Dear nmglugers, I came upon this article: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/outside-party-to-review-cit... in which they discuss external review of Santa Fe's IT infrastructure. These overhauls sometimes involve picking some company, reading their brochure, and giving them a contract. I have seen a large institution where they replaced the UW IMAP server with a Microsoft exchange system, going from 50% of an employee to run the institution's email to 3 full-time people to run the Microsoft exchange system, plus untold hours of lost productivity in dealing with the morass generated by this proprietary system. In this case the executives were told by the parent company that they had to shift to MS exchange, period. The city is not beholden to a parent company, but group-think is rampant with people who are out of their depth, and the 10% rule also applies ("you only need to know 10% more than someone to snow them"), so vendors might come in and write an IT plan for the city. This is all speculation - does anyone here have any inside knowledge on how this process is going? Wounldn't it be cool if the city were to invite proposals from our city's top IT people (who are almost certainly on this list), and also include them in the review. It would also be cool if someone had the ear of the city's IT planners and could propose some free software adoption, as well as a requirement free software compatibility.