While Novell loses PR points for demonizing their former customer, they do have a valid point regarding the cost.

As all Microsoft Shops know, cost and secureity are NEVER the deciding factor. It all has to do with politicking, and market-anemic Novell lost out on that front. Again.

The City of LA paid 7.2 million to use Google Apps, not Gmail. So it isn't free, they are paying their reseller and Google to use the service and support it.

Secondly, not everyone gets gmail. Non technical users find the UI, lack of folders, conversation views, etc, confusing. So if the mandate is everyone must use gmail’s web interface, then yes, there is going to be a big cost for re-training. The training probably isn’t just for gmail either (think Docs, Calendar, etc).

Also, the cost for training is probably higher than normal because the reseller (Computer Sciences Corp.) is training to gain more revenue as I'm assuming the margins for reselling Google Apps is fairly low.

Let's take the training for the other google apps out of it for a sec.

Let's just assume they are all using Outlook or similar to manage their mail.

GMail supports IMAP (and POP) So once IT imports everything over, it's simply a matter of changing the connecting server in Outlook, and everyone is back where they were before. No change to the employee.

RJ,

GroupWise supports the Outlook Client and IMAP, POP3, etc, so while the interface may look the same between GW and GMail, the functionality delivered are considerably different.

Looking the same and acting the same - big difference and training will be required.

Discussion of Cost

Here is an interesting analysis from Information Week titled "Four Possible Reasons Why L.A. Chose Google Over Microsoft": http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/blog/archives/2009/10/four_possible_r.html

"It costs $15 per user/month, and includes Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications, and Live Meeting. Exchange alone is $10 a month. Meanwhile, Google Apps, which includes Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and Sites, costs a little more than $4 a month."

Bob,

Microsoft is ALWAYS an expensive proposition. Even the licensing costs are more than just the applications - you have to have licensing to access the servers upon which the applications reside, thus effectively doubling your licensing count. With Novell, you don't have silly server-based licensing, unless you use the Linux crapola they are forcing. NetWare doesn't.

Anyway, when companies choose Microsoft, they are sold a bill of goods, IMO. Then the companies sink so much into MS technologies that turning back is very painful and the CxOs refuse to admit that they were wrong.

All Microsoft, all the time is extremely expensive. You can't just take the initial cost - it's so much more than that and not enough people pay attention to it.

Another problem is that MS is all about MS and not integrating or playing well with others. Want to implement SCCM but have a non-Microsoft DNS/DHCP solution in place? Won't happen without jumping through hoops.

There's a lot of horror stories with companies running all MS, but the support contracts - in many cases - disallow any sharing of such stories.

I applaud LA for trying something unproven and untested in such a critical and security-driven area. I only hope that it doesn't compromise sensitive data, resulting in huge lawsuits.

"GMail supports IMAP (and POP) So once IT imports everything over, it's simply a matter of changing the connecting server in Outlook,"

Ugh. Have you ever used Outlook as an IMAP client? It is HORRIBLE. It's even WORSE when you use it as an IMAP client with Gmail because of the 'conversations.'

Better idea is to simply ban Outlook and terminate any employee that claims they can't function without it.

you are SHORT SIGHTED

Interesting. I never really knew anything about this.

Anonymous, don't hate.

Wow, that's weird! Never heard of anything like this before

LOL, so much for free! LOL

Jess
www.complete-privacy.at.tc

So, basically Novell is mad that they lost a huge account, so they come out and say it was a stupid decision. Of course they think it's dumb...they stand to lose millions.

How is this news?

Unless you work in IT, don't make a comment regarding this.

If you can find a technological switch that gave cost a negative dollar amount in capital expenditure, please send it to me since you have figured out what no other company or organization on earth has.

Nice way to be short sighted Dennis Romero. Lets only look a year ahead and not 10 years ahead. You know that always works great in politics and financial planning.

I really hope you don't apply that type of failed logic in your life when planning out finances.

