From EWeek, last week:

Google unanimously won the battle with Microsoft for the right to move Los Angeles’ 30,000 municipal employees to its e-mail system, knocking out Novell’s GroupWise platform for the $7.25 million contract.

The Los Angeles City Council voted 12-0 Oct. 27 in favor of using Gmail over Microsoft Office Outlook. The city plans to complete implementation of the Google system by June and will begin with a pilot period during which a limited number of employees will test the system, according to The Los Angeles Times, which reported the news first.

Google hosts Gmail, used by more than 40 million people, on its servers and serves to users over the Internet, or the cloud. It is also the heart of the Google Apps collaboration platform.

Read the full story here.

The story also notes Google must compensate the city if its e-mail service is breached and data is stolen.

Since my gmail account was breached this past weekend :-(, I look forward whatever improvements Google will make to the service as a whole to ensure breaches do not happen…