More specifically, this looks like an answer to the Army's Office 365 licensing woes, which initially did not include licenses for these 250,000 junior soldiers to cut costs: https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2022/07/14/gmail-fi...

Right. So now they will have two systems that can’t work well together. Brilliant!

Yeah, but also, I'll bet you in a couple of years the next offer from Microsoft will come with a steep discount on Office licenses.

That would mean another huge migration project with corresponding costs for training, organization, and data migration.

Those costs are never taken into account. It's always the "low" price of licensing/use/dev that is looked at, and then... you have the regret phase. Which never end because "we already invested so much", and the famous "in the long run it will be cheap... oh wait, we have a newer offer"

That's OK, next year's budget will include funding for a third service to bridge them together for three times the cost.

Hey, as long as its the taxpayers money they're wasting who cares, right!

Previously all of the Army's 32 commands ran separate email systems, so 2 is a big improvement.

Email is about the only compatible thing between these systems.

When full out war starts, they might have wished they still had 32 different im-house email systems when Google or Microsoft stops working.

Presumably most of those 32 were already hosted by the big boys (Google, MS), but just paid for and administered under separate contracts.

How long ago was that a thing? I got in in the 2000s and there was only a single email system for the entire Army. 10 years ago they moved the whole DoD to DEE.

Ok, I guess I feel really old right now.

Last time I checked, you could send an email from MS owned accounts to Google owned accounts. Something I missed?

As an employee of a company where about 1/3 of our workforce have migrated to Google Workspace and the rest have not, I have a (pretty long) list of things that are a pain. Anything to do with sharing is awkward. Google Chat vs Teams is a headache. Lack of calendar integration is annoying.

Obviously YMMV, but I don't think it's as simple as you're making it out to be.

How do your Office users share files? At a previous employer they refused to migrate away from an ancient companywide network share, combined with people emailing each other QuarterlyReportQ42021_final_Fixed (7).docx. There was absolutely no interest from IT (which the company had recently outsourced) to actually facilitate migrating to a sane sharing model a la Office 365.

OneDrive. Enterprise deployments have something similar to consumer-grade OneDrive, but more enterprisey with compliance controls built in. And of course all the regular Office apps work well with it — it’s not just browser based.

It’s honestly pretty good. All the usual features are there — importantly, version history (no more Contract v15 FINAL.docx).

The key thing is it works with Teams and SharePoint and has collaborative editing, works in browser, desktop app, or phone.

They had an on-premises version of OneDrive too, not sure if that’s still a thing.

It’s not all a bed of roses. Gmail still feels nicer than Outlook web, but Outlook web is catching up. Collaborative editing feels much more robust in Google Docs. But the OneDrive client is way nicer than Google Drive (for me, at least).

I’d definitely say Google’s and Microsoft’s “online business collaboration” offerings are comparable. I suspect users will have preferences based on what they’re used to.

Of course, if your org uses both you’re in for a world of hurt. Email works well enough, but even calendaring has friction. Filesharing / chatrooms? Doesn’t interoperate well at all.

CalDAV? :o

Which neither side supports fully. So now you're paying a software dev to integrate the two. And of course, they're not going to get recurring events implemented correctly, especially when some events are exceptions due to holidays or other scheduling conflicts.

>Right. So now they will have two systems that can’t work well together. Brilliant!

Is this very different from the many, many universities that offer both Google Apps and Office 365 to students/staff/faculty?

You’re assuming they need to work together. The Army is huge.

So the army mandates cloud interoperability based on open protocol, and we are all better for data access ?

So everyone is going to have to switch from Workspace to O365 email when they get promoted from E-3 to E-4? Migrate all the saved messages and presumably switch addresses? Isn't that a low level enough that it will apply to basically all enlisted?

No, they will just claim for months that they will automatically migrate your e-mail and then instead of doing that, they'll cut you off from your old account one day and you'll lose all 10 years of mail in it.