In the Cloud

Within the few months, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) migrated 25,000 mailboxes to Google Apps for Government, the largest federal agency to do so. At a cost of $11.5 million over 3 years, NOAA expects to realize a savings of up to 50%. From my personal experience, transitioning to the cloud has been a great experience. Let me tell you the ways...

1. Google Docs allows for live collaboration of documents during meetings which has cut down both meeting times and follow up emails for clarification. Everyone can add their 2 cents to the document without the need to keep track of the most up to date Word Document. This can be done both remotely and on government issued Blackberries.

2. Google Calendar lets us more efficiently schedule meetings both within and outside the organization.

3. Google Chat allows for efficiency in getting answers to quick questions without the need for the organization to pay for an out-of-state call.

4. Google Voice allows the convenience of free calls anywhere in the U.S. and Canada.

5. Google Sites allows us to not only share and edit web pages with one another, but to also search all the NOAA Google Sites to get a cursory idea of similar work being done in the agency.

It is interesting that we can give editing privileges to Docs to anyone, but Calendar and Sites are restricted to within NOAA. I'm guessing it's because Docs allows you visit the revision history while Calendar and Sites do not (as far as I know).

I've only been working for NOAA for about 1.5 years, but Google Apps has helped tremendously in sharing ideas and moving toward consensus (which is often needed in the government world). In my mind, the next step would be enabling Google Plus so that collaboration on Google Docs can be combined with the audio and video features of Google Hangout.

What are some innovative ways in which you use Google Docs in the workplace?

Hoover, J. (2011, June 9). From Ocean to Cloud: NOAA Goes Google Apps. Information Week Government. Retrieved from http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/cloud-saas/230500174