LOL, so much for free! LOL

Jess
www.complete-privacy.at.tc

Interesting. I never really knew anything about this.

What kind of idiot needs to be "trained" to use Gmail? Oh yea, these are government workers.

It will cost money to train them, but over time I think switching to Google Apps is going to save the city a ton of money. Also, I don't think training should be that hard, most if not all the City employees have commercial email accounts with one of the majors like Yahoo, MSN, or GMail if they can use those then they can use Google Apps. Nice try Novel, stop whining and work on making something that can compete with Google Apps on merit.

there might be a loss of 1.5 mil in the year, but the following year, the service fees/support contracts will be greatly reduced.

so the 1.5mil loss this year will be 3-4mil saved next year etc...

How does it make sense to look at the 1 yr cost? The GM of Los Angeles's IT is quoted as saying that longer term, this switch will save the city somewhere between $8 million and $30 million.

Novell? NOVELL? Whatever...they bitched about Active Directory, too.

The reason for training is that a large percentage of gov't workers are still "old-schooled" and don't even know how to use outlook. it is an age thing, not about being gov't workers.

Costs savings over time... they won't have any equipment costs anymore.

The last time Novell was relevant was the 1990s.

LA will save money by getting rid of unneeded servers, support staff, and IT staff.

The spam filters will improve, saving employee time by not needing them to weed through as much junk mail.

And finally, it's not "free e-mail", it's $50/per person per year for business customers, with better uptime and better support.

This entire article is absurd and uninformed.

i agree with bob's previous post and this switch really shouldn't take much.
i switched a school with about 1000 accounts by myself in about 3 days. that's with setting up gmail for the individual users removing the old account from their fat client mail app and adding the new gmail account. i would say about 40% of the users had a gmail account and could use it online right away but we were using fat client to connect to gmail so it didn't matter anyways. it should be really productive and cheap.

So I wonder what it would have cost to just maintain their current system; hardware, licensing, etc. Add that up compared to the 1.5 million gives us what? Not to mention the long term savings.

Personally, I've used outlook, groupwise, and google products and find google to be the most usable.

They probably won't even train anyone, they'll probably just throw it out there and see what hapens. I work for the government and it might be different in other states but we don't have the budget to train for things like e-mail. I think you'll find 9 out of 10 users won't even know what Google is anyways, and will probably be just sending straight e-mails. IT departments will just hope they can figure it out with some sort of short tutorial.

Ouch... I guess that really shows how free it is.

I'm confused as to why people are speaking as if gmail requires "training" in order to use. It has 146 million users, last I checked.

It's also SIMPLER than regular email: it doesn't have lots of folders, you can search really well, and follow-up messages are grouped (as "conversations") so that you don't need to look for them.

Just because it's different doesn't mean it is going to terrify the end users. This "change=confusion" equation is silly. I do not understand why people are speaking as if gov't employees are mentally handicapped.

It's not about whether the system is different; it's about what those differences, specifically, are. Almost every change that has been mentioned here as a potential problem (simply by virtue of people "not being used to it") is actually a simplification of email, rather than a complication.

As for the budget, I still don't see the reason here. Even if there were an initial training investment, which is an absurd idea, that cost would be eclipsed by the fact that the system saves money over time.

But I guess this makes for an entertaining blog post. Sigh.

I miss the critical thinking that ought to be integral to non-fiction :(

146 million users: mostly spammers from what I can tell as an anti-spam administrator

The cost of running an email service consists of many things. The software licensing and servers are only a subset. So, IT administrators need to do a calculation to determine if switching to Google does not increase costs in the other areas too much, as it would eat up the potential savings.

Of course, there are other issues with moving to the cloud: privacy, reliability, dependency on a 3rd party, etc. Not everything is about cost.

