Posted on 06/26/2014 1:19:54 PM PDT by uncommonsense
When the General Services Administration (GSA), the agency in charge of supplying products and communications for US government offices, chose Google Apps for email and calendaring functions back in 2011, fear was no doubt struck into the heart of Microsoft. After all, the Microsoft MSFT -0.71% Office franchise has been the number one pick of Government agencies for decades. That the GSA would chose an upstart like Google GOOGL -0.35% was something of a shock. Well, the stress in Redmond continues with news today that the GSA has selected Smartsheet to be its online collaborative project management tool. This is, obviously, something of a concern to Microsoft whose Project product has been the go-to app for project management for the longest time.
As I wrote when I covered Smartsheet’s latest funding round, the Smartsheet product in essence combines the functions of Microsoft’s Office family – Excel, Project, Access and SharePoint. Users can, via a relatively simple interface, work on documents within a project and timeline paradigm. Think of a familiar spreadsheet-like interface, alongside file sharing, workflow automation and project planning features. Originally launched in 2006, and then relaunched in 2010, the company boasts of 42000 paying users (and is quick to point out that this is more than perennial cloud darling Box has). Those users are spread across 165 countries and cover a vast number of different verticals: construction companies, consulting firms, schools and universities, utility firms, government entities, healthcare organizations, high-tech firms, non-profits, manufacturing and law firms, among others
This isn’t the first federal deal that Smartsheet has secured, the company has sold its product to NASA, the Library of Congress, National Institutes of Health, National Parks Service, and US Department of Veterans Affairs. Additionally, state government organizations such as the State of Maryland also use Smartsheet...
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
This land is Google land
But is it a frugal land?
I am now a subscriber to SmartSheet and minus a few things that could be done to help the scheduling inputs, but as this moves forward in time, I expect the changes I would like to see coming. I love it and so do my customers who can at any time see their project status. Depending on the editing and viewing rights I give them, anytime it is changed for whatever reason, it is almost a click away from them getting an e-mail notifying them of the update.
There was never any doubt. Google, IBM, and ORACLE has mastered the art of schmoozing and even bribery to win contracts.
Just looked at website. It seems ideal for your situation as you don’t need many ‘creators’ and your customers can access for free. If I understand it correctly?
Great... Now every Russian and Chinese hacker will have a second way to access all our private government information.
or any statist partisan hack...
Exactly why I posted this article. Remember what was done to Sarah Palin's email account...
Also, as we now know from L. Lerner's activities, FedGov employees send emails with millions of personal private records to other agencies. There's no way a Google employee from, say, China, India, or Egypt... would ever consider peeking at gov emails. No emails relating to national security could ever be sniffed across a public network. No smart phones could ever get lost that would allow a hacker to socially engineer a path to greater cloud access...
It is also a comparable product at a much more affordable price.
Government employees are, bar none, the least sophisticated users and consumers of computing technology on the planet. It's like taking candy from a baby. Plus, there's zero accountability - they can't get fired for screwing up.
Scale up the platform to billions of users (Google), and I will 100% guarantee everything I own now, or ever will own, plus my first and only born child who I love more than life itself, that this will be an epic disaster.
Lots of tech products are basically becoming commodities. Was looking at cloud email and app pricing a little while ago. So cheap via that route it is almost not worth it for a small business to host their own stuff.
I cannot use cloud services because of the liability for mistakes in security.
I host my own data. I do not allow outside viewing. Therefore, I control the access cross-company to other companies’ data.
But cloud-based storage makes me liable for other peoples’ mistakes.
Sharepoint is where perfectly good information goes to die.
I cannot stand Google, but MS Project and its $700 pricetag was ripe for the plucking.
why govt isn’t required to use good freeware like open office to keep costs down and compatibility with past ms docs...?
Both the Google and Smartsheet are paid solutions by the FedGov. The FedGov should drive down costs, but using Google, knowing their operations model, for core communication and doc store in particular WILL be a problem.
True - but I'm sure the GSA schedule is far less. Truthfully, who believes the FedGov actually uses MS Project for anything more than a glorified spreadsheet...?
My main problem with this revelation is the FedGov use of Google apps.
I used SharePoint extensively and yes, it has it's issues. I didn't use it for any HTML cut-and-paste. All of the WISIG browser editors I've used mangle HTML. MS interacts with their RTF much better.
Anyhow, I used SharePoint to manage versioning and workflow for an endless number of software documentation artifacts. SharePoint does some really nice quasi-spreadsheet list management with pivots / views on any attribute. It was great for tracking product roadmaps with custom feature scoring (formulas to quantify request and success [risk] factors).
All of the "site" / "portal" security / search management features was mess. MS bought SharePoint and should have rewritten it from the ground up.
Yes it does - and breaches cause different liabilities in different states and countries. I think at this point, over half of our states have specific mandatory, time-based breach responses. That means if the cloud is breached, somehow you must become aware of it and then respond according to the depth and breadth of the compromise by each state statute.
A "cloud service" by its very definition means your don't know or care where it is hosted. Like differing state laws, international legal requirements are much more diverse.
I could go on, but I think most people get the point...
Just saw a GSA auto at McDonalds. The lady driving was loading up on junk food.
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