City of Orlando: cutting costs while advancing our infrastructure in just two months

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Conrad Cross, CIO of the City of Orlando, Florida. In November, the city announced it had Gone Google. Last month Orlando became one of the first cities in America to switch all of its employees to Gmail. Cross has been CIO at the City of Orlando since December of 1999 and has been leading the Google Apps deployment that took only two months and is resulting in more than 60% savings.

Join Conrad for a live webcast on Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 7:00 p.m. GMT. He'll talk about moving 3,000 city employees to Google Apps. Please note that registration will occur on a third party site.

Like many city departments, the City of Orlando is facing an aging infrastructure juxtaposed with budget cuts and high demand for more advanced infrastructure services such as mobile access to email. We were using a Lotus Notes® email system and paying for numerous servers in City Hall, so we needed to find a different way of doing business.

This situation was all exacerbated by the fact that our IT department was recently whittled down from 84 workers to 69 this year. We determined after analyzing Google Apps that we could achieve significant savings and move into the cloud very quickly.

If we were to keep our current system, we estimated it would cost $133 a year for each of its 3,000 employees – or $399,000 including annual software licenses. Google charges $50 per user, or $150,000 delivering more than 60% in savings. In return, everyone from city planners to police officers will now use a web-based email system similar to Google's popular Gmail, but without the advertisements that support the free consumer version.

Google servers will store all city email and run the application, and Google technicians in Google data centers will make sure it runs smoothly. Google will also help us more securely host records such as sensitive law-enforcement and legal documents by mustering greater resources and expertise than we could on our own.

After considering the cost and feature advantages, we made the decision to move to Google Apps. We were able to move to Google Apps in less than 60 days, a major accomplishment. When the mayor cornered me in the hallway, I was nervous – but then he told me how excited and supportive he was about the switch. We're now on board with Google Apps and we don't have to worry about constant upgrades or implementing new innovations, and the cost-savings we're achieving are impressive.

My message for other city governments is: do the analysis and determine what your costs are. If the savings are compelling, then move quickly - you'll see the move into the cloud is relatively fast and painless—and ultimately very cost-effective.

We’re eager to share our experiences about the nuances involving our transition to Google Apps, including what the main concerns were across the city in making the move and how we address them.

Please join us for this live event:

City of Orlando Cuts Costs by Over 66% by Moving Email and Apps into the Cloud
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes®/Domino®.

Why the City of Los Angeles chose Google

Editor's Note: In October, the City of Los Angeles – the second largest city in the United States – decided to switch its email to Google, a decision supported in a unanimous vote by the Los Angeles City Council. We've invited Randi Levin, Chief Technology Officer for the City of Los Angeles and general manager of the city's Information Technology Agency, to provide more insight into the reasons behind this decision.

Los Angeles is going Google. After a rigorous evaluation process to select the best email solution for the city, Los Angeles recently decided to move all 30,000 city employees to Google Apps from our existing GroupWise email system.

City employees fulfill a range of important functions – from policing our streets to supplying water and power to city residents and businesses, and from operating our libraries to designing and building wastewater treatment plants and other public facilities. We want to provide all these employees with modern tools that help them do their jobs. Some of the benefits our employees will see from the suite of Google applications include:

• Improved collaboration. Much of the city's work requires multiple people – even multiple departments – to work together. With instant messaging, video conferencing, and simultaneous review and editing of documents by multiple people, employees will have better tools to work together on projects.

• Easier remote access. In a fast-paced city government, people often need access to work information when they're not at work. With Google, employees will be able to access their information from any computer with an internet connection, as well as from their mobile phones.

• Expanded storage. With Google, we can provide employees 25x the email storage they have today, saving them from having to make difficult decisions about which emails to keep or delete.

In addition to empowering employees across the city, everyone will benefit from Google's security controls, which will provide a higher level of security for City data than exists with our current system.

Google Apps will also help conserve resources in the city's Information & Technology Agency (ITA), which is responsible for researching, testing & implementing new technologies in ways that make Los Angeles a better place to live, work and play. Because the email and other applications are hosted and maintained by Google, ITA employees who previously were responsible for maintaining our email system can be freed up to work on projects that are central to making the city run.

