Client Story
Supporting Enhanced Staff Communication
A rapidly growing community, the Town of Oakville wanted to improve quality of service for citizens. With more than 4.5 million email messages to be processed and stored, they needed a more cost-effective, flexible and secure environment. Limited resources taxed their over-burdened IT department – changes had to be made.
About Town of Oakville
With more than 173,000 citizens and growing, the Town of Oakville is a metropolitan centre on the verge. A 30-minute drive from Toronto, Oakville is a vibrant and thriving lakeside community that offers all the advantages of a well-serviced urban centre, while still maintaining its quaint small-town charm.
Town of Oakville’s Challenges
As a growing municipality, the Town of Oakville Ontario, wanted to shift away from a Lotus Notes email environment that was both inflexible and could not easily scale to support expansion. As the number of email messages and data grew exponentially, Oakville wanted to improve its employees’ communications productivity while reducing the burden on a busy IT department.
The Solution
After reviewing various options Oakville implemented a new Microsoft-based messaging system that enabled IT to deliver more efficient administration, better archiving, enhanced security and provides easier access for remote users. IT is spending less time on administration and support, reducing their operating costs and maximizing the efficient use of tax dollars.
The Rewards
Oakville employees and managers are benefiting from larger mailboxes, new productivity features and improved availability. For the 1,200 workers that require access to the town’s email services, high availability is mission-critical.
“Reliable access from almost any location is especially important for us. Our users can save emails directly into our SharePoint-based portal, allowing all staff to better manage email documents and projects,” notes Steven Zaborski, Project Manager at the Town of Oakville.
“As an administrator, Exchange Server 2010 is a big improvement. We can do our administrative tasks during the day with Exchange Server 2010; we don’t have to come in during the weekend to perform upgrades.”
Jeff Lanaus, Director of IT, Town of Oakville
