In a move which implies that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) will not be "going Google" even after attempts spanning more than two years, the City of Los Angeles has shelved its plans, pertaining to the LAPD's shift to Google's hosted email and office application platform, on the grounds that the service fails to meet some specified FBI security requirements.

As a result, a Los Angeles Times report has revealed that the LAPD and the 13,000 law-enforcement employees in the City of Los Angeles will not be included in the process which involves the deployment of Google's problems-ridden cloud collaboration and e-mail services.

In other words, it means that while the other departments in the city will be able to make use of the Google Apps for Government cloud platform, the law-enforcement department will, for an indefinite period, continue with LAPD's currently-in-use Novell GroupWise applications.

A development which has prevented the LAPD from moving its email applications to Google is the last week-amendment which the Council members made to a contract that the city signed with systems integrator Computer Science Corp. (CSC) in November 2009. The contract involved the replacement of LA's GroupWise e-mail system with Google's email and collaboration system.

Noting that the contract amendment was necessary, Gerry Miller and Miguel Santana - LA's chief legislative analyst and chief administrative officer respectively - said in an earlier-this-month memo to council members: "Although CSC does not have the technical ability to comply with the City's security requirements, it should be noted that the DOJ requirements are not currently compatible with cloud computing."