By ITA estimates, Google Apps will save the city of Los Angeles millions of dollars by allowing us to shift resources currently dedicated to email to other purposes. For example, moving to Google will free up nearly 100 servers that were used for our existing email system, which will lower our electricity bills by almost $750,000 over five years. In short, this decision helps us to get the most out of the city's IT budget.

The decision to move to Google Apps was not taken lightly. The city issued a request for proposals and received 15 proposals, which were evaluated by city officials. The top four proposals were invited to give oral presentations, with CSC's proposal for Google Apps receiving the highest marks. This decision was reviewed and discussed by the Los Angeles City Council which, after a healthy debate, voted unanimously to move forward with Google Apps.

Learn more about this installation here:



Many other government agencies across California and around the country have already reached out to us to learn more. In addition to the benefits mentioned above, Los Angeles found Google's system availability of 99.9% and service levels for response in the event of an issue to be equivalent – if not better – to what we could provide ourselves. Together with the cost savings, it all adds up to a compelling argument for government agencies both small and large.

We still have work ahead of us, but we're excited to be moving forward with Google and CSC to bring state of the art email and collaboration tools to the employees of the City of Los Angeles.

Randi Levin, Chief Technology Officer, City of Los Angeles

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Enterprise team

Governments Gone Google

It's not often in life that we can get more for less. But that's just what cloud computing is offering cash-strapped governments across the country: an opportunity to upgrade their dated infrastructure to state of the art, and save money in the process.

That was the appeal of Google Apps to Conrad Cross, the CIO for the City of Orlando. Conrad is leading the migration of all 3,000 city employees from Lotus Notes/Domino to Google Apps, including the Police and Fire departments. Facing software license renewals, major upgrade costs, and a 12% reduction in staff, it was the right time for the City to consider other options. For half the cost of the alternative, Orlando is jumping onto Google's innovation curve and freeing up IT resources to focus on more important efforts. "The time was right," said Cross. "I'm delivering a better service with less resources, and that gets me ahead of the game." Just down Interstate-95, the 11th largest school district in the US, Palm Beach County, is also moving its more than 200,000 students, staff and other users to Apps.

The New Mexico Attorney General’s Office has a similar story. Its 120 attorneys and 200 full-time employees use Google Apps for email, archiving, and document management. After moving from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps, the employees no longer need to delete mail or worry about backing up sensitive information. The data's instantly available whenever they want it and they're more productive.

Fast growing cities like Canton, Georgia are also benefiting from the cloud. Strained by escalating spam and endless server maintenance, Camille Wehs, the city's only IT staffer, moved all 165 employees to Apps. With additional reliability, disaster recovery, flexibility and anywhere access to information, she sleeps better for it.

Most recently, the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to move its 30,000 employees to Apps. If you're also interested in getting more for less, please join us for a live webcast this Thursday featuring James Ferreira, CIO for the New Mexico State Attorney General’s Office.

Join us for this LIVE Event on:
Thursday, November 12, 2009
2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT / 7:00 PM GMT

Already a Google Apps customer? Submit a form to share your story.

Posted by Michael Lock, Director, Americas Sales & Operations, Google Enterprise

Microsoft Exchange or Google Apps? One government agency goes Google

Editor's Note: Please welcome our guest blogger, James Ferreira, Chief Information Officer for the Office of the New Mexico Attorney General. He provides IT services to the largest law office in the state. James Ferreira has the privilege of serving the New Mexico public as Attorney General Gary King's CIO. Mr. Ferreira is tasked with the responsibility of facilitating the communication between the public and nearly 200 office staff, including attorneys. Additionally, Mr. Ferreira has served as a member on many committees including the NM Information and Technology committee, NM Technical Counsel, Department of Information and Technology Project Review Committee and the Conference of Western Attorneys General WAGGY committee.

Please join us for a live webcast on Thursday, November 12, 2009 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT / 7:00 PM GMT where James will be on hand to answer your questions about his office's switch to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange (3rd party registration required).

Attorneys rely heavily on documents like pleadings, deposition transcripts, exhibits, briefs and other legal materials. In the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office, we have 120 attorneys and 200 full-time employees whose jobs revolve around documents. And it's not just the attorneys. Imagine the news releases, media advisories, scripts and other materials that our communications department has to produce.

