You must all be aware of the comedy of errors of the L.A. City Council Google Apps implementation. It is a classical egg on face story, which started with LA and Google showcasing it as a model implementation, where both would march into the gilded world of the cloud hand in hand with their head held high, help improve productivity, and save costs at that.

The happily ever after never happened.   

Rifts started to show when a memo was leaked to the public around the middle of 2010, with users reporting frustration with using the features. Normal glitches with an implementation of this scope – they laughed it off.

More issues emerged that year when Google missed its official implementation deadline, and the LAPD complained that it was uncomfrotable with Google Apps' security features. Minor delays, we were told. 

It started to get ugly late in 2011 with the LA City Council demanding a refund from Google for failing to meet security requirements. Mud flew back with Google claiming that the City had introduced enhanced security requirements at an advanced stage.

The final nail on the coffin came when the LA City Council voted to scale back Google for LAPD and shift back to Novell, the system they were trying to migrate off. To be fair, Google still keeps 17,000 non LAPD users in the City. 

Is that Novell's laugh I hear? With Microsoft adding its own snickers?