Boston Replacing Microsoft Exchange With Google Apps

netbuzz writes "The city of Boston, which employs 20,000 people, has become the latest large organization to switch from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. The city estimates that the move will save it $280,000 a year. Microsoft's reaction? 'We believe the citizens of Boston deserve cloud productivity tools that protect their security and privacy. Google's investments in these areas are inadequate, and they lack the proper protections most organizations require.' More and more customers aren't buying that FUD." Hopefully they'll be more satisfied than Los Angeles was (PDF).

Comments

Only $280k?

[CAIMLAS]

I suspect that number is wildly conservative. That's crazy, when you consider the costs associated with:

* Multiple FT "Exchange Admins"
* Needing people on-staff who actually understand email
* If they were using something like Forefront and/or additional spam services as well (additional $$$)
* Dozens of servers they no longer need to maintain maintain and replace
* Tens of terabytes of fast, redundant storage they no longer need to keep on-premises

Due to the cost of such a large migration (will they be migrating existing mail, I wonder, or just keeping it on a network-mapped share for archival access?) I have to wonder how long this will take.

I'd have thought the per-year savings would be closer to a million than a quarter mil, personally.

Re:Good

[BasilBrush]

You seem to be confusing professional with academic. It's hardly a big surprise you used LaTeX at college. It would be a lot more surprising if you'd been a professional using it.

Re:A better idea...

[foniksonik]

Uh booking meetings in a calendar is ~50% of the average corporate managers daily activity. The other 50% is attending said meetings.