Central UK govt awards £12M+ contract to leave Google Workspace for Microsoft 365 The UK's Cabinet Office is to migrate away from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 — in line with the rest of central government — in a move set to cost up to £15 million in third-party project support alone. French IT service giant Capgemini has been awarded a deal worth between £12 million and £15 million ($14.8-$18.6 million …
I'd upvote you twice if I could. Google is of course not perfect but Workspace is incredibly streamlined and easy to manage. In comparison the Office admin portal or whatever it's called this week is a total joke.
This move is classic rule of one thinking where the only thing that matters is having one system. To hell with user satisfaction and productivity.
As a side note the reason I moved from O365 to Workspace is because Microsoft decided to throw up a fake default browser popup in their Android Outlook client to try and trick users into installing Edge. Theres a way to respectfully cross-promote products and that is not it.
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Nah, that's why they have the limited circulation BIG bank notes.
"Excuse me, Sir, we cannot accept those banknotes"
"I work for the government."
"Ah, my mistake, have a seat. Coffee? Cigar? Just how much would you like to deposit?"
There's a reason every single government allows a tax haven here and there: self interest..
Don't think? their was anything "Farage"-y (faragey is my new favourite word) about that comment as second generation immigrant in this country working in IT, I feel this country doesn't build or export enough and we need sure up as many jobs as possible within these shores.
Sending contracts like this abroad as government sends a bad message to business.
Not sure if this is sarcasm, but hey, this is that amazing sovereignty thing we gained.
We are now free to pay a French company to migrate our stuff from an American company to another American company.
Of course, we could have done that before brexit, but then it would be because the EU made us do it, or something.
Now we are free to do just what we were free to do before, but by making us poorer, more restricted, and insular in the process!
Yet another example of civil service incompetence. Move away from a system that is pretty much self-contained and go to one that requires layers upon layers of additional systems adding to it to get to the same level as you had with the other provider. I'm sure it won't take very long for the cost to jump to £30M, and then not much longer to go to £60M.
one that requires layers upon layers of additional systems
Now imagine you know you will get a cut from the revenue that is extracted by each layer from the government (read: the tax payer) when you are faced with the decision to do this, and keep in mind you're a government minister so you don't need to apply any ethics. And when you're bored in the government you can get a fat position in the absorber of all that loot.
Now guess again which way that decision will go: leave in place or replace?
Let's look at the probabilities.
1. 100%
2. 100%
3. 100%
4. 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% - possibly a bit overgenerous but I'm try to be even handed.
But as others have said.
Approx. £1000 per user seems VERY excessive even if they are charging out all their consultants at the usual £1000 per day.
Oh, wait a sec, forgot the 50 project managers at £1500 a day, 30 programme managers at £2000 per day, 20 senior senior technical architects at £2500 a day.
Damn, forgot the uplift since they'll all have to be SC or above so that adds another 30% per day.
Actual staff doing the work - 6 grads and probably an embittered BOFH who will all spend 5 hours a day in project planning meetings with all of the above when things keep slipping to the right for reasons they can't fathom. Therefore...
Actual time dedicated to doing real work = 2.5 hours per day per tech
If a few REAL techs assigned to it and left to get on with it without any distractions and some goodwill on the part of the customer, couple of months excluding accreditation.
Anyone think I'm incorrect?
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1. Screwing it up.
2. Taking much longer than expected.
3. Needing more money due to reasons 1 and 2 above.
4. Doing it right.
Sherlock Holmes would exclude (4) - the impossible - and deduce (1,2&3) - elementary.
My guess is 1,2&3 plus a transitional period (5) when both evil empires are running in parallel which will be intended to last weeks or at most months but of course this semi-disfunctional state will be extended indefinitely.
Holmes had the good fortune to "live" in simpler times.
With a Starmer goverment (one doesn't have to be psychic) probably adding one or more players to this IT miasma. Only box unticked would be tossing a Musk entry in this witches' cauldron.
