L.A. Adopts Google Email for Staff of 30,000
Los Angeles is replacing GroupWise with Google Apps.
The LA City Council Tuesday approved a multi-million dollar deal that will see the City of Los Angeles' 30,000 employees rely on Google Apps for e-mail and other Internet services.
However, while most are labeling the $7.2 million deal as a big win for Google, a significant amount of people are talking about what the unanimous vote means for Microsoft. The AP reports that the Council chose Google's offer over competing bids from Microsoft and more than a dozen other technology firms.
Analyst Rob Enderle spoke to the AP about Microsoft's failure to seize the Los Angeles contract, detailing that the loss represented a setback in its efforts to compete with Google for Web-based e-mail and other applications.
"Losing something of this size has to be really painful," Enderle said. "It's not the death knell for them, but it's a big red flag."
Then again, Microsoft isn't the only one suffering because of LA's decision to go Google. The new deal ends a 7-year agreement with Novell Inc. City workers complained that the company's GroupWise software was slow and crash-prone. According to the AP, Novell's senior VP said during the Council hearing that many city departments were not using the most recent version of GroupWise and reiterated an offer to provide additional services for free but alas, it was not to be.
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Check out the full story here.

Sarah Palin didn't get "hacked". She was a moron that had her email security question set as her town of birth. All they did was reset her password and the media called it "hacking."
It mentions nothing about office apps, so I presume they will still be running the almost ubiquitous MS office.
Also their previous calender/email client was groupwise (a horrible evil nasty piece of software that anyone should want to replace) and only turned down a 'bid' from MS to use theirs (presumably outlook, which is wierd if they are already using office... maybe they aren't, but it would be highly unusual).
The most interesting thing about this article is the issues they raise surrounding security on a cloud based system, that these concerns were raised (and by all accounts quite loudly) but that it went through anyway shows that either 1) the people making the deal didn't understand the issues, or 2) google were able to satisfy them that these issues were able to be dealt with... if this second alternative is the case, then I'd like to hear more on how they achieved it.
I disagree, I think email and internet applications are... in some ways by their very nature they always were, it just took the comms hardware time to really allow it to take off.
Bill bailed before the going got tough.
I fail to see how this could possibly be the end for MS, as they moved from a Novell system to a google one. MS possibly lost out providing outlook and server software plus support. Now considering using gmail, all is outsourced, less IT overheads, there is still quite the likelihood that outlook is still used for organising mail and passwords/accounts. This could possibly be up to the individual.
At my place of work we use an engmail system for webmail and outlook to access on your own workstation. engmail is terrible faux hotmail on intranet and hotmail itself cannot be used by corporations in it's current form and has no IMAP ability. A good webmail is great for hotdesking and outlook is terrible for it. MS has never been great in this area, it's services just aren't together enough now. Whoever lost out it was really in the engmail (possibly an MS product) and mail server arena. Now if they were moving 30,000 employees to linux, that would be a nail gun sounding off in the distance...
http://www.rackspace.com/email_hosting/blog/2009/10/congratulations-google-your-win-in-los-angeles-is-a-win-for-us-all/