We essentially use email as our day-to-day file and case management system, so it is mission-critical. Our previous Microsoft Exchange email solution was falling short – especially regarding the need to safeguard and backup sensitive emails. We looked at moving to a clustered system of in-house email servers for failovers, but we calculated the cost at $300,000, not including continual upgrades.

We began searching for something with ample inbox storage, easy backup and data redundancy and perhaps most importantly, a system that offered high security and reliability. Google Apps Premier Edition emerged as the clear alternative. To put it in perspective, Google Apps and Gmail can support any attorney over the course of a whole career, storing and backing up every email he or she ever sends. Google Apps Premier Edition also passed muster with well-known third-party security auditing organizations.

The move to Google Apps took minimal time and effort, and our users now appreciate the reliability and large storage quotas of their new email system. We have realized many additional cost savings. For instance, we have created a prototype Google Docs archiving solution, using the Documents API. In addition, a few years ago, the department paid more than $50,000 for replication software to store data from a SAN to a disaster recovery site. It didn't work very well – but is no longer required with Google Apps. We also spend less time and money on licensing. In the past, I often joked that we needed to check if we needed a license for the license with our former software vendor. With Google Apps, we get the whole deal up front.

Google Apps Premier Edition was a good fit for the Attorney General's Office. It provides secure, available, and searchable access to documents and emails, while reducing costs and lessening workloads for our busy IT staff. It has reduced the "paper chase" across the board, from attorneys to our busy communications staff. I hope you can join me on a live webcast this Thursday where I'll take your questions about "going Google."

Microsoft Exchange or Google Apps? One Government Agency Goes Google
Thursday, November 12, 2009

2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT / 7:00 PM GMT

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.

Google Apps and Government

Everyone benefits from cloud computing, though few stand to benefit more than government. The cloud helps agencies at all levels increase productivity, cut costs, keep pace with technology innovation, and become more open and transparent with their citizens.

That's why we were pleased to join other industry leaders today at NASA's Ames Research Center to hear Vivek Kundra, the CIO of the US Federal Government, announce the launch of Apps.gov. Apps.gov is an online storefront that makes it easy for federal agencies to browse and purchase cloud-based IT services from a variety of service providers, including Google. The cloud is coming of age, and we applaud the Obama Administration's efforts to ensure our government realizes its many advantages.

We also want to do our part to make it easier for government to transition to cloud computing. We recognize that government agencies have unique regulatory and compliance requirements for IT systems, and cloud computing is no exception. So we've invested a lot of time in understanding government's needs and how they relate to cloud computing. To help meet those requirements we're taking two important steps:

• FISMA certification for Google Apps. In July, we announced our intent to secure certification for Google Apps to demonstrate compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), the law defining security requirements that must be met by all US Federal government information systems. Our FISMA process is nearing completion. We will submit a Certification and Accreditation (C&A) package to the U.S. Government before the end of this year. Upon review and approval of the Google Apps C&A package, agencies will be able to deploy Google Apps knowing that it is authorized to operate under FISMA.

• Dedicated Google cloud for government customers in the US. Today, we're excited to announce our intent to create a government cloud, which we expect to become operational in 2010. Offering the same services and features as our existing commercial cloud (such as Google Apps), this dedicated environment within existing Google facilities in the US will serve the unique needs of US federal, state, and local governments. It is similar to a "Community Cloud" as defined by the National Institute for Science and Technology. The government cloud will allow Google to manage and meet additional government policy requirements beyond FISMA.
  

We look forward to working with governments across the country on these exciting initiatives in the months ahead.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Director, Product Management, Google Enterprise

Virtual Alabama: three years into visualizing our state

Editor's note: Last Friday marked the third anniversary of the release of Virtual Alabama, an innovative information-sharing program in the state of Alabama. Built upon Google Earth Enterprise, Virtual Alabama has become a true leader in promoting collaboration among the different agencies that fulfill government's many roles – from disaster preparedness and response to the environment, from education to economic development, and much more. We invited Chris Johnson, program manager for Virtual Alabama, to provide an update.

July 24, 2009 marked the 40^th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 astronauts' return from the first successful Moon landing, and also marked the third anniversary of Virtual Alabama – the state’s implementation of Google Earth Enterprise technology to provide government agencies with a statewide common operating picture.

It’s hard to believe that in the three short years since Virtual Alabama went "live," our user base has expanded to beyond 5,000 users. More interestingly is that number represents users in more than 1,450 agencies at every level of government.

