The United States Department of The Interior (DOI) was sued by Google last year because of the restrictions favoring Microsoft on their projects. The agency had previously rejected Google proposal for using their apps, and had asked them to work under the cloud environment by Microsoft.
Thanks to the lawsuit, now Google has been awarded with another chance, but analysts are curious about the uphill task of integrating Google's apps under the current and dominant Microsoft environment.
Getting back to the lawsuit, it was filed on October 29th 2010. The grievances were mostly pertaining to DOI's insistence having to work under Business Productivity Online Suit by Microsoft. It was the prerequisite demand by the DOI on their 'Request for Quotation' documents.
Google did try a lot to convince them about the cost effectiveness of using Google apps solution, but the DOI had objections due to security reasons. Google on the other hand, was very confident about their security standards as they meet FISMA accreditation and certification needs. Thus, Google had sued the DOI for restricting competition.
Now that the DOI has decided on going for cloud platforms from multiple providers, Google has gone ahead and dropped the charges. The winning bidders need not compulsory use Microsoft services. According to their documents, this is the move to maximize the competition with the help of non-restrictive requirements.
Now with the lawsuit behind them, it still is going to be a huge challenge of collaborating services as they mostly used Microsoft products for all these years. The winning bidder will have a tall task of integrating 88,000 users who are currently using Microsoft products for documenting and emailing.
Some of their requirements are:
Since they're using Microsoft Outlook and Word, the new vendor solutions will have to be made compatible to those products. Additionally, they have been using the Active Directory system from Microsoft as email directory and for authenticating the e-mail users. The new vendors will have no choice but to work with that system.
Google on the other hand is quite confident of integrating their apps with the Microsoft products, as they have done it several times in the past. Many of their past and existing projects have compelled them to work under Microsoft active directory and Outlook User interface for emails.
DOI hasn't yet made any confirmation on using Google. On the other hand, Microsoft has also upgraded their cloud services to Office 365, and it is supposed to be more robust. However, both office 365 and Google have been known to have their share of outages.
Is DOI really keen on going out of Microsoft?
Many people within DOI strongly believe that the winning bidder would again be Microsoft. One of the main reasons for this is the encryption of emails on archives. Office 365 has the facility to un-encrypt them during the online exchange. The spokesperson of Google refused to make any comments on this point.
Both Microsoft and Google have assured the uptime of 99.9%, whereas the DOI is demanding for 99.95%. Additionally, they will also need to comply with the specific enhanced security systems of the DOI along with the standard FISMA accreditation. Moreover, 85,000 of their devices have been working on the enterprise server by Blackberry, and they prefer support for other devices like iPhone, Windows phones and Android phones.
Although, they had standardized the Microsoft Outlook in 2006, almost half of their emails are currently being run of the Lotus Notes by Lotus Domino. DOI has been up a running on a mix of many technologies in their 1100 offices. This kind of mishmash has created a lot of inefficiency with their emails. They expect the new vendor to migrate 120,000 mailboxes and 88,000 users to one single platform. Moreover, all this is expected to be completed within a matter of just six months.
