their databases get absolutely massive, and between elected officials, turnover, and the frequency with which government employees tend to switch positions (to get promotions and earn more money, since merit raises are incredibly rare), having such monsters is a tremendous liability.
This is an area where OSS has yet to prove a good fit. Here and there it is an excellent solution; as a cover-all it is a terrible one. The OSS community is good, but Oracle and Microsoft answer their phones 24/7, and allow 15-minute MTTA SLAs to exist. Which, you know...is legally required in some places.
Re:Foo (Score:2, Interesting)
Funny, but the only thing I pay RedHat for per-server? Seems to be just for access to patches and updates. I've honestly never had to call their support line in the 4+ years that I've been using RHEL professionally.
Microsoft OTOH had been a near-constant companion last year during the install of the travesties that are SCOM and SCCM - and most professional MCSE types I know of have had to do the same. Even called 'em up a couple of times back when Exchange 2007 first came out.
So, at least in my own experience, Microsoft has been a pricier support and maintenance proposition (on the enterprise level, anyhoo) than Linux has been.
Re:It's all the same even for alternatives (Score:3, Interesting)
We have a managed dedicated server from Pair Networks that handles our company websites and email. (We have a few more that handle our E-commerce Platform). We access our email through IMAP with Mac Mail, iPhones, iPads, Android phones, Outlook, and thunderbird. We looked at Google apps and the dedicated server was cheaper for our company (4 full-time, 6 part-time employees). Two years and we've not had any noticeable problems. I think I had to call tech support once to get the machine reset that took a whole of 5 minutes on the phone from the time I dialed until the server was rebooted and working again.
Re:It's all the same even for alternatives (Score:2, Interesting)
Corrupt Slimy Leadership. I live here. (Score:4, Interesting)
It does not surprise me one bit. Our Governor is a slime who only about 1/3 support and many of those only because of his party affiliation. (3rd parties upset results often here.) He's been doing the whole "no new taxes" thing for his whole term and its only ended up hurting us as well as word games where they actually raised taxes in other ways. Then we have our ROADS -- that bridge that fell down was ours -- which took a voter initiative to get the road funds used ON ROADS! (before the bridge fell, but not fast enough... the bridge fell while they were fixing it.) I wouldn't be surprised if MS bought his support since he wants to run for President or VP.
I used to know a state IT guy - a unix guru. You can be assured that they have some great experts for intelligent planning who were not the deciding factor. I will have to reach him and see if they cut his job since he did do some email servers among the 100s he managed.
Re:That's Life (Score:1, Interesting)
I found it easy. When friends have viruses they call me to help remove it. I bring the rescue disc (don't forget to install Flash... SIGH). They can't believe that months later, not only did the kids still not install a virus, but the computer remains as fast as it was when you installed Linux, which is faster than it was before they got the virus.
The new generation of web-only users don't miss Windows when it is gone.
Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost (Score:4, Interesting)
A few numbers to back you up:
Where I work in local government, our IT budget is $90 million. A little under $2 million of that goes to Microsoft directly. Our Unix/Linux guys start at a pay rate that's probably 20% or so higher than the Windows guys that get hired.
Sure, we could save some up-front money to Microsoft, but some of it would still go to Red Hat (all production Linux servers run RHEL, as CentOS is authorized only for test environments), and the admins would have to be retrained or replaced at rates that run higher than the existing ones. It would get ugly very, very fast.
Note: I spend about 70% of my day on a Linux notebook.
Microsoft ushers in the Year of the Linux Desktop? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have no doubt that at a minimum, MS built it such that the user experience is degraded somewhat on other browsers/platforms (think Outlook Web Access), but if in fact everything functions, it could actually indirectly enable migration of desktops to other platforms, since it addresses the oft-voiced "MS Office compatibility" issue.
Wouldn't that be ironic, if the MS move to cloud-based services finally ushers in the Year of the Linux Desktop?!)
Re:Ugh, I unfortunately am a Minnesotan. (Score:4, Interesting)
Take a trip to Montreal, QC, Canada... you will find your roads to be pristine and mint conditions...
Or perhaps Louisiana, where it is easy to tell when you've crossed the line from another state into Louisiana, because where you were doing just fine driving the speed limit a few miles ago, now you need to drop 15 miles an hour from your velocity just to maintain control of your vehicle... Ah, Louisiana...
This is the same place that doesn't seem to have an issue with spending billions to rebuild a city with an average of elevation of several feet below sea level after it flooded (surprise!), but then doesn't even acknowledge that there was a hurricane on the other side of the state that was, by all accounts, a worse storm that arguably caused more damage, if not (thankfully) more deaths... Rita was a stronger storm than Katrina, but no one seems to notice. There was Federal assistance available (in states on the other side of the country from where the "disaster" occurred) 5 years after the event, if you could prove you resided in an area affected by Katrina during that particular event. I don't mean just public assistance, I mean "free money" and job placement and housing assistance and all sorts of other things - handouts for having lived there at that time, regardless of whether you were actually affected by the storm. I don't mean to downplay the plight of those caught in the sixth-strongest storm in recorded history, but please read on.
