New federal email system stalled till 2016

Bell Canada and CGI Information ‘unable to meet ... project deadlines’

The federal government’s plan to merge 63 email systems across the country onto one platform is now one year behind schedule.

The department overseeing the migration of hundreds of thousands of email addresses across 43 departments to the single system said this week that the move won’t be completed until 2016. The deadline had been March 31, 2015.

The two companies contracted to create and run the new email system — Bell Canada and CGI Information Systems — were “unable to meet the committed project deadlines,” a Shared Services Canada spokesman said in an email, which has left the government “disappointed by the unacceptable delays.”

The government has said the move to one email system should save the federal treasury $50 million annually, avoid duplication of services, and reduce security weaknesses. It is also a central component of Blueprint 2020, the plan to modernize the public service.

When the Citizen first reported an almost eight-month delay in the project in June 2014, Shared Services Canada still believed that it would finish the single email project by the end of 2015.

Revised plans outlined in a Dec. 5, 2014, presentation, show 33 departments were scheduled to be under the Canada.ca platform by the end of the calendar year, with nine more departments there by the end of March 2016, including the RCMP, Foreign Affairs, the Department of Justice and the Privy Council Office. Shared Services Canada provided the presentation to the Citizen.

Delays have been the result of multiple issues, some of which were first identified almost one year ago. Those issues are outlined in internal documents obtained by the Citizen under the access to information law, including an overly aggressive timeline and concerns that Bell seemed unable to design a system that would meet the government’s demanding needs.

The documents also lay out the belief from one department that Shared Services Canada hid details of the project’s problems from the departments it serves, an allegation Shared Services Canada strongly denies.

In April, Shared Services Canada raised concerns about an “Internet issue” in a letter to Bell, a move that prompted a six-page response, all of which has been redacted, and meetings to sort out “external network connectivity” issues. Shared Services Canada said it wanted security issues sorted out, but it didn’t say how those issues were resolved.

In June, the president of Shared Services Canada, Liseanne Forand, met with Microsoft Canada executives over shortcomings in the design of the email system.

A briefing note prepared ahead of a June 3 meeting showed there remained “significant architectural limitations” with the design of the email system, specifically in its ability to support public folders where multiple public servants can access shared messages or documents. The email software, Microsoft Outlook 2013, couldn’t handle more than 10,000 public folders, even though there were more than 800,000 such folders across 43 departments.

Shared Services Canada said Microsoft and Bell were testing updates to Outlook to steadily increase its ability to handle thousands more public folders. The first wave of departments moving to the new email system will find it can support up to 250,000 public folders, Shared Services Canada said.

While Shared Services Canada was dealing with the private companies building the email system, it was also dealing with the Canada Revenue Agency, which was highly critical of the whole project. A briefing note to the CRA commissioner ahead of a June meeting with Forand notes that Shared Services Canada has faced “multiple challenges” and delays of more than 21 weeks.

The CRA briefing note, which was given to Forand and obtained by the Citizen, laments a “lack of system design details” that CRA officials needed before giving the go-ahead to move its approximately 53,000 mailboxes over to the integrated email system.

Shared Services Canada told the Citizen it provides “regular updates on the health of the (email) project” to departmental chief information officers and to a senior group of bureaucrats who sit on an advisory group overseeing the email project.