A small-business-owning FBvian says we’re on to something:
Keep pushing about the city of Dallas switching to gmail. It’s a great idea that could save the city a lot of money and improve their email reliability and search ability. My company (albeit much smaller than the City of Dallas) switched to Google’s enterprise edition about a year ago — one of the smartest business decisions I’ve made. At full price, Google charges just $50 per employee, and they handle everything to do with email, as well as provide a number of word-processing and other functions in the “cloud.” With 13,000 employees, the City could strike a deal.
Even if the city of Dallas never used the apps and only used the email services, they would be able to completely get themselves out of the business of managing, storing and maintaining (and repairing) their email for just $650,000 a year. Ultimately, they could rid themselves of their email servers all together (and the manpower required to keep them running) and get virtually unlimited storage space — and powerful search functions to aid with informational requests.
