He pushed for Google Apps because he was a happy gmail user himself and wanted better mobility for city workers, who had been slowed down by having to log in through the firewall using a Cisco VPN client to check Lotus Notes e-mail.

But Google Apps was still a brave new world for users not accustomed to collaborating online and using SaaS (software as a service) applications.

"We had to do some training on storing documents in the cloud and sharing them instead of e-mailing them," Ferrick says.

But he was still stymied by the inability to take an inventory of the city's documents within Google Apps.

"In Florida, we put a lot of documents out there as public record, but we want to have control over them."