The Hidden Costs of Microsoft's Free Office Online 174
Michael_Curator writes "Despite what you've heard, the online version of Office 2010 announced by Microsoft earlier this week won't be free to corporate users. Business customers will either have to pay a subscription fee or purchase corporate access licenses (CALs) for Office in order to be given access to the online application suite (Microsoft already does this with email — the infamous Outlook Web Access). But wait — there's more! A Microsoft spokesperson told me that customers will need to buy a SharePoint server, which ranges from $4,400 plus CALs, or $41,000 with all CALs included, if they want to share documents created using the online version of Office 2010."
well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
you need the server to run the apps inhouse rather than out of your control. The same is true of things like google docs and other cloud apps. either you run it on their servers and gove third parties access to your data or you pay to run it on your servers. this is not a surprise or even unreasonable.
Re:well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it sounds like the article is confusing free, online, other-party-hosted applications with non-free, online, self-hosted applications. Both have existed for a long time.
Since Microsoft's main bread and butter is MS Office, why would they offer a "free" version- offline or online, other than trialware, crippleware, or sampleware?
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Since Microsoft's main bread and butter is MS Office, why would they offer a "free" version- offline or online, other than trialware, crippleware, or sampleware?
Competition [google.com] perhaps?
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Which reality is it that you live in where Microsoft's Office suite is not extremely popular and does not sell tons of copies?
OH NO! (Score:2, Interesting)
A for-profit, closed-source and highly-profitable company is going to charge real dollars for corporations and businesses that use their software!
How dare they! What gives Microsoft the right to adapt their successful business model to Application as a Service?
When will this outrage stop!
Really now, people. If you want free beer, let Google steal your companies IP and private communications.
If you want a free puppy, go to town on OOo and whatnot. :-)
Personally, I LIKE the puppy option, but not everyone is
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I didn't say they couldn't or shouldn't charge real dollars, the online feature of office won't be nearly as popular if you have to buy an additional tool rather than just what comes with office. Even if the incorporated some DRM to make sure it was a legitimate copy. But if it just worked out of the box without requiring an additional service it would be used by more people and make office itself more popular than it already is.
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The same one where (FTFS) Billy Mays - the "But wait -- there's more!" guy is still alive.
I finally had a chance to see the ribbon bar in Word/Excel/etc. last week - I didn't think it was possible to screw up a good idea that badly ...
It was easier to just download openoffice and get the user ru
Re:well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, it is certainly unreasonable if 3rd parties have access to my data. Suppose that all in one afternoon, I do Grandma's tax return, do a medicare application for Aunt Helga, make a resume for my son, etc, etc, etc, you're saying that ALL of that data should be accessible by unknown 3rd parties? Every application hosted in the web should supply my data to anyone, and everyone, around the globe?
Totally unreasonable.
This is why I am not entirely thrilled about the web. Notice, I'm not just picking on Microsoft here - the same applies to Google and any other company that might supply applications in the future.
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>This is why I am not entirely thrilled about the web.
Not thrilled about the web, eh? Hmm. I'm not sure this is the web's fault, to be honest.
If you pay attention to the comment you're replying to, you'll notice the post didn't suggest that all data be accessible by any and all unknown 3rd parties. But what he/she says is that when you do your tax return online with TurboTax, they have access to your data. That _is_ reasonable. Just like when you walk into a brick-and-mortar H&R block to do you tax r
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Sorry, fingers got ahead of the brain there. I meant "cloud", not "web". ;-)
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No, it isn't. I don't see why something besides the IRS should have to know what's on my tax return.
That they have to see the data is simply a limitation of the web model.
The way I see it, things should work in one of two ways:
A. The IRS themselves hosts an online page for tax filings. The data is sent over SSL and goes to the IRS, and IRS only.
B. If for some reason a third part
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That page links to a list of third-party web sites where you can file your taxes, that is, exactly the situation that the parent is complaining about. The IRS don't offer their own online filing service.
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I don't know what country you live in but in the USA the police DO need to tell you if they access your PC. And if you think Microsoft gives a toss about your My Documents folder I think you've overestimated the value of those documents.
My $.02. Keep the change.
