The City of Los Angeles recently made news by announcing that they are turning to Google for their email needs. Instead of maintaining their own servers and staffing people to maintain the city’s massive email system, the people of Google will do it all for the. City employees will use web based Gmail instead of using a software based email system such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Mail.

Google is not doing it for free. The city will be paying out $7.2 million to make the transfer. Much of the cost is associated with making the new system more secure. A contract has been awarded to Computer Sciences Corp. to make the system air tight. In fact, if there is a breech in the security, Computer Sciences Corp. has to pay a fine.

Novell, is claiming that the cost to switch over to Google will cost the city an extra $1.5 million in hidden costs. The reason? To train city workers on how to use Gmail. It should be pointed out that Novel is sort of a competitor of Google. Novell was also vying to provide email services to the city of angels.

Google won, Novell lost.

The idea that city workers would need to be taught how to use Google’s wildly popular Gmail seems kind of silly to me. What office worker doesn’t know how to use Gmail? What’s next, will they need to be taught how to use eBay too?

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