Posted by Arnold Leung on October 3, 2009 at 2:09am
Recovery.gov was initially built using Drupal. They have re-built the site using Sharepoint at a cost of $18 Million, which I believe is huge. Most enterprise level web sites that I know of cost a max of $X Million, not $X.X Million.
Anyhow, I found this article about the technology used: http://blogs.msdn.com/uspublicsector/archive/2009/10/02/recovery-gov.aspx.
I think that probably half of the cost has gone towards software licensing.
Arnold
Blog: www.appnovation.com/blog
Comments
Several folks took a little
Several folks took a little closer look in this thread. Summary: it's not pretty.
Recovery.gov
That $18Million figure is the quote on the contract spread over 5 option years. They may or may not spend that much. Actually moving to SharePoint is going to save them money in the long run. "... And while Microsoft has long been viewed with disdain for their near monopoly on corporate business platforms, this time, it saved taxpayers a good sum of money." The amount obligated up front was approximately half that. You can see the actual contract here: http://www.recovery.gov/Accountability/inspectors/Documents/Initial%20Aw...
What I have seen were the reasons they chose to move away from Drupal in this particular instance. "...But users were not able to follow the recovery funds from beginning to end as the Obama administration had envisioned — and promised. Nor could site administrators use the site to handle the approval process needed to collect, sort and display spending data being collected from recipients of the funds. As a result, the site became a target and verbal punching bag for watchdogs, open government advocates and lawmakers who were underwhelmed with the content and capability of Recovery.gov."
http://ohmygov.com/blogs/general_news/archive/2009/10/23/Recovery-gov-re...