[LINK] Technology Consolidation Business Case Briefing

[Tom Worthington]

At 02:05 PM 14/05/2007, COLLETT Martin wrote:
>...  develop a Technology Consolidation Business Case by September 2007.
>
>The business case will outline the optimal strategy for 
>consolidating and managing infrastructure, networks and data centres 
>across the Queensland Government.  ...

Perhaps the Queensland Government should just use something like 
Google Apps <http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/googleapps.shtml>. 
This provides a suite of office applications via a web browser.

Obviously the Queensland Government should not trust all its 
corporate data to Google. But they could implement the same sort of 
thing themselves, using free open source web applications, to 
consolidate their corporate infrastructure. All staff in all agencies 
would then have access to a common email, document management, word 
processing, spreadsheets, calendar/scheduling, VoIP and instant messaging.

The Queensland Government may find by installing such a system it can 
reduce its bandwidth, storage and server needs. Also they could 
replace most desktop PCs with lower cost low power thin clients.

Those agencies which wised to have their own system could do so, 
provided it was shown to inter-operate with the corporate system, 
using standard interfaces and formats. The easiest way to do that 
would be to use the same software as used for the state wide system, 
on another server.

The Google Apps system works reasonably well, provided you accept its 
limitations. I ran a web course last week and needed applications for 
the students to use for exercises. The last time I ran such an 
exercise in Samoa 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/2005/emuseums/report.shtml>, I turned up 
expecting Dreamweaver to be installed on the PCs in the classroom, 
and found they had Microsoft Frontpage instead. To avoid this I 
decided to use web based applications, so the only software needed on 
the PCs would be a web browser. So I singed up for Google Apps, on a 
new domain name (I didn't want Google Apps messing up my existing web site).

ps: In the end I did not actually need the Google Apps, as I found 
Moodle had a good enough editor built in.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml