The City of Côte Saint-Luc  has officially decided to  migrate away from our current e-mail and calendar software Lotus Notes and the accompanying on premises Lotus Domino e-mail server. Instead we are moving towards a cloud-based application in which a software application is not installed on a local computer,  but instead accessed over the Internet via the Google Apps for Business/Postini application.

At a special council meeting on April 23, we  approved and authorized the city to enter into a one-year license contract with Google Inc. for Google Apps for Business and the Postini archiving application, and authorized  payment of $16,600 US (plus applicable taxes);, Research firms have shown Google Apps to be five times less costly to maintain than on premises e-mail systems like Lotus Notes. Google Apps is used by 350 million users and is widely considered to be the easiest and best e-mail application, with outstanding document collaboration tools.

Switching to Google Apps will save our  I.T. technicians countless hours installing and configuring the Lotus Notes application on every new computer or replacement computer, and troubleshooting the complex Lotus Domino mail server -- often with the help of costly outside consultants.

The City of Edmonton just switched over to Google Apps and it appears as if many other municipalities will eventually follow suit.

To the average citizen, there will no noticeable change on how they communicate with the city. They only need to know that we are introducing a system which is much more efficient. Hats off to Darryl Levine, our head of public affairs, communications and I.T. for his many months of hard work on this dossier.