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72 Comments
- BXRWXR, on 10/14/2008, -1/+27Cloud is still too early in its life. I'm still concerned about security and I don't view this as a wise decision on the part of The District.
- inactive, on 10/14/2008, -3/+26almost as if they were a business...
- CaptRage, on 10/14/2008, -2/+25I don't see companies moving to hosted web apps, they don't want their data out on the web.
- ExRe, on 10/14/2008, -1/+17Ever try Open Office?
- trollick, on 10/14/2008, -0/+11I'm dropping Crysis and switching to web apps.
- ExRe, on 10/14/2008, -0/+11Online apps suck. I don't think that it would even be legal for them to do this unless it is only for public documents because of the laws our gov has for security.
Just use Open Office if you don't want to pay for one. - wadd, on 10/14/2008, -2/+13You should evaluate OpenOffice as well.
- Jorriss, on 10/14/2008, -0/+10The IT folks better not unplug the wrong cord.
- stevedan, on 10/14/2008, -6/+15So Washington D.C. is a business? And it only has 38,000 employees? The article is poorly worded, because I can assure you there are hundreds of thousands of people in D.C. that still use MS Office. Cool nonetheless, though I'd rather see a shift towards Open Office instead of Google Docs.
- DryMaltExtract, on 10/14/2008, -1/+9Yeah, for some reason, this sounds like a bad idea. They have no control over how secure it is. Though maybe we'll finally find out who killed JFK.
- ventralnet, on 10/14/2008, -3/+9if you have client ask you about that it doesn't sound like you are a professional web developer.
- inactive, on 10/14/2008, -0/+5Your parents should have aborted, coat-hanger style.
- FcukAllYall, on 10/14/2008, -0/+5I have a small biz and I'm debating buying Goog Apps or MS Office for my guys.
BTW, is it true that Goog Docs is going to be made available for offline use? - flip2trip, on 10/14/2008, -1/+6I agree with the above two posters, OpenOffice is very good. Works just like MSOffice.
- ohplease, on 10/14/2008, -0/+5
No policy based administration or AD integration?
No thanks. - michrech, on 10/14/2008, -0/+5Not only that, but what happens if your internet connection dies, or if the application host has an issue of some sort? Your business is dead in the water until the problems are resolved.
I don't see too many intelligent businesses doing this any time soon. - skywake, on 10/14/2008, -0/+4because google isn't an American company?
- JDoorjam, on 10/14/2008, -0/+4You're presuming that when the connection isn't down there's a notable difference in productivity.
- SillyRabbits, on 10/14/2008, -0/+4Not to mention all the tax dollars that now have to spent to retrain everybody (who already have years of experience working with MS Office) to use these new apps. How many days/weeks are going to be wasted getting the average worker (who's only barely computer literate to begin with) back to same level of proficiency. There's the old saying about penny wise, pound foolish.
- oldhick, on 10/14/2008, -0/+3Microsoft Office 2007 Professional - $379
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 ...
I know its fun to defend Microsoft, but get the right pricing and comment back.
Those were student prices for Office, how are those relevant? Since when are government employees and private companies considered students? Also, your OS licenses were for Systems Builders, which most home users do not qualify as. - toxicityj, on 10/14/2008, -0/+3Lincoln did it.
- spectecjr, on 10/14/2008, -1/+4Google Apps blows. About the only good thing about it is that the docs are stored online, so everyone with a login can easily get them. As for a consistent bug-free UI experience? Or even being able to embed images without a lot of hassle? Gimme a break.
- dondara, on 10/14/2008, -0/+3Hey, backwoods retard, ***** off.
- mdude85, on 10/14/2008, -0/+3Weather forecast for Washington, DC: partly cloudy
- JasonCox, on 10/14/2008, -0/+3Two words:
Security
Nightmare
Nothing against Google, but these web apps just aren't ready for prime time yet. Well, at least a "search application error" will yield us some interesting documents in a few months. - scottybowl, on 10/14/2008, -3/+6Don't do it - the MS Office suite is currently the cream of the crop for office software. Regardless of whether you hate MS operating systems, the Office Suite is something they really have got right.
I'm also speaking from experience - I trialled using OpenOffice (and other opensource options such as Ubuntu) for two months and the wave of relief that came with going back to MS Office was unbelievable. I've written an article on this topic which you might find useful http://www.guavastudios.co.uk/ubuntu-for-business. ... - stevedan, on 10/14/2008, -0/+2DC is a city, not an organization. Much of the city is composed of different governmental organizations, but it itself is not an organization.
- atmmac, on 10/14/2008, -1/+3As much as everyone hates microsoft I think everyone can Agree that Microsoft Office is pretty much unreal. There is no other program that even compares. Ive used them all and open office is not even close. Google docs is a joke. You want your employees to do online work then have your company invest in citrix.
- Dumbledorito, on 10/14/2008, -1/+3I'm not sure I'd do this, were I any government; when things go wrong (and they will), isn't it better to have your apps and data available locally, especially if security is a concern?