Most people don't even know that Rita happened - in the same state, in the same year, and actually the fourth-strongest storm in recorded history. There was discussion of changing the classification systems, which would make Rita a Category 6 Hurricane; Katrina would still have been a Category 5 Hurricane. There were mandatory evacuations; the police came to my house to make sure I had evacuated. Driving away from my home, it took nearly 10 hours to go 38 miles, due to traffic (and the police stopping everyone to tell them not to go east because all the shelters were already full - we had arrangements to stay with friends in that direction, but whatever). They closed the borders of my city and I was nearly arrested for coming back two weeks later, once the "all-clear" had been sounded - the issue being that I was on the road after dark and my truck was full of stuff (I was returning from Baton Rouge for the second time that day, after ascertaining that our pets would be safe coming back with us (3 hours in a vehicle containing 6 cats is *so* much fun)). They were still recommending people stay away, but part of my job was to make sure the local governments could operate - I was the technician for a company specializing in software solutions for municipalities, and so could claim I was part of the "relief efforts".
Rita didn't drown a "cultural center", it just washed away entire towns. A governmental office I worked in had 3 feet of water in it, and not only is it on the second floor, it's easily an hour's drive from the coast. My neighbor had a tree that was easily ten feet in circumference blown through his house. People still have "blue roofs" (tarps instead of shingles) in some locations in south-west Louisiana.
There was no federal assistance available for having survived Rita. No handouts, no free jobs, no relocation assistance, no compensation for having been forcibly removed from our homes. All of the things that Katrina victims got handed to them just for asking (or in some cases, without even asking), Rita victims asked for and were refused. Even the damage numbers were skewed, because somehow New Orleans properties are more valuable than the rest of the state. Maybe it's because not as many people died (due largely to the fact that we got out of the way, and our homes were above sea level, instead of below it).
Katrina only got all the hype because people were too stupid to leave when given a week's notice, and it's a "cultural center", whatev
Re:Also (Score:2, Interesting)
There are 2 things further
1) The deal - apparently - precludes using OSS. This is bad no matter how you look at it. This means something perfectly useful - and productive - won't be allowed.
2) I've used the MS Virtualization software and it really didn't work well at all. It was certainly the worst of the bunch.
Why anyone would really choose that kind of agreement is beyond foolish to me. Good luck to them.
I have to agree that a mix of different software makes tons of sense. AD is hard to beat -- and makes sense to use it. Exchange is hard to match, but there are reasonable alternatives... and I think everything else is a question mark.
Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost (Score:4, Interesting)
In my experience at least you need fewer admins per server with Unix than with Windows. Largely because it is easier to script and automate stuff and to some extent because those Unix admins with 20% higher pay rates actually know more about computers and can therefore fix problems faster than the corresponding Windows admins.
So you can't say it is more expensive to admin Unix than Windows just because of higher wages.
Re:Initial cost is a small piece of the cost (Score:5, Interesting)
Thats the unfortunate thing about MS. Its all politics on the inside. There is no "Big Microsoft Machine"
In general I've found that much better support was to be had(when necessary) if you got the person that was in charge of making the decision to buy the licenses to call the SALES office. Not the support office. I had one of the managers in the tech support department call me back inside 2 hours with a solution to the problem we were having once I went that route. If anyone else had called in it would have taken 3-4 days minimum, if we ever got anything at all.
I give them 6 months, maybe. (Score:1, Interesting)
Our company attempted to use BPOS for a few months, but its shortcomings were evident very quickly. We gave BPOS the boot about 4 months into the project and moved back to hosting our Exchange in-house.
Just to echo the issues others have posted: Unable to configure many critical options, administrative system is unreliable, outlook can't stay connected to their cloud a full day without being knocked off at least once for an annoying 30-60 second reconnect time, their inability to let you configure forefront to meet your needs beyond "safe/evil sender list", etc.
I hope this post allows anyone who might be considering a switch to this to reconsider. It's only useful in the most basic of applications, i.e., small mom+pop shops that can't afford an exchange admin.
Wrong, wrong, wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Whoever wrote the TFS doesn't fucking live in Minnesota, that's pretty certain. The DFL has run Minnesota for the past eon.
No, what is clear is that you don't live in Minnesota - or haven't for the past few decades. The current conservative idiot ("Teflon" Tim Pawlenty) is just the latest in a string of ever-more-conservative governors going back to the 80s. Look at the past three governors:
Based on the trend it is likely that the next governor of MN will be Pat Buchanan, as a late write-in. Really there are few states excluding Texas that are more conservative than Minnesota currently, and Pawlenty has worked hard to change that.