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ROFLMAO - Has Microsoft engineered a backdoor into all *nix machines, then? Assuming that all the stories about MS's backdoors really are true, assuming that the stories about the NSA's backdoors are true - that doesn't address breaking into a *nix machine. Yeah, I'm sure that either MS or NSA could get into my machine, if they really wanted to. *nix is secure, but I may or may not have configured the thing perfectly. Maybe they can get in. They have the resources to hire good crackers, if they want to
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It would make more sense for them to send a couple of cops out to my house with warrants to confiscate my machines. If that happened, THEN it would become a game of "who is more clever". Is my stuff really hidden, or can they get to it? You can damn sure bet that I'm not going to just GIVE it all to them. ;-)
Do you really think that's going to save you and your data? They can take images of the whole disks quite easily (there are hardware tools for doing this) and they most certainly can get someone who will tell them that if it's a truecrypt partition, they should make sure to check for multiple stacked encrypted partitions, especially if the dates of the innocuous files don't match up with recent use of the system.
The only thing that is saving you right now is the fact that you're not breaking any law they ac
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Bigjeff addresses part of your post.
Let me remind you that the inter-net is inter-national. I am most certainly breaking SOMEONE's laws, somewhere. The fact that I will probably never enter the jurisdiction of most of those law making and law enforcement agencies saves me from a lot of hassle. But, I wouldn't respect the laws of N. Korea any more, or any less, if I had a trip planned to N. Korea tomorrow. I would continue to post on the internet that I think Kim il Jong has a flacid Dong - and worse.
As f
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I've even got several presentations that will make my explanation easier, though the use of that much powerpoint might count as Assaulting A Police Officer...
Damn! Have I sat in on one of your presentations?
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Dude, you've either been reading way too much or not nearly enough. That's not some special, secret technology they have. Hell, it isn't even hardware based. There are probably 40 million IT professionals who could do what you think is so secret and dastardly, and do so on a regular basis. That includes me, by the way.
It also doesn't work the way you think it does. It's true that they can make an exact, sector by sector copy of your hard drive. However, it's not some outlandish expensive hardware that does this, it's actually software and there are even a number of free programs that will do it, though the gold standard of sector based drive imaging is Norton's Ghost.
It sounds more like you are talking about taking a backup of a drive then collecting data in a forensically sound way. The police does use hardware to block writing to the drive holding the evidence. If they don't it doesn't hold in court as the data could have been modified. Also I have never heard of anything Norton being used for collecting evidence. It would more likely be dd, FTK or EnCase.
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What makes you think your data is safe on your computer? Microsoft can access anything on your PC if they so choose.
If Microsoft could do that, I would be sending some emails to debian-user asking the maintainers why they are allowing such a travesty to go unchecked in their repositories.
And then I would probably post a whistle-blowing story right here on Slashdot.
Re:well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Some things should be mentioned here for those that aren't familiar with Sharepoint.
I work for a Fortune 15 company and we are required to use Sharepoint, instead of a simple file server, to store all of our Office documents already. Sharepoint is a terribly, terribly flawed "workplace collaboration" software. It's basically a glorified WebDAV server that supports versioning, and also allows people to post little "widgets" like calendars that integrate with Outlook.
Sharepoint is Microsoft's answer to Mediawiki and other real media sharing web services. In fact, for 99% of all companies, Mediawiki running on an internal server would be much better than Sharepoint, and provide much more functionality, without requiring a copy of MS Office to be installed on everyone's client PC. But, corporate america, in their infinite wisdom, only trusts Microsoft products, so we get stuck with Sharepoint.
I hate the fact that I'm required to use a Microsoft browser to check out a Microsoft proprietary document, and edit it with a Microsoft proprietary office software package, then check it back in to a Microsoft proprietary server. This solution is the most difficult to use, from a usability standpoint, workflow point of view solution I have ever used before. Mediawiki would be a better solution for 99% of these purposes. I like the ability to just click "Edit" and start editing a page. Microsoft's solution is to keep all editing inside the Office suite, which requires checkout and checkin of each individual document. It's a terrible solution, rooted in an outdated "document centric" methodology.
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Let me understand this:
No one is forcing your "Fortune 15" company to use SharePoint and fully-loaded office applicati
Re:well duh (Score:5, Informative)
Other than the access control functions, Sharepoint doesn't do any of these things either.
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Plus the fact that it intigrates with outlook, which has communicator (a secure internal version of Live Messenger), and Live Meeting intigrates with all three.
Done properly, the Microsoft intigrations greatly improve workflows for many many people. Done poorly, of course, they suck monkey balls, but anything can be that way.
Re:well duh (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm no expert, but I have to call bullshit on this.
We've deployed an internet-facing Sharepoint (not MOSS, v3) server that can be used on any random PC. You do need domain credentials for access though, if you've restricted access. It does take more work to set it up this way.
