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Minnesota, powered by Microsoft, becomes first US state to move into the cloud
In a first that has been deemed "historic," though by who I do not know, Minnesota has become the first US state to move its communications and collaboration suite into the cloud.Last year, Los Angeles switched to the enterprise version of Gmail, but this is the first entire state to move into the cloud. (We should point out that LA has a larger population than Minnesota, however...) The announcement mostly reads like a press release, highlighting and extolling the benefits that await other governments that decide to make the move to the Microsoft Cloud. It's more secure, it's cheaper, it's easily upgradeable and expandable, ... and so on.
Comments
10
Subscribe to commentsMichaelSep 27th 2010 2:25PM
Uh, Minnesota has nearly 1.5 million more people than LA. Or was it actually Los Angeles County that switched?
CarneySep 27th 2010 2:41PM
Having all your critical information sitting on some one else's servers, particularly a private party with business before the state, doesn't sit right with me.
Why give up the control?
Fort GriffenSep 27th 2010 5:05PM
Scary. Microsoft's hosted Exchange is extremely unreliable. I hope they have lots of other things to keep them busy when their email goes down.
MatthewSep 27th 2010 11:34PM
they're just playing into the machine's hands. terminator and matrix were made as a warning.
SpankySep 27th 2010 8:16PM
Get real. Most states IT departments have holes you could drive a truck through. By putting the data up on professionally hosted Tier 4, SAS 70 Type II audited data centers, the government gets out of the costly IT business and winds up with much higher availability for their constituents.
To say that somehow this is scary is to miss the point that the status quo is terrifying. A properly managed hosted environment can limit virus attacks and keep the governor's girlfriend from snooping around your files.
You should be thrilled.
JordanSep 27th 2010 10:07PM
Great, another one of Pawlenty's legacies, MN locked into Microsoft.
NotHappyInMNSep 27th 2010 10:57PM
What you don't hear about is that the entire IT staff completely dropped the ball, they spent millions to outsource support to a third party, the third party got overwhelmed and refused to answer the phones though they were just fine cashing those checks.
Also, users have a 200 megabyte limitation on their Exchange mailboxes.
Yes, this is SUCH a better idea than Google *rolls eyes*
One last thing: claiming that the state has moved into the cloud is completely false. Its hosted Exchange. that's it. They aren't using Communicator, every client still has a MS Office license, and their phones have no Microsoft to speak of.
gojedaSep 28th 2010 5:41AM
If users have a 200 MB limit on their mailboxes (verification of this would be nice), then that is a limitation the State of Minnesota has placed on their workers. It has nothing to do with Exchange itself.
bjxxxOct 2nd 2010 11:08AM
A private contractor dropping the ball? Horrors! Say it isn't so! I thought privatizing government agencies would be the answer to our prayers. *rolls eyes* *facepalm*
BenSep 28th 2010 10:23PM
I feel so proud, being a Minnesotan:)