As we celebrate one of America’s greatest scientific achievements, I am reminded of a quote from Dr. Wernher von Braun (chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle which carried man to the Moon) when asked by a reporter, “What was the most difficult thing about going to the Moon?...” His reply? “The willingness to do so."I have to say that the same has been true about Virtual Alabama.

One of the most gratifying aspects of working on Virtual Alabama is the diversity of our audience. Virtual Alabama has leveled the playing field for users across all 67 counties in our state. But more interesting, it is the assortment of agencies that the program serves – literally everyone from high-level law enforcement to the local animal control specialist and everyone in between. This diversity is key to providing such a rich and robust data set. I am often amused when federal agency representatives tell me they have seen Virtual Alabama demonstrated by their counterparts at a state or local agency and they say, “I thought Virtual Alabama was a product of that agency." You see, every agency feels that Virtual Alabama is THEIR program and was created specifically with them in mind.

But the beauty is that collaboration on such a massive scale allows Virtual Alabama to serve us all equally – regardless of size, resources, technical background or geography.

Every day, agencies in every locality diligently collect, correct, and analyze data turning it into the most accurate, up to date and useful information on the planet.

We have learned from them that the best data resides at the local level. Without their willingness to collaborate, Virtual Alabama would not exist. These efforts continue to make a tremendous difference in the lives of our fire fighters, law enforcement, and first responders and their ability to protect the citizens of Alabama. Those efforts are also making a difference in our ability to manage our cities and communities more effectively.

Our federal counterparts are taking notice and today over 100 federal agencies use the Virtual Alabama system. Alabama led the way as the first state to have a statewide common operating picture. Our neighbors are now following that lead and establishing Virtual States. Virtual states include Virtual Louisiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Hawaii and Texas which all have similar programs to provide their respective government agencies with information to protect their citizens. Currently, we are working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in a collaborative partnership with 8 other states to develop the Concept of Operations for Virtual USA.

Take a look at Virtual Alabama here:

It's exciting to think about what we might accomplish with Virtual Alabama as we celebrate future anniversaries. We're sure that progress will continue, as all on the Virtual Alabama team are "willing to do so."

– Chris Johnson, VP of Geospatial Technologies, US Space & Rocket Center

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Enterprise team

We have a winner! News on the "Where's Your Google Search Appliance?" contest

Back in February we announced a contest challenging our customers to show us their Google Search Appliances and share a picture of where their yellow GSA boxes fit into their organizations. The prize? Tickets to the upcoming upcoming Google IO conference, to be held in San Francisco on May 27-28. We had some great entries – but when we saw this picture, from the Web Dev team at Atlanta'sWellStar Health System, we knew we had a winner.



WellStar's GSA keeps "operations" running smoothly

Congrats to Rob and the Web team at WellStar in Atlanta, Georgia. Here's their story:

Before GSA: With five premier hospitals in the Northwest suburbs of Atlanta, 11,000 employees and the largest nonacademic Physicians Group in the State,WellStar Health System has become one of the biggest not-for-profit health care systems in the Southeast. As WellStar grew, it became increasingly difficult for folks to find our stuff. WellStar’s intranet houses a physician portal containing content from over 70 different clinical sites – along with unique portals for 60+ supporting enterprise departments – andeveryone's generic material permeated our content management systems (CMS ). Employee and patient volumes intensified, organically creating a nightmare of a file library, and it seemed that our system needed 20CCs of Findability Stat! The challenge was to efficiently serve everyone at once while minimizing the impact on our own busy environment.

After GSA: Our previous intranet search limited employees to each of our internal .Net portals, meaning employees would have to be sifting through the right haystack to find a specific needle, which gave them a whopping 1.4% chance of starting in the right place. This all changed with the GSA. The GSA crawls from a central location and provides a single URL to hit when employees need fast results. Its active replacement of cached, dead-end links diminishes wasted search time, and the “Text Only” document display feature is an essential business asset for clinical employees without specific readers.

After purchasing the GSA and performing a minimal setup, our team found that the appliance was pulling several hundred rabbits out of its hat every eight hours. It was finding the one-of-a-kind policy, form, safety, and class information details from long forgotten documents – all without requiring someone to organize the material. Thin-air content was rediscovered, removed, and replaced with current information, and incoming help calls starting with “Where do I find…” have been eliminated.