And the search feature in v3 is currently the quickest search we have. With a few hundred documents, we get search results in around a second - it takes longer to render the page - Google / Windows Desktop Search are a bit slower on
Re:well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Well SharePoint doesn't do any of those things, and the Office integration part sucks. Have you seen system requirements for SharePoint for a large organization? Have you administered a non-trivial sized Sharepoint instance? Have you managed a SharePoint version to version migration? It's a PITA, and completely overkill for most applications. The OP was right, most people don't need SharePoint.
It's the new generation nightmare - almost like MS Access and Lotus Notes rolled into one - easy for some tasks, ridiculously painful for others. And don't get me started on the whole song & dance people go through to build custom applications on top of it...
Dunning-Kruger indeed.
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My company has somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million employees. Seems to work pretty well for them, they use sharepoint for all sorts of things.
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Yeah. I'm a huge fan of Microsoft Office and I despise sharepoint. It's terrible. There is nothing I can think of that's redeeming about it. The interface is bad. The implementation is bad. The features are lacking. It just needs to be completely scrapped.
You could start from scratch and develop an almost featureless replacement that would perform better just because no feature of sharepoint is actually worthwhile and what is worthwhile is impossible to use.
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Don't forget you can mount Sharepoint pages/folders as network drives, and simply drag&drop files in and out of them like any other network folder. That's a *huge* feature, and there's no way you could replicate that with MediaWiki.
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Check out the Wiki or blog functionality in SP. Literally, click Edit, and off you go.
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I hate the fact that I'm required to use a Microsoft browser to check out a Microsoft proprietary document
SharePoint 2007 works fine with FireFox, assuming you configure FireFox to pass your Windows credentials on and maybe a few other minor configuration changes. I imagine it will work with other modern browsers (in which category I do not include e.g. lynx).
and edit it with a Microsoft proprietary office software package
You can store any type of file you like in SharePoint, as long as the administrators d
Re:well duh (Score:5, Informative)
FYI, Sharepoint 2007 SP2 now supports Firefox with no config changes.
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We've started using opengoo [opengoo.org] in the 3 man IT department at my school for internal documentation and project management (with calendar, task lists and milestones), assigning a separate workspace for each project. You can upload files (such as photos, office documents) then check them out with versioning, or just write and edit simple documents (in html with an editor straight in it. I've even published one specific workspace to a subcontractor, so they can see where we're at with our end of things with one pa
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Microsoft's solution is to keep all editing inside the Office suite, which requires checkout and checkin of each individual document.
Actually, nothing requires you to checkout or checkin a document. Only your company procedures would require those actions in order to prevent someone from modifying a document out of turn. I can attempt to edit a document and if it isn't checked out but someone still edited it then I *am* notified that someone is already editing it. Obviously it would be stupid for me to continue and make changes because they will just be overwritten when the person who started editing before me saves their changes. Now, h
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Seriously. It takes all the headaches out. Auto-synchronizes between team members, keeping a local copy on each person's machine. Everything can be dragged/dropped into it. Images, text, files - it doesn't matter. Easy to annotate content by just typing or drawing on top of stuff. Easy to reorganize just by dragging things around.
My team was very hesitant to adopt SharePoint for exactly what you were talking about. We (being an MS-oriented company) wer
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...and pay a third party to access your own server. Welcome to the wonderful world of CAL.
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Oh, and you have to be actually be running Windows and IE to access Windows Live services.
Move along... (Score:2, Flamebait)
Why does the poster sound so surprised by the licensing and prerequisites? It is not like this is new behavior for Microsoft.
And you can bet it won't work with any other operating system except MS Windows, and won't work with any browser except IE.
Nothing new to see here... move along...
Re:Move along... (Score:5, Informative)
SharePoint (not 2010, i mean the current version) actually works well with Firefox. I have yet to noticed any different when browsing it with Firefox/IE7.
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Although that is good news, I would comment thusly:
1) Did you try it using Firefox on a non-MS-Windows computer?
2) The article is really about some type of browser-based MS-Office, not Sharepoint. So even if Sharepoint might work, it doesn't mean MS-Office will (I should think the odds would be much lower)
3) Microsoft has a nasty habit of allowing things to work with non-MS products/browsers/OS's AT FIRST. Then later that support starts to dwindle and disappear.
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We run a mix of PCs and Macs, and I actually run Ubuntu with a VB version of 7RC. Our SharePoint site works well on PCs with IE7/IE8/Firefox, on the Macs with Firefox (Safari has permission issues and is generally unpleasant), and it even works decently on my Ubuntu with Firefox.
