You Got Mail: State Migrates 10,000 Mail Boxes To the Cloud

You’ve got mail: Looking at the state migration.

By Thomas L. Sheehy | 6/12/12 12:00 AM PST

Last month on May 23^rd at the Ziggurat Building in West Sacramento, the California Office of Information Technology (OTECH)  hosted agency information officers (AIOs) and departmental chief information officers (CIOs)  from various state agencies across the executive branch for an Executive Forum to get updates in the progress of the California Email System (CES) and to hear first hand the experiences of the early adopting agencies. A big news item was the announcement that CES has now successfully migrated over 10,000 mail boxes encompassing both large and smaller departments. CES is one of two e-mail solutions available to the Executive Branch departments pursuant to AB 2408 legislation of 2010.  Since AB 2408 was enacted, ninety percent of all state departments have elected to use CES for their departmental e-mail service.

AB 2408 consolidated state information technology functions under the Office of the State Chief  Information Officer and required all executive branch state departments under the Governor’s control to consolidate e-mail systems, servers and networks to reduce redundancy, save energy and streamline delivery of IT services. The legislation requires the consolidation of 130 separate e-mail systems, all with their own hardware, software licenses and maintenance requirements into just two systems: CA MAIL offered by  OTECH and CES offered by a private Cloud vendor utilizing the Microsoft Exchange platform. It took one year to build the service for the state and some departments have more pre-migration planning and remedial work to do in order to consume the service, but  the major milestone of migrating 10,000 boxes successfully shows how the state of California is innovating in IT services under  OTECH’s leadership and the leadership of AIOs and CIOs around the state. Two of the major departments and some smaller entities that have already migrated are in the  State and Consumer Services Agency (SCSA) including the Department of General Services (3,300 MBs) and Consumer Affairs ( 2,300). “We fully support the vision in the state's 2012 IT Strategic Plan and the migration of 10,000 mail boxes to CES has demonstrated the promise cloud computing offers” - Andrew Armani, Agency Information Officer of the SCSA.  When fully implemented, 66 state departments and over 100,000 state mail boxes will utilize CES for email, making it one of the largest Cloud email systems in government today.

Migration to CES  delivers the benefits of reducing  state costs for the maintenance of unused mailboxes, elimination of unneeded software licenses, and reduced capital expenditures for equipment replacement and related upgrades. The reduced IT foot print  will significantly lower energy costs and space requirements. When consolidation is completed,  Governor Brown can communicate more directly with state employees via e-mail -  an ability his predecessors have lacked.

During the OTECH Forum, state executives, project management and technical leaders were able to talk openly about their experience migrating to CES and to compare and contrast experiences and share important tips with each other. The various panel presentations were designed to share lessons learned along the way. The Forum concluded with an open question and answer period with IT managers  from the early adopters and the CES project team.  Finally, closing remarks were made by new the new Chief at  OTECH, Jeff Uyeda.

Tom Sheehy is the former Chief Deputy Director of Finance

and Acting Secretary / Undersecretary of the State and Consumer

Services Agency under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He joined

Greenberg Traurig's Sacramento government affairs practice

in October 2010 (http://www.gtlaw.com/People/ThomasLSheehy).