City Hall plans to use Google applications to improve communication for emergency notification, better access to city information and better security for the city, Deputy City Manager Tony St. Romaine said.
He said Columbia was facing an uncertain future with legacy email and calendar software from Novell GroupWise, the software the city has used for the past 14 years. GroupWise has been sold and Novell’s customer service has declined.
St. Romaine said the city needed to invest in new platforms to continue with GroupWise.
“With a new focus on customer service, collaboration and communication, it made sense to move to Google’s powerful ‘cloud technology,’” St. Romaine said.
In addition, the total projected cost for licenses and implementations is $71,618.50, he said.
St. Romaine also mentioned some of the benefits the city expects to see when the Google apps project is fully implemented. In emergency situations such as an extended power outage, the city’s email system will continue to function from any device with an Internet connection.
Furthermore, it will improve the quality of collaboration through Google Apps for Government such as documents, video chats, sites and blogs, St. Romaine said. Google apps for the city government also allows off-site data storage to ensure access during emergencies and faster disaster recovery.
St. Romaine said this project will benefit mobile device integration as well as access to data such as Gmail, Google Calendar and videos from anywhere on any device that is connected to the Internet.
St. Romaine also said that Google apps will provide efficient access to email and calendar services backed by multiple Google data centers as well as Google’s 99.9 percent uptime guarantee. The city has just begun a three-phase implementation process and they are in the process of establishing internal web sites.
Moreover, other tools to communicate with all city employees are available now, St. Romaine said.
“Google Apps for Government segregates government data for better security and secure storage in the U.S., where it is protected by federal laws and regulations,” St. Romaine said.
The city’s goal is to have all city departments using Google Apps for Government by July 31.