In a big announcement today, the California city of San Francisco will be migrating from multiple email systems to Microsoft’s cloud based email. Talk about a big cloud computing win for Microsoft.
As InformationWeek reports, the city of San Francisco is working on consolidating seven separate email systems to Microsoft’s hosted cloud-based email service within the next year. The city is working on migrating nearly 23,000 employees across 60 different departments and agencies to Microsoft’s Exchange Online. As we already know, Exchange Online is a cloud based enterprise messaging platform that offers email, calendars, and collaboration features.
This migration to a cloud based service will cost $1.2 million per year and will help the city achieve a mandated 20% budget reduction.
“It was unanimous between all the CIOs in the city that the Exchange platform was the one to adopt. It wasn’t a point decision just about email. We had to consider that it was an email solution that was complimentary to the other solutions we’re employing in the city. We really see it as the best fit for where we’re going over the next five years,” said San Francisco CIO John Walton.
San Francisco currently utilizes about 15,000 email inbox’s that run on Lotus Notes on two different systems. The remainder of the 23,000 users are spread across five different Exchange systems hosted on-site.
The city of Los Angeles has also migrated to Microsoft’s cloud-based email service, but Google still claims that Microsoft is somehow biased with the government.