State Services Commission tells govt agencies to dump Microsoft

Upgrading to Vista is only going to force hardware upgrades, technical support with driver issues, added training costs and for those that manage to run on the base hardware frustration in system performance. I certainly wouldn't be recommending an upgrade unless they had a compelling reason to do so. Unfortunately Windows 7 whilst it does have some enhanced useability and support benefits suffers from the same albeit slightly better performance of Vista. Throwing more hardware at a problem does not cut it when efficient programing could have overcome it. I guess Microsoft are heading in the right direction with a programing target of getting to idle I.e stoping continual CPU processing through better software design. Summary. Stay with XP until Windows 7 provides compelling reasons to upgrade.

ring ring .. yes .. ministry of dumbo here..yes and why have you called the microsoft helpdesk today... um .. we have an issue between the application layer and thingy bit that goes whoop whoop ( fred in records downloaded it from the web and it said it was open source and compatable) and now we have red lights flashing and the computer just doesnt do a thing... help ..

well madam have you tried the Open source help desk .its armed by mercinaries... on mondays it is open from 2-3 in namibia , tuesdays in Rio from 4-5.. you get the picture..please dont call us again at Microsoft - you dont have a service agreement and support costs.. tat tah

but but .. are you there??

@Fred: You're conflating the natural evolution toward consolidation of computing resources (clouds/servers) with where these servers are geographically located. Local government and companies can have their own cloud, in New Zealand.

The browser is the client, and the huge efforts going into HTML5's offline capabilities, and into accelerating Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome/Apple Safari show how most software can be made for the web.

@practical: Proprietary or free/open source software can be sold without a support contract. If you want a vendor to stand behind it then there are hundreds of commercial organisations only too willing to help. There tends to be communities of free support too but that's not true of all open software licenses.

@Paul,

Open source software may be supported by mailing lists, wikis, etc., but there is commercial support from IBM, Oracle, Unisys, and hundreds of smaller vendors.

Open source support doesn't involve "programming" any more than proprietary software. Just take a popular open source project like Firefox and their http://support.mozilla.com/ site that has user friendly support without programming -- it's all point and click. Similarly the install of Ubuntu Linux is more user friendly than that of Windows XP (although Windows Vista/7 is considerably better).
Some proprietary software is difficult and arcane and litters the windows registry with obscure configurations, but making generalisations about open source or proprietary requiring "programming" is simply untrue.

Then you go onto say that open source can't compete with managed and paid employees at corporations. Firefox earns tens of millions through advertising referral to fund employees, and software as a service is a proven business model that employs millions of people internationally. Again, there is no generalisation to be made about open source being unorganised and unpaid, as you imply.

Regarding your last line... many open source projects require contributor agreements that assign copyright to a central organisation (Eg. OpenOffice.org contributions required signing rights over to Sun). Communal ownership in a copyright sense isn't part of open source, but instead it's about communal use.

The reasons for this can be about market commoditisation, software as a service, advertising, hardware by-products or simply by-products of getting the job done.

Your ideas about software need to become more sophisticated because they sound like the kind of things that ignorant people said ten years ago. They're not particularly persuasive, and you could be missing out on some good software and business opportunities.

Open Source does not have to mean google or cloud computing. The cloud part was only a small part of the article.

NBR has been erroniously attributing problems with google to open source programs an a whole.

For instance, cloud computing would make it difficult to comply with the audit-trail requirements in the Public Records Act ... but so does storing the information in proprietary formats.

Putting the monopoly supplier on the spot is a good idea anyway. Lets have more of this.

Micro$oft has arrogantly plunged way ahead of many of it's customers real needs and these harsh economic times are a wonderful opportunity for the marketplace to take the plunge and start getting comfortable outside the Micro$oft $ecurity blanket that seeks to smother and stifle competitioin. Myabe we will finally see a real 'burst' of takeup of alternatives with that pushing the expansion in support services and trades education in support personnel. Sounds like good job creation rather than paying over inflated training and thus support for Micro$oft's over bloated functions. Besides, Micro$oft et al is in cahoots with US govt regarding spy features in it's software for the sole purpose of US trade and security benefit/protection, I believe.

I used to work as IT Advisor for a smaller govt agency and was very familiar with the G2003 and G2006 negotiations.

I felt that the agreements worked well especially for smaller agencies under a Select agreement but perhaps less flexible for larger agencies under an Enterprise agreement. Negotiating on an individual agenciy basis will put things back to square one for a lot of smaller (<200 seat) agencies.

Smaller agencies are more financially constrained so perhaps open souce may be an option for them, although a balance needs to be maintained between cost of open source alternatives, internal IT support required to maintain and external support required. I have used open source solutions with differing experiences from good to poor. Not sure about using them for mission critical apps yet.

The SSC is recommending agencies "sweat" desktop assets and leave desktop SA behind. This really is a no-brainer and something I was planning to do while in govt and will do at my current organisation with Windows 7 on the horizon. Managing SA is the key here as not all products need to have SA. Also Visio and Project are premium products and attract premium pricing and they are underutilised so good that open source alternatives are available.

In the NGO sector, Microsoft provides significant discount on RRP for organisations with charitable status and Techsoup also offers another low cost alternative for access to microsoft premium products. However, key determinants on how open source will fit with an organisation will depend on its technology strategy.

There are governance issues around cloud computing and while it may be good for some apps (e.g. Gmail) I suspect integration between cloud and non-cloud apps or federation between cloud providers is still an issue. Private clouds may be appropriate, expecially in a commercial or goverment context where agencies or organisations with similar interests can build a cloud to operate within certain governance however miss the scalability of larger cloud offerings.

Apologies for the lengthof this post. My thougfhts on this interesting topic.

Open Workbench is an open source alternative to MS Project and is quite good although found myself dran back to MS Project, perhaps because of my familiarity with MS products more than anything else.

Also try Gliffy as an open source alternative to Visio. Have not used it but looks good with arange of templates and objects comparable to visio.

Hi,

You have all missed the point the State Service Commission has failed to negotiate a government wide simplistic contract with Microsoft. That is ridiculous they did not deliver, and it has huge cost and time ramifications to all government departments.

Grasp the nettle firmly and give the Public servants the tools to do their job quickly and efficiently, that means “Planned Maintenance” on all governmental computing resources. Public servants not having to compromise, you do not give a surgeon a plastic knife when a scalpel is required. Having dialup in the 21st century is not an option for 1st world countries.

For huge productivity gains use of MS Project with "MS Project Server" gives a Department wide view of all projects, in a single repository - which can and should be turned into a single "governmental view" provided daily to PM’s office. . ROI, productivity and communication gains are enormous.

The same with MS Visio - where is the single governmental view of the all governmental computing resources?

To provide world class governmental computing resources, there is required world class governance to all government departments … the State Service is failing dismally therefore a “Department of Computing” should be setup, with numerous Chief Engineers (Computing) being mandatory to sit on all Departmental Steering Committees of Computing expenditure.

To provide the best use of governmental computing resources for the people and companies of New Zealand.

Why should we participate in the great american public bath houses (church of google, twitty etc)

Local data for local entities. :-)

Kind regards

Andrew

Perhaps Fred you would be better confirming where Google hosts it severs before you tar them with the American Eagle. I think you will find out that there are more Google servers outside the US than within.

As for outages; yes Google have had several, but for every Google outage that you heard about you can be reasonable assured that there are 100,000 more in IT departments all over the world that you never hear about that cause more disruption to business and government than all Google's outages combined.