Washington, D.C. Government Implements Google Apps

When it came time for Washington, D.C., to create a new intranet for city employees, spending US$4 million on a site based on proprietary portal software just didn’t seem like a good idea to CTO Vivek Kundra. But using Google Apps did.

Google Apps is not replacing Microsoft Office entirely for the 38,000 municipal employees in Washington D.C. However, more and more government employees will be “migrating to using Google Docs instead of Microsoft Office,”. Google’s online applications have advantages as far as ease of use and the ability to build new sites for the city’s intranet quickly and easily. Washington, D.C., has been piloting the intranet with employees since June 2007. The application, which uses Gmail as its e-mail service and Google Apps for documents and spreadsheets, went live earlier this year and is currently in regular use, Kundra said.

Kundra decided to go with Google Apps as the basis for the new intranet not only because it was less expensive — the city is paying Google about $475,000 a year in licensing fees — but because new applications and interfaces can be assembled quickly on Google’s platform because of its open nature. When we looked at integration and deployment costs Google Apps was at a lower cost and was a faster way of achieving the same goal.

Take for example a new site the city created for its Fall 2008 Job Fair. On it, Kundra has his managers outlining in YouTube videos the positions for which they’re hiring, an example of how easy it is on Google Apps to allow for “voice, video and data integration,” he said.