We had a few other standouts. Here's one.



Two GSAs were all it took to change the "State" of search

Meet Chris with the State of Missouri in Jefferson City, Missouri.

Before GSA: The State of Missouri is made up of 16 executive agencies and various other non-executive agencies, boards and commissions. Prior to the purchasing the GSA, the state was simply a collection of data silos that provided no unified search for our citizens or the companies who wanted to do business with us. The bottom line: it was difficult (at best) for tax-paying citizens or businesses to find the information that they needed on the various State of Missouri web sites.

After GSA: After implementing the GSA as a centrally-managed device, we made search available to all of our executive agencies as well as to our other agencies, boards, and commissions. The GSA allowed us to index all the relevant information from across all of these entities and provide a unified search option to our citizens. The flexibility of the device also allowed each of the agencies to integrate the search onto their unique agency site and further refine the search capabilities they offered to their taxpaying customers. Not only have the search capabilities greatly increased, from the citizen’s perspective, the data silos are no longer there and results across each agency are much more relevant.

From all of us at Google: thanks, WellStar and State of Missouri.

In the next few weeks we will be releasing their full case studies and if you are interested in knowing how other customers are using their GSAs we have more success stories here. Thanks for your participation and don't forget to register for I/O. Congrats again to the winners!

Posted by Dave Kim, Google Enterprise search team

Transforming Government Through Next Generation Technology

Governments everywhere are struggling with unprecedented challenges. They're expected to reignite a global economy in free-fall, while grappling with crumbling infrastructure, aging populations, declining quality in education and healthcare -- plus a heightened social concern about preserving the environment.

All in a budgetary environment of declining tax revenues.

Like the private sector, governments are now turning to technology to help them to improve both the delivery of government services and to promote overall economic growth.

Building 21st Century Economies
Like the waterways and highways of previous centuries, government leaders recognize they must create essential tech infrastructure to fuel innovation-led growth and prosperity. High-speed broadband is seen as a catalyst for encouraging economic development. However, meaningful services are required to stimulate demand.

For example, Germany has committed €4.6 Billion to install Telepresence capabilities throughout its schools -- to improve the quality of its education system, while reducing costs.

Similar to the access of electricity and the telephone, governments recognize the social equity of providing broadband access to everyone. Thereby using technology to improve the quality of inner-city schools, encourage more telecommuting and increase the productivity of rural economies.

Delivering 21st Century Public Services
There are significant opportunities for progressive governments to:

• Reduce Costs of Delivery – delivering online services, collaboration tools, and video, not only lowers costs to serve but enhances the overall customer experience.
• Empower Citizens – employing Web 2.0 capabilities, such as collaboration and social networking, allows citizens to more easily interact with their government.
• Improve Levels of Service – Kiosks, Telepresence units, or VoIP enabled call centers for 311 calls, raises service levels and the overall experience.
  

Creating 21st Century Governments
Both taxpayers and public servants now recognize that the business of government must evolve, and that technology plays a critical role in this transformation. Likewise, technology providers can choose to partner with governments on this journey.

Research by Cisco IBSG (the company's strategic consulting arm) reveals that the public sector has a number of unique requirements:

• Funding Models – providers must find creative new ways to pay for the new technologies, such as managed services and public-private partnerships.
• Skill Shortages – hiring freezes and lack of skills, means that governments require significant help in design, implementation and management of technology.
• Integrated Solutions – across multiple departments and levels of government, but also with not-for-profits, agencies, multiple partners and other parties.
• Innovation – the private sector can proactively bring new and innovative solutions to legacy problems -- seeding the transformation.
  

Managed Services offers a proven way to help transform government for the 21st Century. However, service providers will need to recognize the unique needs of the public sector and to partner with the champions of progress, to address their most pressing challenges.

About the author: Stuart Taylor is a Director in Cisco IBSG. Stuart leads thought leadership and engagements with key Service Providers in managed services. He has over 15 years of experience focused on strategy, corporate development, business unit strategy, M&A and operational improvement with large mobile and wireline operators and high technology clients.

The Google Search Appliance: Providing Timely Information about the Peanut Product Recall

Editor's note: We always value learning how our customers use our products to meet critical business needs. Here's a case where those needs were especially critical. The FDA recently mobilized website search, powered by the Google Search Appliance (GSA), to address a major public health issue. The FDA sped information access to the public, removing barriers that could have made this type of information difficult to find.

