The Veterans Affairs Department has awarded HP Enterprise Services a $36 million contract to move 600,000 email accounts to the cloud. Under the five-year contract, VA users will have access to email and shared calendars using Microsoft Office 365 for Government. Users, however, will not have access to additional features such as instant messaging and web and video conferencing. “VA is moving to cloud-based email and collaboration as part of a broader effort to leverage emerging technologies to reduce costs, increase efficiencies and, most importantly, improve service delivery to our nation’s veterans,” Charles De Sanno, executive director for enterprise systems engineering at the VA,…
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The U.S. Special Counsel on Wednesday warned that agencies could be reprimanded for targeting whistleblowers and monitoring emails that report wrongdoing. In the memo, Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner said that targeting emails between whistleblowers and the OSC or inspectors general for surveillance is “highly problematic.” Agencies that deliberately target whistleblowers’ submissions or draft submissions to OSC or IGs could be accused of retaliating against the employees, Lerner said. “This is the first finding that we are aware of in which a government agency has stated that there are limits on how federal agencies can monitor employee email,” Stephen Kohn, executive…
The Interior Department expects to migrate 92,000 employees to a single cloud-based email system by December, according to a senior agency official. Interior awarded a $35 million contract for cloud email and collaboration tools to Ohio-based Onix Networking Corp, according to an announcement on fbo.gov. The Google Apps for Government solution will also provide employees with instant messaging, desktop video conferencing, web-based collaboration systems and email on their mobile devices. “That is one of our first big enterprise services that we hope we can ramp up quickly,” Andrew Jackson, deputy assistant secretary for technology, information and business services, said in…
Tom Vilsack said yesterday he hoped to snag some stimulus money for IT modernizations at the Agriculture Department, but he may have to get in line behind the White House. Seems that yesterday there was a nearly 24-hour email outage in the West Wing that was resolved early this morning. The Washington Post gives a full account of the panic caused by what it terms a “mysterious ‘server outage’†here and here. Apparently people had to talk to other people using devices called telephones and do business on stuff called paper. No word yet on what caused the outage, though…