(this is a restored post; comments lost)
The other day (and again in my upcoming Guardian column) I quoted Telegraph digital head Edward Roussel speculating about shifting his paper’s platforms — business, sales, distribution — to Google.
Now here’s Paul Cheesbrough, the CIO of the Telegraph Media Group, making a first step in that direction. He tells CIO that he’s not updating Microsoft Office licenses and has opened up Google Apps for the entire newsroom.
“[As a pilot] we put 10 per cent of our 1400 user seat estate and allowed them to use Google Apps alongside their Office and Exchange infrastructure. Overwhelmingly, the feedback was positive and there would have been uproar if we had said we were turning it off. We were faced with the decision of whether we pursued the same [Microsoft] path and paid the price for that or put more and more internal solutions in the cloud.
“We made a conscious decision not to refresh any of [the Microsoft infrastructure]. We’re not going to remove it but we won’t upgrade it. . . . Google Apps is good enough and rich enough for us to do what we need to do. Collaboration has been very powerful [in Google Apps] and as people use Google Mail and Calendar they’ll naturally stray to use Google Docs. . . .
I think it might be time to sell my Microsoft stock.
