The 600,000-strong workforce of the Philippine Department of Education (DepEd) -- teachers, staff, school administrators and top managers -- are moving to the cloud via Google Apps for Education. The landmark project officially kicked off last September 21 when the new system started giving out email addresses to its employees nationwide.
“DepEd is an incredibly large and complex organization. With 200 divisions and 45,000 schools in more than 7,000 islands, we were looking for a way to streamline communications in order to draw the organization closer together,” said DepEd Assistant Secretary Reynaldo Laguda. “Engaging an email or web-mail service will address many of these communication and collaboration challenges. With this collaboration with Google, we will significantly reduce our IT costs."
Prior to Google for EDU, Reynaldo D. Laguda, Assistant Secretary, Chief of Staff, Department of Education, said the entire organization was using an email server that serves only a few users, so majority are using personal web-based email addresses for communication. However, the scope and reach are not available to everyone and they are technically working on different platforms so the opportunity for collaboration is less.
"We know what we needed but we do not have the budget because our priority right now is providing schools with hardware and connectivity to schools," he said. "So office communication and productivity is taking a backseat."
With Google Apps for EDU, the Philippine government's biggest bureaucracy will not only get email addresses for its employees for free but would also gain access to a very big suite of tools, including tools for editing reports, sharing teaching materials, real-time collaboration, for free.
Calen Martin Legaspi, SCEA, Chief Executive Officer, Orange & Bronze Software Labs, a Google partner in the Philippines deploying the infrastructure and conducting training for the DepEd project, said Google Apps offers a very big suite of tools that are accessible via Internet-connected computers and mobile devices.
These include not just Gmail, but also other very useful collaboration tools such as Google Calendar, which is good for coordinating work or class schedules, meetings and events online; Google Docs for creating and collaborating on documents spreadsheets, presentations, forms, and drawings in real-time; Google Video that is private to a school’s domain; Google Sites, which allows users to develop and customize rich websites; and Google Groups for create mailing lists and discussion forums.