STATE OF WYOMING TO ADOPT GOOGLE COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS
CHEYENNE, Wyo. th All Wyoming state agencies will be on a Google-based email system within a year, the State's Chief Information Officer announced today.
(Media-Newswire.com) - CHEYENNE, Wyo. – All Wyoming state agencies will be on a Google-based email system within a year, the State’s Chief Information Officer announced today.
Moving to one system for office technologies, including email, email encryption and security, instant messaging, groups, sites, calendar and video, will enable all state employees to easily communicate with each other, something that is not possible now.
Currently, there are two separate communication systems managed by 14 agencies internally and one central agency, the Information Technology Division, which manages email systems for an additional 47 state agencies.
"The change to one email system will make communications better, faster and cheaper," said CIO Bob von Wolffradt. "Employees in one state agency often couldn’t easily find email addresses for employees in other state agencies. Governor Freudenthal said this was an obvious indication of the problems with multiple email systems,, and his direction to us was to fix it," von Wolffradt said.
"The economic impacts of migrating to a single system will result in $1 million of indirect savings annually, based on the 15 agencies not needing to own servers, licensing, and maintenance contracts or provide dedicated staff to manage the system internally," von Wolffradt explained.
According to von Wolffradt, the process began two years ago with 30 State agencies and a general fund appropriation in March moved things into the action phase, "This is one of the fastest turnarounds from receipt of funding, to RFP, bid, evaluation and scoring of projects that I’ve ever seen," von Wolffradt said.
Under a contract with Tempus Nova, the State of Wyoming will pay $5 million dollars to migrate e-mail systems to Google’s hosted email, security, e-discovery, encryption, and archive services and transition some 10,000 email accounts to the new services over the coming year.
Another benefit of the new system is that cities, towns and counties will be able to use the State’s contract pricing and eliminate costly procurement processes and time if they choose, von Wolffradt said.
Now that a system has been selected, the next step is implementation planning, which will include meetings with agencies to figure out timing, conversion, training, licensing and maintenance contracts for existing systems. "We’re going to be sensitive to the various agencies’ high-volume times, or certain business processes, like when Revenue is processing payments or when the Secretary of State’s office is dealing with elections – we won’t be asking the agency to convert then," von Wolffradt said.
Existing agency email systems will be discontinued as the new services start and allow agencies to eliminate licensing costs and maintenance efforts as they switch to the Google system, and that will result in immediate savings.
"Google is a good fit for the State because the company has proven its ability to provide critical business services, federal security certification, state-of-the-art employee tools and reduce costs while improving services," von Wolffradt said.
Contacts: Robert von Wolffradt, CIO Office: ( 307 ) 777-5840 Email: cio@wyo.gov ( mailto:RvonWo@wyo.gov )
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