L.A. City Council lets Google e-mail project proceed despite glitches
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The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday agreed to allow Google to continue moving the city’s 30,000 employees to its online e-mail system, despite a number of performance and security problems facing the implementation.
The $7.25-million project, which was supposed to be finished by the end of June, got behind schedule because the city and Google had trouble satisfying data security measures necessary to protect the e-mail accounts of 13,000 Los Angeles Police Department employees, among others. Other users have reported that sending and receiving e-mails sometimes took hours.
Because of the delays in fully implementing Google e-mail, the city will be forced to continue paying for its 10-year-old e-mail system at the same time as it pays for the new system. But city officials announced Wednesday that Google had agreed to cover the cost of the old system until the switchover was complete. The costs could rise to $415,000 if the project is not finished by next June.
However, city technology officials and representatives from the LAPD and Google said they expected the implementation to be finished in November.
The state requires that law enforcement data be encrypted and physically protected and that Google employees with access to the LAPD data have background checks. Some of those requirements have presented challenges for Google.
Though some council members worried about the slow pace of the project, others expressed optimism that it would be completed in the near term