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Um, no. In all those cases (and many others), their motive was to suck people in and then shut it down, in an attempt to force people to their OS. I remember it well.
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Actually, Sharepoint works terrible with Firefox. All of the advanced directory and file browsing features are disabled, since Firefox doesn't support the "Internet Explorer is your file browser" functionality that IE does. Sharepoint is basically just a glorified WebDAV server, but trust Microsoft to use proprietary IE only protocols instead of standard
Re:Move along... (Score:5, Informative)
The real name for SharePoint is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. It's an online extension of the Office suite.
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Miss the obvious sarcasm of the post to which you're responding, did you?
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It crashes IE7 if you use some Microsoft add-ons - haven't taken time to figure out which one but they're all microsoft. I've not had any luck with Firefox doing anything but downloading docs - and sometimes that doesn't work either. The check out, edit, and upload certainly isn't functional in Firefox 3.07
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Microsoft says the online applications will be free to consumers and small businesses, via Windows Live. Larger businesses can choose to host their own versions of the web applications via their SharePoint server or buy them as a hosted service from Microsoft.
I found this article from the previous Slashdot summary about Office 2010.
Microsoft copying Apple? (Score:2, Funny)
Maybe Microsoft has decided to become a hardware company like Apple claims it is. I wonder if the servers will be made in the same Chinese factories that make Macs.
Re:Microsoft copying Apple? (Score:4, Informative)
A Bad Idea (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A Bad Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Cloud computing is a bad idea.
Isn't that kind of a sweeping statement? Might it not be a good idea for some people?
It gives software companies an unprecedented level of control over our data.
It rather depends what you put on there and what kind of business you are, doesn't it? It also depends on your backup strategy. If they up the price of their service, you can migrate away. If they shut it off completely with no warning... well, you were keeping backups, right?
I would not endow them with this level of trust
Who's talking about trust? You use their service and you keep backups. You don't "trust" anyone.
If you are looking for an alternative, might I suggest http://www.openoffice.org/ [openoffice.org] [openoffice.org]
Please tell me that your whole post wasn't just a plug for a free office suite that everyone on Slashdot is already aware of?
Anyway, other than saving a few hundred bucks per seat, OpenOffice isn't a "solution". It still requires more support compared to letting Google/MS be your IT department.
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It still requires more support compared to letting Google/MS be your IT department.
I believe you just made my point for me. Letting Google or Microsoft be your IT department is dangerous because they have a vested interest in the decisions your IT department makes.
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they have a vested interest in the decisions your IT department makes.
Well, I'd certainly hope that any vendor would be interested in the decisions of one of their customers! If they make a bad decision with their service, you move. It's not as if anything that Google offers ties you in. Email? Redirect your domain to one of several billion other providers. Calendaring? Ditto. The office suite? Even you pointed out a free desktop solution.
I have no experience with the MS version, but if it's not similar to Google's offering it won't go anywhere. Competition is good.
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You realize that most large companies have either IBM, HP, or Fujitsu running their IT department, right? Mostly off-This is nothing more than a new kind of outsourcing, separating themselves even further from having to deal with IT decisions.
To protect themselves, they have NDA's, well written contracts, and the teams of lawyers necessary to sue the shit out of the company handling their IT if any of the "dangerous things" you imagine will happen, happen.
"Cloud Computing" is just the next wave in the move
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Well, there goes one of the major savings from cloud computing then. If you can't rely on them to back it up, you still have to host all your data yourself (as backups). For that matter, having all your data sitting in a big tarba
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Well, there goes one of the major savings from cloud computing then. If you can't rely on them to back it up, you still have to host all your data yourself (as backups).
You can buy backup space from another provider if you want, or do it yourself with your own equipment. If you want to do it yourself, you have to remember factoring in the costs of doing it properly, keeping the system up when you need it. If you care hugely about your data (which you might or might not do; not everyone feels the same) then you'll want to keep multiple backups in multiple locations, with at least one under your direct control. But it's up to you to work out how much you're willing to spend
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Well, there goes one of the major savings from cloud computing then.
How so? Let's say I have 25 users in an office somewhere. Every day I run a script on a single machine which backs up all of their google accounts. This saves me a whole lot of work... no running my own mail server, no updating applications, no backing up individual computers, no license worries, etc. In the utterly ridiculously contrived event that Google shuts down its service overnight and Gears somehow becomes instantly unusable, I still have all of my users email and files. If they absolutely can't wai
Software licensing is cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
It's nothing compared to the cost of hiring a team of people to get sharepoint to do what you want it to do, and plenty of companies are happy to pay for them. It's also cheap on a per-user basis - remember how many tens of thousands you are paying them each year - not that this logic extends to buying them a decent computer.
