The following is a post from Michael Donlan, Vice President of U.S. State and Local Government at Microsoft and originally appeared on the Official Microsoft Blog.

As part of a new cloud computing strategy, Mayor Rahm Emanuel today announced that the City of Chicago will move 30,000 employees to Office 365 for cloud-based e-mail and productivity.

The City will consolidate its three disparate e-mail systems into one Microsoft Office 365 environment in an effort to improve collaboration, enhance security, and provide both mobile and desktop access for anytime, anywhere productivity. This new strategy will deliver more than $1.3 million in cost savings over the next four years - a whopping 80 percent decrease in cost per employee - while ensuring City workers have access to Web-based versions of the Microsoft tools they rely upon every day, including Microsoft Outlook, Word, OneNote, Excel, Lync and PowerPoint.

Today, Chicago joins a rapidly growing list of state and local government customers that are taking advantage of the cost savings and efficiency benefits of moving to the cloud with Microsoft, including the City of San Francisco, the State of California and the State of Minnesota. To learn more about today's news and what it means for Chicago, here is a link to the City's press release.

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