Prince George’s County, Maryland

Project: School District E-mail

The Prince George’s County, MD school district is the 18th largest school district in the country, with over 200 schools, 129,000 students and nearly 28,000 faculty/staff. For the 2008-2009 school year, the school district was facing budget cuts of $185 million and projected that a needed upgrade to their on-premises e-mail system would cost $1 million. The existing system required the support of multiple dedicated members of the district’s IT staff, and due to the lack of an e-mail archiving system, IT personnel spent an excessive amount of time tracking down electronic records for legal purposes.

The district decided to migrate staff e-mail accounts to the Google Apps platform, which is offered to public schools at no cost. The school district’s faculty and staff are now leveraging Google’s cloud computing platform for messaging and collaboration. More than 13,000 of the staff members also use Google Message Discovery, powered by Postini, for archiving and discovery. Due to the cost effectiveness of the cloud computing solution, the district was able to also add the Message Discovery add-on, which costs only a few dollars per user per year, allowing authorized users to locate e-mail messages within minutes. With the success of this cloud computing experience the school district is also considering phasing in a cloud-based solution for use by students throughout the school district.