It's nothing more than a commercial vendor, using their best fuzzy numbers, to whine about why the choice, favoring them, wasn't made and how it was bad/wrong/short-sighted. It's mainly an attempt to save face in a vain hope that none of their other dissatisfied customers will follow suit and do the same thing.

the cost to use the google services comes at acharge as the shift is vastly more expansive than an avg email shift of one person going to gmail.

Thus gmail has to recoup costs and this is a bit like saying well u have to buy the cd from us but ur only paying for the cd and the labour not the software.

what about the potential for tech/web expansion & increase in productivity/teamwork by use of the google apps (are you guys forgetting how revolutionary of a collaboaration tool Wave is/is going to be?)...!?

How does that saying go? "Figures don't lie but lairs can figure?"
How much it will save / cost is really an exercise in accounting and perception.
I've done IS/IT (10 years) and can say that ANY switch costs if it involves switching users from something they are 'comfortable with'.
The cited source states a very vague 'internal-server-based email system'. Perhaps someone inside can shed some general light on that because what that system was like is a very big factor. Were they using some 'sendmail' based text email with custom apps? In that case it would be a HUGE transition to the web-based, label/conversation threaded GMail interface. If they used a fat client like Outlook then it is indeed possible to IMAP and hide a great deal of the transition.
I HAVE played with GMail into fat clients like MS Outlook and even Mozilla's Thunderbird, and it was far from my worst nightmare.AOL users forwarding to Exchange to forward to their Blackberry's = Worst Nightmare!
However, they also state that they won't be implementing it before June, which yields a very nice lead time for employees to get online and get a personal GMail account just to get used to the concept.
I think the related apps (i.e. did they use Sharepoint vs Google Docs vs some Novel/Red Hat / Lotus) will be the biggest challenge.
Generally I agree with CDE that trying something different is at least a step in the right direction. You can argue forever and while keeping an expensive status quo, you have to leap sometime.

Wow, didn't mean to make this long of a reply, thanks for reading :)

Woweee folks! Another hard-hitting report with level-headed analysis and spot-on accuracy from the smart folks at LAWEEKLY! I'm shocked and appalled that the city might have decided to pay an extra $1.5 million now to avoid higher costs later -- its so much more money compared to the $100 million shortfall he says we are facing! What would we do without Dennis Romero keeping an eye on our city government?

This argument from Novell is bogus. It is fairly easy to look at a number like 1.5 Million and assume that it is money down the drain, but I can tell you from personal experience the level of productivity organizations benefit from between these two products is significant. I find it interesting that the article neglects to mention how many employees this cost covers. For a municipality the size of LA this is probably not a large IT cost on the grand scheme of things.

Our campus is still recovering from an attempt to consolidate two email systems. Because Novell was the product upper administration used, it was the system selected for all staff. This choice was made ignoring the fact that the system it was replacing supported more users with fewer servers, fewer technical staff, and over all less cost per user. This decision also ignored glaring discrepancies in quality and reliability between the two options. While it is entirely possible that Novell products can, for the right price, be highly reliable there has been no demonstration of added benefit in our case and the switch has been disruptive and costly.

Novells statement makes light the significant hidden cost in lost productivity from switching to and maintaining their products. I have sat in meetings with Novell representatives, and the kinds of egregious lack of support and functionality they consider to be acceptable are quite frankly insulting. Any city would be better served with a public workforce that is enabled by reliable tools. We could save a lot of money by supplying construction projects with Fisher Price tools, but as one might imagine that is also a bad idea.

So, basically, the people employed by the city are either complete idiots or their employers think that they are. My grandfather, whom I had to teach to use a mouse, figured out Gmail all on his own.

Thanks a lot for the post!

How is reading through Google Help documents going to cost money - apart from time?

Hi. Useful post. It sounds interesting. In my occupation, I am intercommunicating mainly with email. I favor Outlook as my email client and with the help of Email Sorter Wizard, an Outlook add-on, I manage all my e-mail. Your blog is a great resource! Thank you.

Thanks for the post! People are crazy for not using more articles.