A recent report from Los Angeles' chief technology officer gives lots of details on a proposal to migrate the city to Google Apps -- moving away from Novell Groupwise and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft Office.

With the Gov 2.0 Summit happening this week in Washington, D.C., the L.A. document is worth a read for insights into the issues that governments will be grappling with as they shift from software to cloud-based services. As the nation's second-largest city, Los Angeles is being closely watched as it contemplates the change to Google Apps, and its experience -- good or bad -- could determine whether others follow suit.

In an ironic twist, more than half of the money needed to fund the initial Google Apps transition in Los Angeles -- $1.5 million -- would come from Microsoft antitrust settlement in which the city took part.

The Sept. 1 report, available in PDF form, outlines the expected savings (as much as $8 million to $10 million over five years) and seeks to address concerns about security, reliability and privacy.

Notably, in the breakdown of expected cost savings, the comparisons are made between Google Apps and the city's current Office/GroupWise combination. However, they don't appear to consider the possibility of alternatives to Google Apps, including hosted Microsoft Exchange or hosted offerings from IBM's Lotus Notes. It will be interesting to see if the council asks for more details on Google Apps competitors.

The L.A. CTO, Randi Levin, answers a series of questions in the document, including concerns about the high-profile document leak at Twitter. Read on for some of the questions and answers in the filing.

Between October 2008 and July 2008, Gmail was down on five separate occasions. Google was also down in February and May 2009. In May, Google was completely down for two hours and even the "offline" feature was not working. What happens to the City's accessibility of email, documents and applications when Google or the internet connection goes down?

"The proposed contract ensures a greater than 99.9% service level agreement (SLA) with the city.

"Like any technology system, Google has experienced occasional outages. That said, the real downtime as measured by 3rd party analyst firm the Radicati Group shows that Gmail's uptime is significantly higher than on-premise systems such as the City's Novell Groupwise implementation. ITA has also publicly stated that the reliability of Gmail is far superior to that of the City's own system.

"Google continues to make system enhancements, and now gives full transparency to customers via a system status dashboard at http://www.google.com/appsstatus which shows the global health of the system, any incidents, and full incident reports following a service disruption including enhanced best practices to ensure similar issues do not occur again.

"Finally, of the incidents mentioned above, only 2 were "major" incidents that affected a large number of users.

"Many of the incidents affected a very small number of users (less than 1/10th of 1% globally) and for short durations.

"Offline features function exclusive of an Internet connection, so the report that offline is affected in the rare event the hosted service is down is false."

How compatible is Microsoft Office Word with Google's word processing application? Is there any functionality that may be lost with Google applications? Could the City encounter any operational impacts by moving exclusively to Google applications?

"There is full file format compatibility between Microsoft Word and Google Docs documents. At no time will a City employee on Google Docs not be able to read a document authored/published in Microsoft Word. When a user on Google Docs imports a Microsoft Word document for editing, currently some conversions are not 100%. Google estimates the fidelity of document functionality and formatting to be -75%.

"Addressing these issues is one of Google's highest priority activities for the Google Apps team, and they expect to be at full fidelity for the vast majority of cases within the next 6-12 months.

"ITA (Information Technology Agency) has never recommended moving exclusively to Google and will not remove other office productivity programs from City computers as part of this implementation. The City could have operational impacts, as several departments are required to utilize other systems (Word and WordPerfect for example)."

"Addressing these issues is one of Google's highest priority activities for the Google Apps team, and they expect to be at full fidelity for the vast majority of cases within the next 6-12 months.

Recently, a hacker guessed the password to the personal email account of a Twitter employee and was able to extract the employee's Google password. Twitter's corporate documents that were stored in "the cloud" were compromised and leaked out. How can Google ensure that something similar will not happen to the City?

"The hacker was able to obtain the password for the Twitter employee from a consumer service. The hacker then used the same password to access the employees corporate information, as she used the same username and password for her corporate system.

"This is of course very bad use behavior. Moreover, Twitter, as a customer of Google Apps, was not using any of the enterprise features provided in the system to enforce password strength, password rotation policy, multi-factor authentication, or private authenticated login.

"In contrast, the City's proposed implementation has a number of safeguards to prevent such an attack, and will be utilizing these enterprise features provided by Google including:

• The City will have users continuing to authenticate their username and password to a City directory system, not through Google's web page login.

• As a result of the above, City users will only be able to access the Google services on City run networks, on City provisioned mobile devices (e.g. Blackberry) or via VPN, identical to how today's system works.

• The City authentication system will continue to enforce rules on password strength and rotation (frequency of change)."

Related story: The Tech Herald: Google Apps: Are privacy and security concerns being misplaced by the media?