"Choosing Google has meant saving a much-appreciated $1 million per year in the midst of a fiscal crisis," said Wesley Watts, CIO of the district.

Like many organizations, Prince George's County Public Schools (PGCPS) was struggling with a traditional on-premise email system, with multiple mail gateways that required a lot of IT staff to maintain. Complying with requirements for legal discovery and open records requirements was also a huge challenge. In particular, the school district's IT department struggled to ensure a complete collection of requested data.

For cost containment reasons, the school district kept backup data on tapes for only 60 days. This presented a challenge if they were asked to recover older email, which was often stored in other locations and required IT managers to perform more complex and time-consuming searches. Moreover, users had the ability to delete their own email, sometimes before it was backed up, making it difficult to control how thoroughly backup data was actually collected.

In addition to the challenge of ensuring complete collection, the IT department struggled with an excessively burdensome collection process, conducted largely "by hand." In order to recover email in the existing on-premise email environment, the team often had to perform multiple system restorations. As Laurie Tranmer, Email Infrastructure Manager, noted, "For anyone who’s had to do this, you know how difficult restores can be."

Recovering email from backup tapes presented further challenges and costs. "In one case, backup tapes had gone bad, or the backups had not fully completed," Tranmer recalled. "We had to search mail gateway records for incoming and outgoing messages, which was very time consuming." Faced with such challenges for each and every request, it was not uncommon for IT response times to stretch to weeks or months at a time.

PGCPS is the 18th-largest school district in the United States, with more than 134,000 students. In March 2008, the district ran a pilot of Google Apps Education Edition, and moved to full deployment starting in July 2008. Nearly 28,000 faculty and staff now use Google Apps Education Edition for messaging and collaboration. More than 13,000 of these staff members also use Google Message Discovery, powered by Postini, for archiving and discovery.

Many factors influenced the district to implement Google Apps and Postini, but one benefit stood out above all: lower total cost of ownership. The legacy email environment consisted of 20 servers, all of which needed ongoing maintenance and upgrades. The district also operated two very expensive SANs in two data centers. Tranmer remembered, "The number of hours it took to support them was substantial."

In 2008, the team faced having to upgrade all of their servers to a new version of their email system, and also upgrade hardware because most of the equipment was out of warranty. "Choosing Google has meant saving a much-appreciated $1 million per year in the midst of a fiscal crisis," said Wesley Watts, CIO of the district.

In addition to lowering the overall cost of the messaging system, PGCPS also sought to locate email quickly and efficiently, using one process, for legal discovery and investigations. They wanted to be able to delegate discovery access to different entities within the organization, such as the legal office, labor relations, and internal audit teams. By adding Google Message Discovery to their Google Apps solution, the district felt confident it could achieve this goal.

When evaluating archiving options, the district looked for a solution that would be managed offsite, both for the ease of maintenance and to minimize costs. The school was facing budget cuts and, as Tranmer notes, "The cost of us keeping up the data center, heating and cooling, hardware, software, and backup in order to deploy an on-premise archiving solution was just out of our price range, given recent budget constraints. We wanted something that was easy to implement and maintain, and would let us focus on projects that improve the quality of education in the district, rather than maintaining servers. And we certainly didn’t want something that would take three months to get up and running."

The district also evaluated the choice based on the type of support provided both during implementation and in troubleshooting. "Google provided excellent support for us in both areas. For mission-critical issues, we've experienced Google support to be better than many of our paid phone support from other vendors. Someone answers immediately with no waiting on hold," Tranmer said.

Sharon Thompson, Email Administrator for PGCPS, said that "Google’s ubiquitous computing solution, coupled with the Postini services' ability to ease the process of email retrieval, has made this an infallible solution for our organization."

When evaluating the integrated Google solution, the district IT department discovered an added benefit: "During the transition from Exchange to Google Apps, we required the ability to deliver mail to both systems, and our current mail gateway could not handle that," Tranmer said. By implementing Google Message Discovery first, the team could configure routing rules at the user level, directing mail to either Exchange or Gmail, with settings that could be changed on a minute-to-minute basis.

The district's implementation of Google Message Discovery took about a day. Fine-tuning took only a few more days, as the team figured out exactly which level of spam filtering was required for the organization. With email archiving fully implemented, Tranmer is satisfied. "We are now able to conduct investigations in about 10 minutes. Similar investigations in the past have taken months," she said. 

Prince George's County Public School District is one of the many organizations who have "Gone Google" by deploying Google's enterprise IT solutions. Increased reliability, lower costs, access from anywhere on any device, and more effective employee collaboration are just some of the benefits that these organizations have realized.

Amanda Kleha is product marketing manager and Adam Swidler is senior product marketing manager for Google's Postini group.