Diana Manos, Senior Editor
Diana Manos is Senior Editor for Healthcare IT News. Located in Washington, D.C., she covers policy and legislation issues surrounding healthcare IT. Follow Diana on Twitter @DManos_IT_News.
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Wyoming hospital takes leap to the cloud for email
CASPER, WY | March 29, 2012
Wyoming Medical Center (WMC), a 100-year-old hospital in Casper, Wyo., has dumped its frustratingly limited in-house legacy email system for Google’s cloud-based system. WMC officials say the new Google system has saved the hospital money and trouble, and they don’t have concerns about privacy.
Last August, the 207-bed WMC completed the transition of its entire organization from Novell Groupwise to Google Apps – Google’s email system for businesses and organizations, says Tom Schoenig, the CIO at WMC. The hospital was one of the first three healthcare systems and the first hospital in the country to adopt Google Apps for its email. The decision came after a number of years with constant server breakdowns during the middle of the night and too little email capacity for providers, he says. In addition, Web access to the in-house server was touchy.
“With the Novell system, even with upgrades, our Web piece was unstable at best,” says Rob Pettigrew, WMC’s network manager. “It was the thorn in our side. We couldn’t figure out why it kept crashing.”
Pettigrew said it was a running joke in the hospital’s tech department: “Why don’t we just get Google to handle this email?” So one day, out of sheer frustration, they called Google. And it turns out, Google could do just that.
“Once we made the decision it would be best to switch to Google Apps, all of us had to convince our administration, he says. "It wasn’t a straight apples to apples comparison on cost, because the Novell system and Google Apps can’t compare. The real savings came in the enormity of the email space Google could give us. Groupwise gave us 200 MB of space per user. Users at the hospital were constantly complaining that their mailboxes were full.
Google gave us 25 GB per user. “We couldn’t give that to our users with hundreds of thousands of in-house servers,” says Pettigrew.
Of course, the hospital administration was concerned with security on the Google cloud system, Pettigrew says, but "we explained to them. A four-man hospital IT team can’t beat what an entire company like Google can do on security. Google handles safety and is always concerned and always upgrading its safety measures. This all happens in the background."
The hospital hired an Atlanta-based company called Cloud Sherpas to help transition to Google email, making it seamless and painless, according to Pettigrew. Cloud Sherpas is Google’s top implementation partner.
Showing 2 Comments
Adam Bradley say: Inaccurate and misleading
March 30, 2012 | 14:54 PM GMT
I will not argue the merits of cloud-based vs. in-house email and collaboration. What I will argue is the 'facts' as presented in this article, specifically:
There is no 200MB limit to GroupWise mailboxes. That limitation is due to the outdated and/or inadequate hardware used by the customer, or a maximum mailbox size set by administrators (in other words, an arbitrary limit, not a limitation of GroupWise).
GroupWise and its WebAccess web-based solution are not unreliable, however they do need to be properly maintained, patched, and upgraded. This is true of any system, including Google Apps; the difference being that Google performs this instead of the local IT department (say goodbye to control and granular administration capabilities). Even though there can be downtime with GroupWise - as is true with ANY system (search on Google for system-wide downtime impacting multiple customers for cloud-based solutions) - there are steps that can be taken to minimize and mitigate such as regularly applying patches and upgrades, hardware refreshes, clustering, virtualization, monitoring, and active management tools.
In other words, the move to Google Apps might be the best solution in the world for this customer, but they should place the blame for the limitations and reliability issues of their GroupWise system where it belongs - on themselves.
Kari Woolf say: Setting the record straight...
As the Product Marketing Manager for Novell GroupWise, I'd like to set the record straight on a key misrepresentation in this article. GroupWise does not impose--nor has it ever imposed--any disk space limitations. For their own data storage or ease of management reasons, customers often choose to create those limits by way of policy. But to position this as a limitation of the product is misleading.
I can't speak to the "constant server breakdowns" and "touchy Web access" issues, except to say that GroupWise is well known for reliability and uptime. I suspect the problems this customer experienced were related to hardware, system maintenance, or some of the many other variables that can impact performance for any solution.
Far from being "frustratingly limited," GroupWise offers new capabilities in its newly released 2012 version--and exciting momentum for the future. I invite anyone interested in learning more about what GroupWise offers today, what our roadmap holds for the future, or the increased investments we've made in the product to contact me at kwoolf@novell.com.