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UC-Berkeley chooses Google Apps over the Microsoft alternative

Written by Andre Yoskowitz @ 25 Dec 2011 9:13 User comments (3)

UC-Berkeley chooses Google Apps over the Microsoft alternative The University of California-Berkeley has chosen Google Apps over Microsoft's Office 365 as their new cloud-based email and calender provider.
After an "exhaustive" review process, the major university decided on the Google-based system: "While both products are feature rich and offer advantages over our current environment, the analysis concluded that the Google offering was the better overall fit for the campus at this time."

Additionally, the school revealed their selection criteria by releasing a matrix assessment. Microsoft scored higher in key areas like security, contract terms and ease-of-use for the calender, but the university still went the other way.

Berkeley decided on Google because it was easier to roll out and most of its student already have Gmail accounts and familiarity with Google applications.



Concludes the report: "Google's solution is optimized for web-based interaction. It is designed to be quickly provisioned and a migration to Google could begin more quickly than one to Office 365."

Overall, the migration will take 10 weeks.

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3 user comments

125.12.2011 21:56

Good to hear! Hopefully this becomes a trend...until too many universities switch to Google and M$ sues them for innovating too quickly.

225.12.2011 23:48

When I saw this e-mail come in about 3 days ago, I was so glad.

UC Davis, San Diego, and Irvine I believe all use gmail as their email client. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory also uses gmail. It's about time UC Berkeley changed.

3 years ago we were stuck using that crappy outdated squirrel-mail app. Finally got round cube about a year and a half ago. But lets be honest, they couldn't compete with gmail's email ui.

Finally I'll be able to centralize everything on one email for convenience! Mail, calendar, Docs. :)

326.12.2011 06:35
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