US State Department Switches to Google Chrome, 58,000 People in Two Weeks

Google has been pushing Chrome as much as possible, via ads on TV, in newspapers and online of course. It's been working with users, more and more switch to Chrome these days, but it seems to be working on the enterprise, or rather, the government front as well.

Google has just announced that the US Department of State made Chrome available to all of its employees and, already, 58,000 of them have switched to the Google browser.

"Just over a year ago we announced that Chrome would get a special set of tools for IT admins at organizations, giving them controls to easily set up, push out and manage the browser in a professional environment," Google explained.

"Now guess what? The US Department of State made Chrome available to all employees, and just two weeks later, more than 58,000 of their employees have Chrome installed," it announced.

Enterprises are slow to adopt new software solutions and rarely if at all adopt software that updates automatically, potentially breaking compatibility with existing applications or bringing bugs that prevent people from doing any work.

Google's set of enterprise tools helped ease the pain though and it seems that the State Department was satisfied with what it saw since it decided to deploy Google Chrome to all of its employees, some 100,000 of them.

The browser will be updated regularly for all users, but the IT department will be able to control all of those installs. There won't be any substantial testing for each release, a big change for any enterprise environment, not that it would have been possible with a six weeks release schedule anyway.

"State’s historical approach to browsers is to test compatibility with all corporate, enterprise-level applications and remediate any issues prior to full release," the State Department's Chris Bronk wrote.

"We’ve taken a different approach with Chrome. Offering Chrome as a browser option allows us to take full advantage of Chrome’s speed -- from quick startup to rapid website loading -- plus the ability to access the full range of modern websites, and will allow our employees to be more productive in their work," he explained.