Rajesh Sripada, a Certified Google Search Engineer with GlobalNet Services, Inc. – a fast-growing provider of web development and system integration solutions to business and government clients – explains the pivotal role of the GSA in providing this service. Thanks to Rajesh for sharing this story.

Did you think twice the last time you reached for a jar of peanut butter? You’re not alone. The ongoing salmonella outbreak in peanut products has sparked one of the largest product recalls in history. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is proactively keeping the public up to date on recalled products, and they’re doing it with the help of the Google Search Appliance.

If you want to know whether the box of granola bars in your pantry has been recalled, simply visit the FDA web page and query for the type of product, like granola bars, or a brand name, to see whether the product has been recalled.

Previously, people would have had to scroll through a long list of products to try and locate the one they were looking for – a much more time-consuming process. Thanks to search, people can make fast, informed decisions.

GlobalNet Services, Inc. (GNSI) is a Google Enterprise Partner who manages and administers the intranet and Internet search for the FDA. For the peanut butter recall, GNSI is responsible for daily database and website updates to www.fda.gov. Information is available to the public through the Google Search Appliance (GSA), and visitors to the site can also download information in PDF and XLS files. The speed of the search appliance is crucial and the data in the GSA needs to be updated as soon as we receive it. Each night, the GSA re-crawls the database and refreshes any new information. This takes less than an hour and still allows late-night visitors to search for recall information.

In its first three weeks of existence, the peanut butter product search page received over 25 million page views, and the search appliance has handled the resulting search traffic with ease. This graph shows the number of queries per minute on the FDA search appliance. A spike like this happens every morning, with a sustained use of around 250 queries per minute for most of the working day. Public safety depends on the availability of this information, and the search appliance keeps it available. To help the search appliance handle the traffic, GNSI turns on caching during the day, and turns off caching at night to re-crawl the database.

- Rajesh Sripada, Certified Google Search Engineer, GlobalNet Services, Inc.

Posted by Dan Israel, Google Federal Team

Exploring new worlds with Google Earth Enterprise

The big news at the Googleplex today is the latest release of Google Earth, making features like Ocean, Historical Imagery, and Touring available to Google Earth users everywhere.

We're happy to open up these new worlds of exploration to our Enterprise customers, with new releases of Google Earth Pro and Google Earth Enterprise also available today. This is a tremendous advance for organizations who work on -- or under -- the Seven Seas, or who have archives of historical photos and data that they'd like to make more accessible to their employees.

People who use Google Earth Pro, the workplace edition of Google Earth, will see the new oceanographic data, historical imagery, and other features through their connection to Google's public globe of satellite imagery, maps, terrain & 3D buildings. With today's release of the Google Earth Enterprise 5.0 client, customers can start to realize the benefits by layering their own private data on top of the Google-hosted Ocean or Historical Imagery via KML. Google's public data about the world's oceans and images from the past should give a glimmer of what's possible.

We're hard at work to allow Google Earth Enterprise customers to build their own Ocean or Historical Imagery for their private networks, in much the same way they today build their own Earth. This will enhance organizations' ability to build private globes displaying this information while ensuring that authorized users can visualize the data quickly and easily.

(That's Cape Fear under water, by the way.)

The new Touring feature already works with private globes, allowing for simple creation of narrated tours of an area to share critical information with other Google Earth users. Touring compliments the Movie Maker capability, which lets users "fly through" Google Earth while capturing video that can be used in presentations, broadcasts, or on websites, available only in Google Earth Pro and the Google Earth Enterprise client.

And there's more. With this latest release, importing data from GPS devices is easier than ever. Customers will also find better ways to interact with their data. Pop-up windows for your data can now include fully compliant HTML and javascript, allowing organizations to provide their employees with richer context about the location they're viewing. And we've improved the startup speed and the performance of layers.

Existing customers who want to get started with the Google Earth Enterprise 5.0 client should contact Google customer support to access the download. Google Earth Pro customers will be prompted to upgrade the next time they start Google Earth. If you want to learn more about either product, drop us a line.

We hope you'll learn more about this announcement and bring the power of these new services to your organization, no matter where in the world (or the ocean!) you may be.

