Readers: Good Decision To Upgrade City’s Email To Gmail
In the poll last week readers supported the city’s move to Gmail, after emailing with the person in charge, I agree. Here were the results:
Q: St. Louis spent $275,000 to upgrade city email to Gmail, good or bad move?
- Good: the old system had no tracking which isn’t good for government transparency 50 [64.94%]
- Bad: talking about laying off police/fire and wasting money on email 12 [15.58%]
- Neutral 7 [9.09%]
- Unsure/no opinion 5 [6.49%]
- Other: 3 [3.9%]
And the three “other” answers:
- Overpaid. As usual, PD won’t follow the money.
- Tracking doesn’t concern me. Saving money and improving service is a good move
- Why is this really a question? Use an archaic system or a modern upgrade?
So why do I agree? I learned the city had their own physical servers located in city hall to run the old email system. Servers wear out, take personnel and electricity to keep them running. Before the rise of cloud computing large organizations had little choice but to maintain their own physical servers. For over six years now I’ve leased server space for this blog, I think it’s located in California.
The city’s old system was a Novell GroupWise setup. I’ve never worked at a big enough company to use such a system. One city employee said they’ve been taking about trying to change the system for the past 11 years. Things apparently began to change when Robbyn Wahby took over the city’s Information Technology Services Agency (ITSA) in November 2010.
First step was to increase the bandwidth and firewall protection which “added to stability of the network” says Wahby. However, problems remained.
March 2011, contracted with SLMPD for tech advice and support. Dele Oredugba is the director of technology and is a consultant to the department. Part of his contract was to help analyse our network. We contracted with REJIS [Regional Justice Information Services] to diagram the network. Discovered a core switch was long in the tooth. Replaced Nortel with a Cisco last month (no small measure!). Put in change management program. Network manager resign June 2011; interim put in place, until a new manager hired in March 2012. Determined that GroupWise was too expensive to continue with (lack support, dying product, servers required too much maintenance, expertise in this product declining, few employee’s liked it, etc.)
Wahby continues…
Formed ITSA advisory board and ITSA Focus Group in late spring/early summer 2011. ITSA advisory board is made up of City employees from various departments who have some level of responsibility and expertise in IT. They advise ITSA (Dele and Robbyn) on what they thought needed to happen with the department. Review RFP for email services for technical needs. ITSA Focus Group was formed to provide input from users (non-technical) about what they wanted from IT and from the applications they use every day. General consensus that GW was lacking (mobility issues, problems with stability, archiving, etc) and lack collaborative features.
This group crafted the key elements of the RFP.
Both groups, along with directors and anyone who wanted to attend, were invited to attend presentations by the top 3 vendors. We had two Gmail vendors and 1 MS vendor present. They were chosen based on a) full completion/compliance with the RFP b) price point
The RFP can be read here.
— Steve Patterson