August start for delayed Qld mail project

Queensland's massive Exchange 2007 consolidation will finally move ahead with a pilot in August after the state election and department consolidations caused delays, according to a state estimates hearing on Tuesday.

(Credit: Tourism Queensland)

The state put out a request for tenders for the program — called the Identity, Directory and Email Services program (IDES) — last year, looking for a supplier to transition all of the government's existing Microsoft Exchange installations to a new whole-of-government identity management platform.

The project is expected to save the government $100 million over a 10-year period, according to Queensland Government CIO and Department of Public Works director general Mal Grierson, speaking at the hearing.

The project was put out to tender last year. According to the tender documents, 80,000 email accounts were set to be migrated to the new system by June 2010. Implementation of the project had been slated to commence in the first quarter of 2009 with an initial pilot to touch some 5000 government staff.

The project is, however, still out to tender. "It is a very complex system," Grierson said. "The tenders have been evaluated. I think we are almost complete and we will be awarding the tender within the next four to six weeks."

He said that the government had waited for the consolidation from 23 agencies to 13 before continuing. "To roll out the implementation of this, we needed to make sure that we had synergy with the new structures of government." The election also delayed tendering.

The pilot has now been booked in for August, implementing new systems in the Department of Public Works.

ICT Minister Robert Schwarten said that $45 million of loan funding had been approved to fund IDES, which would be repaid by the ninth year of the 10-year business plan.

The state's technology transformation program to consolidate datacentres from multiple into two and to rationalise the government's fibre and copper networks was also continuing, Grierson said. The cost of this project is $44 million — $20.7 million from Treasury and $23.3 million in debt funding, which will be returned via savings.

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Winners and Loosers SJG -- 16/07/09

So who were the successful bidders and how much? Might as well be transperant about the costs of the project.

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Way to go, competition! CapnJack -- 17/07/09

Our overlords in government say "You can offer us any mail server, as long as it's Microsoft's"

Wow, way to go to encourage competition and optimise the taxpayers' funds, guys!

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For good reason Anonymous -- 17/07/09 (in reply to #320151992)

IDES Phase 1 was for the consolidation of 80,000 existing MS Exchange users to a centralisd, single Exchange instance. Trying to migrate 80,000 users to a different mail platform would greatly increase both the cost and risk.

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Disgrace Steve Dalton -- 22/07/09

This is a disgrace - what a complete and utter waste of money. A good proportion of that money will be going on Licenses (MS - multinational), Upgraded Hardware (to run latest Windows) and other Multinational companies.

Here's an idea QLD.... use a rock-solid open source alternative for email that will run on current hardware. Employ and train some QUEENSLANDERS and give something back to our local economy and people. All this could be done at a fraction of a cost and you might have some money left over to employ a Doctor or 10.

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come on it not just as simple as that.... Anonymous -- 27/07/09 (in reply to #320159849)

Come on Steve is it really that simple.

I don't give a toss about microsoft but the open source world tends to over simplify things just a tad in the real world of large corporates and government.

It is very true the microsnot is going to get license fees but the tenders that went out were for archiving software, identity management and other stuff. So any rock solid alternate needs to provide those api's to what ever might have been chosen.

Now lets talk hardware, since currently all departments do things their own way and own their own hardware, a new centralized hardware was always going to be on the cards as things like scaleability, availability, maintenance windows, back up and recovery and dare I say it security become even more important.

Also which Australia Email Server product are we talking about, the only ones I know about have roots in the USA unless Zimbra and the like have become local products?

Now lets talk training, there is a big sunk cost in trained staff in Microsoft Exchange, so there is a cost to do that as well and to ensure anything that currently links into Exchange also nice works with an alternate yet another cost.

So what exactly is the fraction of the cost, the only thing I see us saving is some licensing but the cost of change is not insignificant.

What should have been done was a serious assessment of what business requirements were and do the appropriate architecture /design around those.

Then if open source stacks both technical and with a total cost of ownership arguement that is supported by more than you don't pay licenses fees then great lets do it.

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