[LINK] Re: Rant: NSW School e-mails?

[Con Zymaris]

On Fri Sep 9 20:52:59 EST 2005 Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> 
> OK. School e-mail comes up. School IT comes up. Here we go again.
> 
> The whole thing was a PR crock, cooked up and contracted and NEVER 
> delivered.
> 
> It's now 2005. Elder son is in high school. The ubiquitous e-mail does 
> not exist - we get regular updates in the school newsletter that the 
> department promises it's happnening "soon", and this is two years after 
> the project got all that lovely PR from the press-release-byliners.
> 
> The whole thing was, and is, a multi-million-dollar sham. The contractor 
> gets paid but the service does not get delivered. It's bootless - sorry 
> Con - to debate whether FOSS would have been better. What does it matter 
> when there's no bloody service??

Why does it matter? Four reasons:

1) _If_ FOSS had been used (and implemented by competent people,) it would 
   have worked. Porof in point: http://www.fastmail.fm/ 
   Has as many users as the NSW DET mail system was supposed to cater for,
   all built on FOSS at a 97% saving. Been working for years. Gets rave
   feedback from users. Built and run by an Australian firm.

2) Email would be standards based, not Exchange based. Can you imagine the 
   network congestion when trying to get hundreds of thousands of users 
   accessing email using the Exchange protocol rather than POP/IMAP?

3) It would have saved the NSW taxpayers $32 million. 

4) The chances that an Australian company would have won the deal would 
   have been that much higher. After all, when you remove the Exchange 
   component along with the mother-of-all x86 mainframes that you need 
   to carry the weight of that Exchange server for a million users, you 
   are left with little reason to award the business to Microsoft & 
   Unisys. Any old local crowd who can put together 50 Linux/BSD servers
   will do.

To me, these are all damn good reasons Richard ;-)

And I do bet you a beer or three that the FOSS solution would have been up
and running in months rather than the 'will probably never work' scenario
your son finds at school presently.

The fact that the service delivery is non-existent yet Unisys and
Microsoft make millions, is only part of the sham ;-)

-- 
___________________________________________________________________________
Con Zymaris <conz at cyber.com.au> Level 4, 10 Queen St, Melbourne, Australia 
Cybersource: Australia's Leading Linux and Open Source Solutions Company 
Web: http://www.cyber.com.au/  Phone: 03 9621 2377   Fax: 03 9621 2477