City of LA Goes Google Apps; SADA to Assist Effort

Today Google announced on their official Blog that the City of Los Angeles is kicking off an effort to transition over 30,000 employees to cloud computing and Google Apps.

The story of Los Angeles moving to Google Apps started early this year, when the city's Chief Technology Officer, Randi Levin, and her team at the Information Technology Agency (ITA) looked to replace their aging, on-premise system with more secure, productivity-focused technology. After calling for proposals and carefully evaluating over 14 different ones, Randi and the ITA decided to revamp the city government's email technology by adopting Google Apps.

Los Angeles will be the first major city and the largest in the US to move to Google's platform. At the time Google's bid was approved by the Los Angeles City Council, Councilman Tony Cardenas, who made the motion in Council to go Google, told the Los Angeles Times that the City had made a "world-class decision" to go Google.  CTO Randi Levin explains in more depth her organization's decision to go Google in this post at Google's Enterprise Blog

For the last year, SADA Systems, Inc. has been a part of supporting this effort.  Beginning today we are proud, along with Computer Sciences Corporation to be part of the Google team that will implement the solution for the City.

For more information on getting started with Google Apps, please click here or call 866-997-0000, option 3.

LCC International Goes Google Apps!

A pioneer in the industry since 1983, LCC International has performed technical services for the largest wireless operators in North and South America, Europe, The Middle East, Africa and Asia. The Company has worked with all major access technologies (including UMTS, EV-DO, HSDPA and WiMAX) and has participated in the success of some of the largest and most sophisticated wireless systems in the world. LCC recently switched to Google Apps for their messaging and collaboration needs with the support of SADA Systems, Inc.

SADA worked closely with LCCI to develop a strategy for meeting the goals of the implementation. To meet the needs of users at LCC International, SADA worked closely with their own IT department to implement Google Apps. Solutions deployed at LCCI include:

• Email migration and contact sharing in between Google Apps and the Active Directory system in place at LCCI.
• Set up the Gmail list tool to maintain distribution lists managed by LCCI.
• Deployed Enhanced Dual Delivery to maintain messages sent to both accounts (Exchange and Gmail) during the transition period.
• Conducted extensive online training via webinar for employees on five continents.
• Transitioned LCC International's 1,100 employees to Google Apps from their previous MS Exchange-based system.

LCC's Vice President of Information Systems John Buckholz will lead a Tech Republic sponsored Google webinar to share his experience in "going Google." Joining John will be SADA's Director of Projects and Development, Michael Higby, who served as SADA's primary liaison to LCC even before the project started through final rollout.

Read more about LCC's deployment of Google Apps by clicking here.

You're invited to join the webinar this Thursday, December 3rd at 11:00 a.m. PST (GMT - 8).  For more information and to register please visit this link. For more information on Google Apps please visit this link or call 866-997-0000, option 3.

City of LA Has Gone Google Apps

The Los Angeles City Council voted 12-0 Tuesday to approve an agreement with Google to deploy Google Apps including the Gmail solution for 30,000 City employees.

Councilman Tony Cardenas, who made the motion in Council to go Google, told the Los Angeles Times "The City of Los Angeles, the second largest city in the nation, made a world-class decision today to support a state-of-the art e-mail system."

Los Angeles will be the first major city and the largest in the US to move to Google's platform.

Published Google Docs Now Available Via Google Search

Google has announced that in a few weeks, documents, spreadsheets and presentations that have been explicitly published outside your organization and are linked to from a public website will be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines. There is no change for documents published inside your organization or shared privately.

If you wish to prevent users from publishing documents to the public internet, we now offer an admin control in the Google Apps Control Panel that allows users to continue to 'share documents outside the domain' without allowing them to publish the files to the public Internet.  To change this setting, follow these steps:

- Login to your admin control panel
- Select Service Settings > Docs
- Un-check the option 'Users can publish documents to the public internet'

If a user does not want their published Docs to be crawled, then the user must unpublish them by doing the following:

- Go to the 'Share tab'
- For documents and spreadsheets, choose 'Publish as web page'. For presentations choose 'Publish/embed'
- Click on the button that says 'Stop publishing'

For more details, please see this Help Center article: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60781

This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people!


If you'd like to learn the advantages to using Google Docs and the entire Google Apps suite of products give us a call here at SADA at 866.997.0000.