Some software just works. Other software unnecessarily requires over the top maintenance and setup costs. I've never read anything good about sharepoint apart from the people who got wooed by the salesman over golf/dinner/piss up to buy it. Sadly these people are who controls decision making.
What's a good free sharepoint alternative, in a single package?
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That works as 'seamlessly' with MSOffice (the default business suite) as SharePoint? There isn't one.
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SharePoint works fine. And you don't exactly need to pay a bundle for it if you just want document sharing and collabortion (since Sharepoint Services is a component of Windows Server. Only the souped up "enhanced" version costs, and has a million pieces to support).
I run Sharepoint on a one server virtual machine, and probably have an higher than average load on it, and its fine, and I definately don't need to maintain it much at all. And at work we're running one of the largest non-Microsoft sharepoint fa
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Oh boy, talk about a typo I made there... the zealots will have a field day with this one. Whoops.
The moving target (Score:2)
What's a good free sharepoint alternative, in a single package?
SharePoint is part of the MS Office system.
What you buy - or rent - from Microsoft is a sophisticated - scalable - turnkey solution for a business of any size.
If you want to be competitive, you have to see how well the parts fit together.
New Features in SharePoint 2010:
The Ribbon.
Ribbon icons will now allow users to check in and check out documents as they are viewing document libraries. Companies will be able to customize the ribbon and even
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That's called "a crappy SharePoint admin" or "bad taxonomy" or "no forethought as to organization".
If that same person was in charge of a simple file share, it would be just as bad.
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You can access your documents via WebDav, and map the sites as Web Folders (Windows XP) or drive letters (Vista and up).
Doesn't exactly get much easier than that.
Storing your documents OFFLINE (Score:3, Insightful)
...priceless.
For everything else, there's Microsoft.
I can't ever see myself storing my personal documents, especially financial ones, on some remote server or "cloud". Fuck that. Take your orafice online and stick it.
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Yes, Microsoft is obviously the first company to think of this concept. Make sure you assign all blame to them and not, for example, to Google.
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But even if he doesn't have any financial documents, that still leaves the question: Should a company store its financial documents in a 3rd-party cloud?
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Why would Microsoft be particularly secure? I also guess that it matters whether you mean protecting the data from loss, or protecting it from unauthorized access.
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Who would you trust more to protect YOUR data?
Myself!
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Like you have any financial documents... What do you keep track of your allowance?
I wish the Australian tax office shared your attitude.
But, as any PHB will tell you... (Score:2)
..."You get what you pay for."
Hidden? (Score:2, Insightful)
Source? (Score:5, Insightful)
And the source of this important information on pricing of an unreleased product? ...
A Microsoft spokesperson told me
Microsoft spokespersons with the knowledge and authority to speak about such things have a name and title.
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Google charges too, for corporate Docs accounts (Score:5, Informative)
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Details at Eleven (Score:5, Funny)
Well, of course its not free (Score:2)
They have salaries to pay.
Glad to be off that treadmill (Score:5, Interesting)
A Microsoft spokesperson told me that customers will need to buy a SharePoint server, which ranges from $4,400 plus CALs, or $41,000 with all CALs included, if they want to share documents created using the online version of Office 2010."
I am so happy to be working in an office free of the MS strangle hold. CALs always struck me as the most insidious of their macabre licensing circus. First you pay for the software, then you pay again so people can use it. What a racket. For the $41,000 you're paying in CALs I can cover an employee salary for 8 months (that would be one of the lower level people).
We don't have any problems getting our work done at the office without Microsoft. We have corporate Gmail and use GoogleDocs, so far with zero problems. If we have super sekret corporate information we can't trust to Google, we can store them in the truecrypt file container. We can send out pdf's to clients and customers, everyone can read them and they format just fine.
Plus I really like that we don't have to fit either our business processes or development processes to MSFT models. It's a lot more open and a lot more productive. You don't realize how much time you spend dancing on Microsoft's string until you get away from them. And, as an extra bonus, I can blow your ROI and TCO numbers out of the water. Just about any metric you want to use. And I never have to make the painful choice between layoffs and new servers. We can upgrade on our schedule, patch on our schedule, work the way we want to. If we need more capacity, we just stand it up. If we don't need it we can turn it off and it's not wasted money sitting there doing nothing.