Unless they're getting the NSA to run the whole thing, which raises a whole host of other issues, but... Huh. Never noticed that black sedan outside of my house before... - pcpimpster, on 10/14/2008, -0/+2Love the Windows platform and .NET but I would not be surprised if in 3-5 years a sizable chunk of businesses who once relied on MS Office suite move themselves into the cloud or other free/cheap alternatives.
For my company, i dont need the cloud just yet but am definitly coding our document based business apps to not use ms office.
Office 2007 screwed me as I needed to change a ton of software just to make their new file formats work with our apps and automation processes. Then their is that steep price that needs repurchased every few years. Just not practical in my environment.
So, I'm currently data modelling all of our MSO forms used for production (my company does auditing) and then will be replacing them with winforms or web forms integrated right into our business apps.
May look into gmail for business someday if I ever think our Exchange 2000 needs upgraded. - jocknerd, on 10/14/2008, -0/+2I work for a city government and I have more faith in Google protecting our data than I do our internal staff.
- Tddupre, on 10/14/2008, -0/+2"whatever his dad is come from"
congrats idiot. - maheshjthakkar, on 10/14/2008, -0/+2Security of Data is main problem!
- Dubbsacc, on 10/14/2008, -0/+2@spectre_25gt (sorry hit the wrong reply button)
Yes, there are many web based document management systems. However, the ones that I know about are contained on hardware locally, and not on an Internet server, big difference. - scabbers, on 10/14/2008, -0/+2Someone was talking loudly about "the cloud" at the golf course, and the person in charge of Washington DC decided he had to have it.
- inactive, on 10/14/2008, -0/+1Technically, the District of Columbia is akin to a US territory. Washington is the actual city that makes up/is contained by the District of Columbia. This article is about the District government changing over to Google Apps.
All in all, I don't blame them. I work at a non-profit political policy think tank in Washington and we've been considering this for a while...even more so now that our board of directors and Google's share a member. - PabloMac, on 10/14/2008, -0/+1"Office 2007 screwed me as I needed to change a ton of software just to make their new file formats work with our apps and automation processes."
Or you could have instructed your users to set up their copies of Word/Excel?PowerPoint 2007 to save files in 2003 format, a simple 6-click task for each program. - alHiboux, on 10/14/2008, -0/+1what, the entire city??
- wsuvtx, on 10/14/2008, -2/+3Yes DC is an Organization. The City government.
- jocknerd, on 10/14/2008, -0/+1I believe the article states that they can still use Office. I think DC is more interested in the email, calendar, and chat applications that are hosted. No reason for a city government to need a ***** of servers for their email. And I'm speaking from experience. I work for a city government and we currently have about 10 Novell Groupwise servers for our collaboration. The rumor is we're looking to replace Groupwise with Exchange and I'm trying real hard to convince our CIO that going to Exchange is not the right approach.
- inactive, on 10/14/2008, -0/+1Yah, private companies want to operate the exact same way organizations in our nation's capital do. That's great for their business.
- SitPoMk, on 10/14/2008, -0/+1And if DC is doing it we should be too. That Washington really seems to be on top things you know
- jocknerd, on 10/14/2008, -0/+1Depends on how much you need Office apps. Do you write a lot of documents? Do you work a lot with spreadsheets? Do you need to publish documents for others? You could probably get by with OpenOffice but you would still need to worry about backups. With Google Docs, you don't have this worry.
- jocknerd, on 10/14/2008, -0/+1Something that I really like what DC is doing is providing data online for download. They have a data catalog that provides links to data in various formats including KML, XML, text, and RSS feeds. You can see it here: http://data.octo.dc.gov/
- ventralnet, on 10/15/2008, -0/+1I actually believe you are a system admin/desktop support professional that manages a user base that may make a webpage here and there but is a wanna be web developer.
Its a guess, am I right? - pcpimpster, on 10/15/2008, -0/+1That was the problem...
After changing the default settings it was the API for Excel for integration and automation tasks. When you set the normal settings through the manual interface to save as 2003 it would not work through to the API side when accessing it through code. At the time, there was no way of getting the API to do it.
This may have been fixed or maybe i missed something but it was pretty straight forward even at the code level and as far as i could tell, just would not work. - commentbot, on 10/15/2008, -0/+1Web-based office suites are a pain to use...
- tamaker, on 10/20/2008, -0/+1Somehow not suprising... the government turning to cloud computing... [golf clap] ... brilliant... nothing can go wrong here.
- Advercation, on 10/14/2008, -0/+1@esc27 we'll all that "private" data is supposed to be public data anyway....
also, you buys might like to checkout DC's "Apps for Democracy" innovation challenge: http://www.appsfordemocracy.org
$20k in cash prizes for open source dev.
Peter
[Disclaimer: my agency is producing this contest http://www.istrategylabs.com] - esc27, on 10/14/2008, -0/+1So Google now has root access to all of Washington DC's (the city's) documents and email. How is this not a massive privacy and security concern?
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