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Comment by veb | Hacker News Reader

What? "The city will pay the Redmond, Wash. software company a little more than $1 million per year for the new product."

But surely they could use Hotmail or something right? That wouldn't cost $1 million a year?

I'm missing something.

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I would assume that the City(/County) of San Francisco IT Department also gets access to and control of the backend, in a similar manner as if they were hosting it themselves. This would include things like privacy policies, security and account recovery, spam filter, attachment policies/malware scrubbing, recovery/removal of email when an employee is terminated, usage logs, and some way of obtaining an employee's email in the event of a lawsuit or disciplinary action. Optional possibilities include stronger guarantees about the provider's (in)ability to access the emails, and filtering tools to alert about suspicious (corruption, child porn) or non-work-related (hate speech, regular porn) email content.

I'm pretty sure that the city doesn't want their employees to have email addresses like "jblow15433@hotmail.com". You pay providers (like Microsoft and Google) to host your email domain as well.

It is technically a better version of Hotmail. It has no ads, provides better security needed for government usage, restrictions regarding the location of servers and SLAs etc.

In general, all this would probably cost a lot less than the cost of having the services on the premises. As for the comparison with Gmail/Google Apps, I don't know how the comparisons were done there.

[I am a Microsoft employee but I do not represent them. This was mostly from my "common sense"]

SLAs, privacy, wining and dining and a "you have money" line item.

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