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El Reg reports
The city of Moscow has announced it's going to start ditching Microsoft, following a call by president Vladimir Putin for Russia to be more self-reliant, and is starting with an untried-at-scale e-mail system.
The phase-out will start by replacing Microsoft Exchange servers and Outlook clients, on 6,000 of the city's computers, with an e-mail system from state-run carrier Rostelecom.
Windows and Office could be next on the list, and local reports suggest the shift could impact as many as 600,000 end users.
According to local business news outlet Vedomosti (in Russian here), the scale of the eventual rollout is because eventually schools, doctors, and housing and community service workers will be using the city-provided e-mail software.
The migration to email servers hosted at Rostelcom, using software from New Cloud Technologies in Russia, is expected to take two years.
Vedomosti says the city has budgeted RUB 43.6 million (about US$700,000) for the initial project, and that the new licenses will be around 30 per cent cheaper than Moscow's current Microsoft bill.
[...] Bloomberg [...] quotes communications minister Nikolay Nikiforov as saying "We want the money of taxpayers and state-run firms to be primarily spent on local software".
Moscow's CIO Artem Yermolaev said the city has already swapped out Cisco's surveillance camera software for local product.
In March, Oracle slagged off PostgreSQL in an attempt to fend off Russian moves towards the libre database.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @08:20PM
What would also be good is to see Russia ditch Windows and use Linux
We should note here that Russia has threatened several times before that they will be dumping foreign technology and doing their own thing.
Now, their progress on their ARM-based processor has made noteworthy progress.
Russia Plans to Dump Some American CPUs for Homegrown Technology [soylentnews.org]
Linux-Based, MIPS-Powered Russian All-in-One PC Launched [soylentnews.org]
Replacing Windoze hasn't been as successful for them.
Going back to 2007, there was the case of Russian educator Aleksandr Ponosov who *thought* he was buying legit MSFT licenses but he got snookered.
They made a big goddamned stink about the software on TWELVE fucking computers.
Ponosov's case [wikipedia.org]
...after which, Russia said they were going to go all-FOSS.
Russian schools abandon Windows after piracy scare [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [theinquirer.net]
...and Putin said that they were going to produce a homebrew national software environment.
...but a couple of years later they said, **Well, maybe not...**
No Russian Operating System, At Least For Now [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [slashdot.org]
**...Maybe we'll just use stuff that already exists.**
So, we'll have to wait and see how it works out this go-around.
At least this time they started at the proper end (with the apps).
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]