State & Local Weekly News Wrap-Up

By Timothy Brett posted Mar 15,2012 01:58 PM

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COLORADO

Colorado plans to move 26,000 state employees to Google Apps for Government to provide them with a unified e-mail system, according to state officials. Google will provide e-mail and calendar services and, in the process, allow the state to eliminate disjointed and aging e-mail systems. The move will save the state approximately $2 million per year, state officials said. Currently, the state has 15 siloed and disparate e-mail systems that in most cases are not integrated with each other. Moving to Google Apps for Government this year will allow state agencies to interconnect e-mail and calendar functions while maintaining strong security and privacy standards, officials said. The state’s public colleges and universities and the General Assembly will not be affected by this change. Colorado joins move to Google Apps

NEW YORK

New York has passed an open-data law that creates new transparency requirements for city agencies to provide unprecedented public access to government data, said Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "If we're going to continue leading the country in innovation and transparency, we're going to have to make sure that all New Yorkers have access to the data that drives our City," Bloomberg said in remarks in a public hearing passing the law, officially called Introductory Number 29-A. The first step the city's Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications will take to help agencies comply with the new law is post on its website a technical standards manual. This will streamline data availability for the "greatest number of users and the greatest number of applications," Bloomberg said. Then agencies will have a year to convert public data sets that are currently in proprietary formats to ones that support open standards so developers can easily use the data for new apps. NYC Passes Data Transparency Law

TEXAS

Xerox won an $848 million contract to provide statewide cloud-based services in Texas. The company will help the Department of Information Resources create secure cloud computing-based services by consolidating the state’s data centers under the eight-year contract. The department’s information technology operations will combine 28 facilities into two centralized data centers. Texas IT providers that are considered historically underutilized businesses will also help carry out the consolidation project. The company is also currently contracted to provide printing and mailing services for the state of Texas under a separate six-year deal worth $53 million. Xerox to Support Texas Cloud Systems on $848M Contract

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