If only Mycroft could be resurrected.
Given that the solution was never going to focus on interoperability and open standards it's just further evidence that the national centre for cyber security advises the use of chocolate teapots.
If the only way central government can play buzzword bingo with words such as integration, efficiency, cross-departmental collaboration, synergy is by using software from the same organisation (and it really doesn't matter which one) then someone somewhere is missing the point.
Why does the bingo card never include: lock-in, resilience, independence, innovation (let alone reliability or security)?
Find the common thread between the Cabinet Office, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Ministry of Justice and now the Parliamentary Digital Service, and you will find the reason why this failed - and continues to fail in all of the existing gov depts this person is in charge of.
Having two systems is failure. Pick one and support the hell out of it - have two and there is always going to be a lack of connectivity.
That is a restatement of the problem not a solution.
Last time I checked the Internet is pretty big and no-one needs a specific piece of equipment.
Once people promoted beyond their level of competence started choosing walled gardens for solutions it's only a matter of time before the wall become a problem.
@t245t "It takes a lot of innovation to make make computers not able to talk to one another" ^
Then Microsoft must be a very innovative company. ;)
But seriously it is easy to make it hard for them to understand each other. by placing obstacles in the way. Obstacles in such as file proprietary file formats Microsoft office has theirs, so does google docs. Same with communication protocols/formats, can you join a video conference in teams with anything other than teams, or Zoom with anything but Zoom or Google etc.
The problem is that these systems use proprietary formats, so using two (Google Workspace and Microsoft 365) will result in a lack of connectivity.
Whatever happened to government's commitment to using ODF V1.2?
see: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/using-open-document-formats-odf-in-your-organisation
The Open Standards Board has selected the ODF 1.2 standard for use across government. The government chose ODF 1.2 because it:- is an open standard that allows suppliers to create interoperable office productivity solutions
- allows stricter security checks to help prevent common cyber-attack scenarios
- can lower IT costs as ODF is either low cost or free to use
- allows the government and citizens, businesses and other organisations to share documents
- allows government staff to share and edit documents
- is compatible with a wide range of software including assistive technology
- can add digital signatures to a document
- has a powerful generic metadata system
Note the bit about across government. In my book that includes local government. So no more bloody .docx documents you lot!
However...…Virtually the whole of Govt uses O365 because THAT is what the users want. They are used to it and MS gives Govt a MASSIVE discount on software because they are such a big customer.
HOWEVER, it seems that a small group of top bods in the Cabinet Office insisted on Google regardless of user wishes.
I know this is a techie site and 90% of the people here would want linux servers with linux desktops running Open Office and probably still using floppy disks for "secure transfers"; however users like O365, that's what they are used to. Personally I Can't stand Teams or outlook and have myself set to OOO as much as I can so I Can get 2 minutes a day to actually do my real job.
We were sold the "Chocolate Factory" as being cheaper by a shady consultant company. It was an intentional lie or a massive fuck up because being local gov MS 365 would of been cheaper because.
1. Local gov gets MS 365 cheaper than normal
2. MS said they'd migrate our exchange for free.
The Chocolate Factory has been massively more expensive.
They charged about 30k to migrate exchange.
Documents looks shit in Google Docs and don't convert properly.
Having to share Google Docs with others who don't have Google is a pain in the arse.
Google Workspace is fine for local business', local garages etc. But shit for medium to large companies.
Quite why the Cabinet Office decided to go its own way with Google Workspace, the documents do not disclose, but the department renewed its faith in the productivity tools as recently as 2021.
It appears the government has been sending our personal tax data to the US for a lot longer so I'm not that surprised:
~ % dig +short mx digital.hmrc.gov.uk
10 aspmx.l.google.com.
20 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
20 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
30 alt3.aspmx.l.google.com.
30 alt4.aspmx.l.google.com.
There's no other, more benign reason for this to exist inside one of the more important parts of UK government IMHO, and this has been there far too long IMHO.
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