The State of Colorado has joined Wyoming and Utah in the Google Apps for Government wagon train.
According to the Governor’s Office for Information Technology, has selected Google to provide email and calendar services for all Colorado state employees.
“This decision will allow the state to eliminate disjointed and aging email systems and provide a single email solution to all employees, while saving approximately $2 million per year,” state officials said.
Gov. John Hickenlooper weighed in on the decision, saying “This move to a unified email system will save taxpayer money and put all state employees on one communication platform.”
Currently, the state has 15 siloed and disparate email systems. State IT officials expect the move to Google Apps for Government will allow state agencies to interconnect email and calendar functions while maintaining strong security and privacy standards.
It will also allow employees across departments to find co-workers and communicate more effectively with one another, giving them more modern collaboration tools and better mobile access to state data in ways that should help them deliver better citizen services.
The state’s public colleges and universities and the General Assembly will not be affected by this change.
Enterprise’s official blog site, noted that in addition to sharing a similar approach to email apps, the three states will “also share a common (computing) cloud.”
The decision will involve migrating more than 26,000 Executive Branch state employees to Google Apps for Government, said McIntyre.
While the move signals Google’s growing penetration of state and local government’s, not every implementation has met with total success.
Google and the City of Los Angeles agreed to pull the plug on their very public, two-year struggle to deploy Google Apps for Government (GAFG) at the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). In a document dated Dec. 9, 2011, city officials blamed the failed deployment on FBI information security rules which, they allege, make it impossible to deploy cloud email services like Gmail to law enforcement agencies.
More recently, new privacy rules for users of Google products, which went into effect this month, raised questions all the way to Capitol Hill about the ability of federal government agencies to continue using Google Apps for Government as they had in the past.
Google Enterprise officials have gone to great pains to reassure agencies under contract that the new policy rules would not supercede existing government agreements.