Posted by Bryan Atwood, Product Manager, Google Earth Enterprise

"Why I sleep better at night with Google Apps," by Camille Wehs, IT Director, City of Canton, GA

Note: We are pleased to welcome Camille Wehs, IT director for the City of Canton, GA, as our guest blogger today. The City of Canton recently selected Google Apps Premier Edition for its messaging and collaboration needs, saving more than $10,000 and untold IT hours. Members of the City of Canton team and will be on hand next week to talk about that experience in a webinar exploring how Google Apps can help businesses of all sorts reduce costs.

My name is Camille Wehs and I'm the IT director for the City of Canton, Georgia. Canton was the fifth-fastest growing city in the United States according to the 2005 US census. Since we are only 30 miles from Atlanta, we've experienced rapid growth in our residential population -- and have consequently witnessed a parallel increase in demand for our fire, police, water treatment, and zoning/planning services, all of which have been challenged by Canton's growth.

Our rapid population increase also put a strain on other parts of our city infrastructure. On the IT side of things, spam emails were overwhelming our security systems and our email server required constant maintenance. With only one IT person (me!) serving 185 city employees, I spent a lot of time trying to ensure our IT infrastructure was keeping up with our growing needs for fast and effective communications and easy-to-use collaboration tools. In the end, my on-premise software couldn't keep up, so I moved our IT infrastructure to Google Apps. And I have to say, I've slept better since I did!

We now have a first-rate solution at a fraction of the price of our old one. Our employees have more functionality than they did before – instant messaging, video, and site publishing tools in addition to the basics of email, calendar, and word processing/spreadsheets. Because everything is hosted by Google "in the cloud" our employees can access their docs or mail from anywhere – a nice solution in the event of disaster. What I like most of all is that we can add or subtract user accounts as our budget dollars go up or down.

Many people have asked me about my experiences and I am happy to share lessons learned. Please join me for a webinar next Thursday, January 22, 2009, at 1:00 PM EST, 12:00 PM CST, 10:00 AM PST, where I will be on hand to answer questions about how we brought Google Apps into the City of Canton government offices and why that decision is helping us succeed.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps Marketing

Managed Services for Every Type of Organization

Do you believe that the growth of managed services adoption will have little impact in the government sector, or other non-profit organizations? Think again.

Let's consider the facts. Clearly, all organizations benefit from improving their processes.

Government Insights, a global independent research and advisory firm, released a report focusing on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and their use in managing the delivery of IT and network services.

As IT and network technology are embedded further into business processes, the apparent need for productive cross-organizational partnerships becomes evident. The state of these Business Technology partnerships can be either an enabler or an inhibitor -- when negotiating an SLA.

Demand for Service Level Agreements
Organizations may develop SLAs with internal IT staff and/or with external IT service providers. In both cases they set guidelines and minimum standards for the delivery of IT services to the end-user community.

Jan Duffy, research director, Government Insights, said "SLAs should be beneficial to the IT/business partnership, contributing to transparency and to developing objectives that are achievable. Given the large number of relationships and alliances involved in modern IT, governments can benefit substantially from developing expertise in preparing and maintaining SLAs."

As we've stated previously on this forum, relevant metrics and SLAs are a key ingredient of most managed service provider offerings, and the associated inherent benefit of an out-tasked solution.

According to the Government Insights market assessment, demands are increasing for internal IT departments to provide a combination of "invisibility and level of responsiveness" that is considered a hallmark of the seasoned managed service provider.

Imperative for Improved Accountability
To meet this strategic imperative, many IT leaders have moved their organizations toward a service delivery model. Translation: this means that the performance of IT is being judged based upon the way it is valued by the end-user community -- and not by internal IT indicators.

Government Insights describes the main characteristics of developing successful service level agreements for use in managing relationships between public sector organizations and their internal IT departments and/or with external IT providers.

As a result of their analysis, they recommend that public sector organizations -- including central, regional and local -- acquire competencies that will enable them to:

• Define, measure, and continuously improve the services that IT delivers.
• Continuously monitor user expectations and satisfaction, and provide timely education.
• Deliver IT services aligned with the needs and priorities of current and future mandates.
  

A managed service provider can enable a government, or other not-for-profit, entity to select and implement business technology to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of service performance that's delivered to their constituents. The need for on-demand service transcends all sectors of the marketplace.