Durban defends R6.5m website

Sharepoint is great for intranets, but rather a poor choice for an internet site, as it is very bandwidth intensive. Our crappy excuse for bandwith is going to have a problem with this.
 
apogeeza said:
The way I understood it was the price (way back then when I had to deal with SP) the little button that says "Turn this intranet site into a public facing internet site" costs in the region or R150,000.00 or is that missing another zero?)
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As far as I know it is not a set price, it starts way up at 1.5 mil and than comes down depending on certain factors (are you a gold partner etc...)
 
HBee said:
As far as I know it is not a set price, it starts way up at 1.5 mil and than comes down depending on certain factors (are you a gold partner etc...)
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Thats why you get competitive quotes. There are plenty of more cost effective alternatives to Sharepoint. As far as I have seen, there is still nothing to justify even half of this cost.

Put it this way, someone could buy a ticket on a local airline to get from Jhb to Dbn or one could buy a plane, staff it, etc. To say, "well the plane cost R25 million", does nothing to justify the R25 million price tag. It's still a waste of money. It's the same thing with this contract. Them saying "Sharepoint cost R1.5 million" or "We have R1 million allocated to hosting costs" does nothing to justify the R6.5 million price tag. Saying, "we got 3 competitive quotes and R6.5 was the cheapest" would be a different matter.

I still maintain, R3 million buys you a 6 man team of senior developers for 6 months and also covers the costs of all of the other people (testers, BA, SA, etc) that go with it. There is no way a web site requires such a team. If one is doing such a development then you need to look at alternatives and get competitve quotes or even re-evaluate the whole necessity for the site and perhaps redirect people to the FIFA site from a single static HTML page.
 
I agree with Abe here, they still haven't justified the cost, whether it was for SharePoint or any other CMS.

I doubt very much that they got "3 competitive quotes" for this project, which is also why Adapt-IT managed to get away with charging so much. If they did indeed get the quotes, I am sure someone can request access to them via the PAIA Act. I am no expert on this act, so I could be wrong.

B
 
Bismuth said:
I agree with Abe here, they still haven't justified the cost, whether it was for SharePoint or any other CMS.

I doubt very much that they got "3 competitive quotes" for this project, which is also why Adapt-IT managed to get away with charging so much. If they did indeed get the quotes, I am sure someone can request access to them via the PAIA Act. I am no expert on this act, so I could be wrong.

B
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The way it seems to work is... win a tender bid on some miniscule project which you quote below cost, then with the help of Daddykins, have the contract expanded out of all recognition, bypassing all the necessary financial oversight and controls.
 
Actually considering they already use Plone for the durban.gov.za site, which was done by Adapt, Durban has repeatedly stated they will use OSS whenever possible & the possible cost saving by not using SharePoint, the 6.5 million seems insane to me.
 
Gatecrasher said:
What Sutcliffe means to say: "BS baffled our brains."
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+1

LOL!

Actually, this is no laughing matter. I can't believe some of the rubbish I am reading on these threads from people defending the use of a proprietary development tool such as this Silverlight thing (whatever it is).

There is nothing on that site that couldn't be achieved by using any number of open source products. If a certain piece of functionality is needed and can't be found, get a PHP programmer to develop it for you.

Anybody who goes down the proprietary path w.r.t. web development is simply painting themselves into a very expensive corner.

Long live the Open Source!
 
WTF

Durban no longer has a functioning Bus Service or public transport system ( read the sad history of this debacle )

BUT

They can afford 6.5 Mill for a WEBSITE

How are they going to transport the 2010 punters around ????

Oh - wait I've got it -- a 50 Mill "Ricksha" tender :erm::sick:

Retirement benefits are not what they used to be :rolleyes::D


MW
 
Seriously, there must be something someone can do about this?? I'm sure that even if you asked Bill Gates to personally see to the completion of the website, he wouldnt charge this much. This can't be legal.. Seriously.. Have you seen that website??

My head hurts..
 
IMO those who care about this country should seriously consider boycotting anything to do with AdaptIT:
The site, which was launched two weeks ago, was being developed by JSE-listed firm AdaptIT
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mbp said:
IMO those who care about this country should seriously consider boycotting anything to do with AdaptIT:
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Yeah, they are certainly a company that I wouldn't want to get involved with, if this whole Durban website fiasco is anything to go by.

B
 
This is the usual corrupt activities of our ANC government the website probably cost less than a million, but the rest went to "administrative" duties performed by the politicians involved.

It is actually is sad when the bribing revenue surpasses the tender revenue.
 
Well besides the obscure Microsoft products that they used the website is badly designed - I mean could they possibly have used the pictures any smaller? This website looks like is is ten years old!

And REALLY badly written. The writer obviously has no clue about SEO writing - guess they don't really care about search engines if they know what they are. There also doesn't seem to be any linking strategy, but who knows, this is only Phase one, maybe that will come along with the other "cutting edge" technological developments like the videos and the webcam in the other phases.
 
Karen Lotter said:
Well besides the obscure Microsoft products that they used the website is badly designed - I mean could they possibly have used the pictures any smaller? This website looks like is is ten years old!

And REALLY badly written. The writer obviously has no clue about SEO writing - guess they don't really care about search engines if they know what they are. There also doesn't seem to be any linking strategy, but who knows, this is only Phase one, maybe that will come along with the other "cutting edge" technological developments like the videos and the webcam in the other phases.
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They have a webcam...sort of. It updates a single frame every 15 minutes. Or at least that is what it claims to do. :rolleyes:

They also have almost an entire page describing what a bunny chow is. Tourists are going to give up halfway through that insanely massive definition and go and tell their relatives that Durbanites eat rabbits.
 
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Someone is a millionaire over night and only had too spend 5 hours creating a website :p

I wannabe on the gravy train tooooooo :(
 
The best OpenSource competitor ro Sharepoint is Alfresco. Does pretty much everything SP can do with the added benefits os supporting ODF, which is something MS struggles with.
 
He doesn't have a lawn..

He lives in a big penthouse on the beachfront....
 
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