And it's not just a small office. If you set it up right, you could do the same thing with almost any size organization. The only consistent pain in the rear problem we have regularly are those damn webinar programs. GoToMeeting and crap like that. Many of those are Windows only. That's kind of annoying.
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Hello, fellow non-MS-Windows site
>GoToMeeting and crap like that. Many of those are Windows only. That's kind of annoying.
Yeah, it is more than KIND OF annoying. Sometimes it is extremely annoying. Especially when 3/4 of those stupid webinars are nothing but some slide show that could have been done in plain HTML + Javascript, or Flash if they REALLY had to have something fancy.
And it is further annoying that sites like "GoToMeeting" base their whole product on things like VNC, which is FOSS and multip
The true cost is worse: you have to use Sharepoint (Score:2)
I use Sharepoint at work, and... well, it's like what you'd expect if someone had a third-hand conversation about what a Wiki was like, wrote up a Powerpoint about it, translated into Portuguese using a dictionary written by someone who knew neither Portuguese or English, translated back using Babelfish, and given to a bunch of ex-mainframe programmers to implement.
It's ugly, cumbersome, even if you use IE (god help you if you're using Firefox or Safari). Using a Sharepoint server is going to knock 30% off
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That's cause it's not a Wiki.
It's only bad if your admin is shit. I'm assuming you set it up? ;)
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That's cause it's not a Wiki.
Yeh, and Lotus Notes isn't a web page, but I can describe Lotus Notes as a web application if the web was based on database replication instead of HTTP and you understand the point of the analogy (well, I hope you do). Sharepoint is attempting to address the same problem space that a wiki does, and it's doing it from a completely wrong direction, and it's doing it with the wrong tools, with the goal of micromanaging things that shouldn't be micromanaged, and with a user interfac
Is Microsoft *trying* to go out of business.... (Score:2)
Or just stupid? YOU Decide!
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No, it's banking on the stupidity of "decision makers", a strategy which appears to have worked quite successfully thus far.
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Grandparent is clueless? I don't think so. PEOPLE pay for Enterprise. All those costs are passed on to consumers. ALL of them. Those corporations that don't market to consumers pass THEIR costs on to other businesses and/or governments, who in turn, pass those very same costs on to consumers/taxpayers.
So - who is clueless here? It costs ME, and it costs YOU when the idiot managers around the globe to decide that one stupid workstation is worth tens of thousands of dollars.
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The $41k in CALs is cheaper than the additional $60k you'd have to pay to hire an experienced Linux admin instead of an ActiveDirectory admin. That's assuming you *could* find an experienced Linux admin in less than, say, six months of looking.
Measure *all* the costs.
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Whoa. Just whoa. Please. Allow me to figure this new math thing out here. We have an enterprise, with, oh, let's assume 1000 seats. The assertion is, each seat can cost $41k. 1000 x 41,000 = 41000000 Way back in the 1960's, when I learned math, 41,000,000 != 60,000. For 41 million dollars, I think most enterprise could hire an entire DEPARTMENT of support staff. In fact, they could hire 410 individuals @ $100,000 each, which would mean that each of the staff would only be responsible for about 2.5
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> Hey dude - people only pay for MS licensing if it makes business sense.
Sorry, I disagree with that.
Many businesses just buy right into the MS product line, purchasing whatever products they sell that MIGHT be useful, without EVER looking at any competing products... and especially not FOSS.
And there are plenty of businesses that pay for MS licensing for things THEY DON'T EVEN USE!
Most corporations could save lots of money if they only purchased licenses for what they really needed and used FOSS product
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"people only pay for MS licensing if it makes business sense"
*cough* And, investors only invest where their money will grow - it only makes business sense. *cough*
Perhaps you have noticed something they are calling an "economic meltdown"? All those kids we sent to college to learn how to run things aren't all that smart after all, are they?
Allow me to assert quite plainly here - IT MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL. If all of my neighbors agree that the earth is flat, the earth doesn't become flat because of their b
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Same with academia (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course much of it is inertia, but the license fees for Windows and Office in even a semi-professional setting are not 'high'. Say that the average license refresh cycle is 3 years (this is not absurd, in either direction). In that time period, the other salary and overhead for a cheap individual is going to exceed $150,000, so the (perhaps as much as but probably less than) $1,500 for software licensing is not a huge increase.
$500 a year of savings is still $500 of savings, but it sets a pretty low bar f