About 76,000 people and 20 million emails were moved over to Google's cloud

Jan 7, 2014 10:51 GMT  ·  By

It’s been a long time coming, but the City of Boston has finally decided to end its contract with Microsoft and chose Google instead for all its tech needs.

About 76,000 people, including city employees, police officers, teachers and students, were migrated to the cloud with Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange.

“Not only are all city departments, including the Boston Police Department, now on Google Apps, but every teacher and more than 50,000 public school students each has an individual Google Apps account,” announced Bill Oates, chief information officer of the City of Boston.

“Our new unified, cloud-based communication system is pretty big change from our old set-up. Our agencies worked together to manage their mail environments, with resources focused on mail administration and working across the group structures. Our largest department, the public school district, operated on a very separate environment that was in need of a major technical upgrade,” he wrote.

Oates also explained that the city evaluated an upgrade to communication and collaboration infrastructure and came to the conclusion that cloud services was the most cost effective choice. In 2013, the City of Boston reviewed the market, attracting bids from a lot of tech giants, including Microsoft and Google.

In the end, after picking a short list of ten proposals, the committee in charge with choosing one of the offers made up its mind. “The committee unanimously chose Google Apps based on its ability to meet the needs of a fast moving city while providing a secure cloud environment.”

They believe this is a great upgrade over what Microsoft was offering. “The Boston Police department, for example, now has a reliable, scalable system that supports its 24/7 operations with Gmail’s 99.9% uptime guarantee. More than 3,000 police employees, including 2,100 sworn officers, use Google Apps to communicate with one another as well as to streamline reporting processes,” Oates wrote.

Back in May 2013, it was announced that the City of Boston would stop using Microsoft's email service in favor of Gmail. About 20 million emails were moved over to the cloud.