Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

[GreyGeek]

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/it...br /> 038.html

Apparently, the University had three choices. Stick with a cloud-based version of IBM Lotus Notes, listen to a convincing argument by Google as to why Google Apps is superior, or listen to Microsoft who argued in favor of its cloud-based Office 365. In the end, school officials agreed that both Google and Microsoft "offered a superior Web-based interface and enhanced capabilities" over their current system, but "Microsoft was able to provide a more competitive pricing structure than Google."

The added bonus of $250,000 makes for a sweeter deal while the University saves about 50% in annual email operating costs (from $1 million to $500,000).

"saves"? Nonsense. Microsoft will get that $250K back WITH INTEREST. This is what happens when purchasing agents have been deliberately limited to certain vendors, or have used only Windows, or are essentially computer illiterate, and have no clue as to Microsoft's ethical history and dirty tricks.

[saurav]

Re: Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

Link doesn't refer to quote and is broken due to br tag in it.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

That link is dead. Google shows many others:
http://journalstar.com/mobile/articl...70b2e5a50.html
http://www.betanews.com/article/Micr...365/1309907740

What neither article points out is that the current Governor dictated that all state agencies switch to Microsoft Windows and applications. The demand has cost NE taxpayers MILLIONS in license fees and lost productivity and data. By LOST I mean exactly that. I was part of the effort in one dept to switch from Lotus Notes to Exchange. LN is so much more powerful and user friendly than Exchange it boggles the mind that anyone could see Exchange as a technically superior and more economic alternative. We had over 200 databases merged into LN's groupware & email services. While we could export it (and some export apps cost over $5K) we found that Exchange's and SharePoint's import facilities were so limited as to be worthless. I am not including how slow "Active" Directory is compared to the directory services of our Netware and Linux servers, which have now been replaced by Windows servers. In the future, if someone decrees that the state move from the Windows environment to Mac or Linux the export facilities would be, for all practical purposes, manual. VERY expensive. That's how you spell lockin.

[saurav]

Re: Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

If people are willing to pay licence fees, they could as well donate the money to FOSS projects or buy support services instead of opting for lock-ins. But then again, the poor FOSS people don't have $250,000 to bribe the big fish with.

[de_koraco]

Re: Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

They could have just used Google Docs?

[GreyGeek]

Re: Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

Sure, but you have to understand how deeply the MS sales force has networked with State agency purchasing. One could have reason so suspect kickbacks, but I have no proof.

[saurav]

Re: Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

Google lost the same way as IBM - MS was probably able to convince the university that Microsoft's product and money were both better than what Google and IBM were offering.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

No. It's all politics, and God only knows what else.

Before I retired I was a programmer for a state agency. I was fully aware of the politics behind the conversions, since I was told "why" when asked to do a large chunk of it in my department. The first "excuse" was that a high up official claimed that LN was too hard to install, which begs the question as to why she was trying to install it in the first place, since non-IT users are NOT allowed to install apps, regardless of their title or position. Only the IT people do that. Then came the claim of "better efficiency and lower costs", which was totally ludicrous. 10,000 state employees had LN licenses and 3,000 had the Exchange license, which cost $15/person more. They abandon 10K LN licenses ($200K) and bought $350K Exchange licenses, a net difference of $550K. Then came the abandonment of Netware licenses and RH support fees, in exchange for Windows server licenses and support fees. Then came the data export and import costs, conversion fees, and costs for lost data, which easily pushed the total to over a couple Million because labor isn't cheap. The lost productivity because of the slowness of Active Directory, the susceptibility of Windows desktops and servers to malware, beyond their stability problems, adds significantly, but I can't begin to guess how much that has cost since the switch. To say nothing of the fact that the state is now firmly anchored to the M$ treadmill. Zero-day exploits are, by definition, not detectible by any AV product, and one can only guess how many keyboard loggers are sending names and passwords into the hands of the bad guys.

[de_koraco]

Re: Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

Sure, but you have to understand how deeply the MS sales force has networked with State agency purchasing. One could have reason so suspect kickbacks, but I have no proof.

I know, MS is the master of under the table advertising. I asked a sysadmin in my former high-school (they use Edubuntu) how come more schools don't switch. He explained that Microsoft is funding each and every bi-monthly "seminar" for IT workers - it's same way pharmaceutical companies spend their six billion per annum on advertising, even though they're not allowed to publicly advertise most of their products.

What always gets me is these moronic explanations. We saved a X amount of money by transferring from one paid system to another, even though a free system was readily offered. Kinda like repaving the same road for the third time is a win for the district council in election year. Unbelievable. And people actually buy this kind of inverted logic.

[kjjjjshab]

Re: Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

It made me very happy to hear my wife is using OOo at her new job... first time I knew someone personally that has an employer who didn't blindly install Office.

Anyone excited about the Symphony news? (I forget if that was discussed in the earlier thread about Apache Foundation).

https://www-304.ibm.com/connections/...pache3?lang=en

[GreyGeek]

Re: Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

...And people actually buy this kind of inverted logic.

Buy it? I doubt they even care. I don't know if you live in America or not, but considering how apathetic the American voter is to current events I can understand why they don't care about corporate corruption. Oh, they'll complain about it when it affects THEIR pocket book, but most assume "the position", take the abuse, and go on. Why? I suspect that the statistic I recently read is true, over 50% of Americans depend on government checks.

I'm watching to see how many of our Bill of Rights they'll irreversibly forgo for "security".

[saurav]

Re: Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

Wow! And I thought only my place is affected by corruption. And everyone knows MS is horrible but I didn't know it's that horrible.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

I read an article that I am too lazy to search for right now, but the gist of it was that the Gates Foundation was making charitable donations to some educational institutions (not in America) and part of the stipulation that had to be met to get the money was that the recipients computers had to buy Windows and MS software for their computers which, I suspect but the article didn't say, were running Linux.

[saurav]

Re: Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

So much for charity!

[de_koraco]

Re: Univ of Nebraska paid $250K to use Office 365

I suspect that the statistic I recently read is true, over 50% of Americans depend on government checks.

Yeah, you're quite right there. I live in Croatia, where the same numbers are closer to 80 percent. Conversely, they don't even attempt to hide the dirty lingerie here.