Customer Solution Case Study
/ Town of Oakville supports enhanced staff communication with Exchange 2010
Overview
Country or Region:Canada
Industry:Government
Customer Profile
With more than 173,000 citizens, the Town of Oakville is a metropolitan centre on the verge.
Business Situation
As the number of email messages and data grew exponentially, Oakville wanted to improve its employees’ communications productivity.
Solution
Oakville deployed Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010. The new solution improves system flexibility, performance and stability.
Benefits
Highly reliable and available
Simplified IT management
Stronger, more effective staff communications / “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
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. To address these challenges, Oakville deployed Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010. The new solution improves system flexibility, performance, and stability. The town is also taking advantage of Exchange Server 2010 to provide users with larger mailboxes at a lower cost while delivering a highly available solution and greater IT efficiency. The new Exchange-based email environment helps staff be more productive – which in turn helps deliver a higher level of service to the citizens of Oakville.
Situation
With more than 173,000 citizens, 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.
Supporting the town is a strong council that is responsible for various administrative roles and responsibilities. Communications technology plays an increasing role in the lives of the more than 1,200 office employees, and email volumes were growing exponentially. To improve staff productivity and ultimately help to deliver a higher level of service to citizens, the town wanted to refresh its email and messaging technology environment.
For example, town government officials rely on email and calendaring functionality to keep track of the many council meetings required to keep the town running effectively. With town staff spread out across more than 55 office buildings, face-to-face meetings are neither practical nor time-effective. The previous IT environment was quickly being outpaced by the demands placed on it by staff, and as email volumes grew, users were facing storage issues which were impacting overall productivity.
Oakville previously relied on a messaging environment based on IBM Corp.’s Lotus Notes. But as the town was transitioning to a more Windows-based environment – including business productivity solutions such as Microsoft® SharePoint and Microsoft Office 2010 – the town encountered various integration and performance concerns with the Lotus Notes-based configuration. As Jeff Lanaus, Director of IT at the Town of Oakville notes, the decision was made to upgrade its messaging environment with an integrated solution that would facilitate more reliable, scalable and cost-effective communications compared to the previous Lotus platform.
“The Town of Oakville, like any municipality, is very cost-conscious and looking to improve quality of service for citizens with limited IT resources," notes Lanaus. “We currently deal with more than 4.5 million email messages and wanted to ensure a more cost-effective, flexible and secure environment that could scale as we grow in size.”
As municipalities look to meet security, governance and compliance regulations – and also be more accountable and transparent for the citizens they serve – Oakville wanted to ensure that its communications technology was up to the challenge.
Solution
Email is a critical business tool for the town of Oakville; the municipality took due diligence in investigating new IT solutions that could meet its communications needs. After reviewing various options Oakville worked with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Navantis, to deploy a new messaging environment based on Microsoft® Exchange 2010. Oakville is also using Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 to help streamline communications for users, allowing them to easily determine the availability of co-workers based on presence status and initiate an instant message (IM).
The town now uses Exchange 2010 to help its IT managers deliver more efficient administration while improving replication and recovery. The highly available solution features improved email archiving, enhanced security and gives remote employees easier access to email.
“Productivity was a key focus for Oakville. With Exchange 2010, staff can quickly access emails and documents regardless of location,” says Andy Papadopoulos, Partner at Navantis.
In addition, Oakville is taking advantage of the new Database Availability Group feature in Exchange Server 2010 to improve its automated database-level failover capabilities, which helps deliver a higher level of IT availability. Ensuring better availability, notes Steven Zaborski, Project Manager at the Town of Oakville, enables the IT team to conduct regular system maintenance tasks during business hours instead of off-peak times.
“We felt it was an opportune time for us to move to the Exchange environment. We have a large number of applications that can take advantage of the integrations and mass mailing functionality of the Microsoft platform, but they weren't compatible with Lotus Notes,” says Zaborski.
Benefits
The Town of Oakville now aims to meet all present and future communications and messaging needs with the help of Exchange 2010. Oakville employees and managers are benefiting from larger mailboxes, new productivity features and improved availability.
The town is also using Microsoft Exchange 2010 platform to begin planning for future capability and tighter integration with its Microsoft® SharePoint environment – allowing for remote authentication and remote staff access to email and calendaring along with other corporate resources.
“The ability to create customized staff portals through Microsoft SharePoint will allow for easier access to email and calendar resources while also serving to significantly streamline and enhance the staff experience,” says Lanaus.
Highly reliable and available
For the 1,200 workers that require access to the town’s email services, high availability is mission-critical. Today, whether workers access their email Microsoft Office Outlook® in their offices or with the Microsoft Office Outlook® Web Access messaging and collaboration client while on the road, the new environment based on Exchange 2010 helps ensure that email is always available.
“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 Zaborski.
Stronger, more effective staff communications
In addition to larger mailboxes, staff can be more productivity through enhancements in Microsoft Outlook such as Conversation View. The feature groups messages from a single conversation together, even if individual messages are stored in separate folders. Each group of messages can be moved, deleted, or otherwise managed as a whole. Staff are finding Outlook is easy to use, notes Zaborski, because it no longer keeps e-mail in multiple pages and has the same look and feel as other familiar Microsoft applications.
“Our employees are now much more productive by taking advantage of shared calendars to check the schedules and availability of others,” says Zaborski. “And using the Ignore Conversation feature in Conversation View allows staff to quickly manage, archive or delete emails trails to improve both productivity and the communication experience.”
Simplified IT management
The new integrated environment also means that the IT staff now access a more centralized storage solution that is more reliable and easier to manage. System upgrades have also been simplified: Exchange Server 2010 databases and mailboxes can now be more easily configured and updated by the IT team while users stay online.
“Microsoft, Exchange Server 2010 is a big improvement for our administrators,” says Lanaus. “Administrative tasks can be performed during the day with Exchange Server 2010 and without the need for staff to come in during the weekend to perform upgrades.”
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 can help you achieve better business outcomes while controlling the costs of deployment, administration, and compliance. Exchange Server 2010 delivers the widest range of deployment options, integrated information leakage protection, and advanced compliance capabilities, which combine to form the best messaging and collaboration solution available.
For more information about Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, go to:
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