Microsoft Cloud Email for 23,000 Employees of the City and County of San Francisco

No less than 23,000 employees from the City and County of San Francisco will start leveraging Microsoft’s Cloud-based email service, the Redmond company revealed.

This is of course yet another Cloud battle won by the Redmond company in the ongoing face-off with competitors.

The software giant notes that the move will help the City and County of San Francisco cut back on spending, reduce costs associated with IT management, while boosting efficiency, although no actual figures were made public.

“A key part of serving a community as diverse and vibrant as ours starts with making the right investments in information technology,” San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee revealed. “It is our responsibility to make decisions that are fiscally responsible, forward-looking, and improve the services that city and county employees provide to our constituents.”

Microsoft Exchange Online will be the new email service embraced by the 23,000 employees, with the City and County of San Francisco stressing that the move was necessary not by the need to upgrade from older solutions, but also by the necessity to consolidate disparate emails systems.

In total, employees across 60 departments and agencies will be able to leverage Exchange Online, for communications and collaboration, but also enjoy email, calendar coordination, and hosted archiving features.

“The City and County of San Francisco has always been forward-thinking in leveraging technology to improve the services it provides,” added Gail Thomas Flynn, vice president of U.S. State and Local Government at Microsoft. “We are excited at the opportunity to equip and support the employees of San Francisco with the tools they need to better serve the people of San Francisco.”

According to Microsoft, the migration process was already kicked off, and will take about a year to complete.

“By moving to the Microsoft platform, we not only get immediate improvements to our system, but we gain a disaster-resilient system that provides the most modern information tools, with solid support provisions that can scale with the needs of our constituents,” San Francisco Chief Information Officer Jon Walton said.