Going Google

How Franklin County, Pa moved to a cloud based email platform

Sean E. Crager
Formerly known as the CIO of Franklin County, Pa

Franklin County, PA
Located in South Central Pennsylvania
2010 US Census population of 149,618

48% increase in 40 years and 16% since 2000

One of the top ten fastest growing counties in PA

County Government

650 Employees
54 Departments
13 Administration buildings
1 Jail
1 Courthouse
7 Magisterial District Judge locations
8 Senior Centers

Business Challenge
Previous solution was on premise antiquated version of Novell Groupwise
Solution was not meeting end users needs for light weight and easy to use communication
solution
Fast county growth meant a greater need for effective communications and collaboration

The existing architecture was expensive and not centralized

Due to an antiquated network infrastructure, there was a requirement for an email server at
almost every building location.
Backups were slow and utilized a lot of bandwidth resources

Email retention and archiving was not meeting the needs of the county and was
cumbersome
There was lack of effective and easy to manage mobile solutions for email
Document edit/collaboration capabilities did not exist and no online file storage
Smaller sized staff meant dedicating time to maintain infrastructure and email
solution that could be better spent elsewhere

Solution!
Realization that a cloud based solution would solve many of the issues
Increase in user productivity with an easy to use and familiar email platform
Provide cloud storage for documents
Real-time editing/collaborating/sharing

Decrease support from IT

Personnel time
Infrastructure
Local installs for email clients

Easily integrate into our mobile devices

Provide for a way to mange mobile devices that contained

corporate data

Free up floor space and reduce utilities

Less servers/storage consume less power

Secure

Met federal security standards

Willingness to sign a Business Associates Agreement (BAA) to meet HIPAA needs

Save money!

Google Apps for Government

Survey showed that 35% of employees were
already using Gmail as their personal email
solution
Solutions provided:

Gmail 30Gb inboxes and mobile device

management
Google Sites Built Intranet site with this web site
technology
Google Hangouts Ability to IM and video
conference. Courts used to video conference inmates.
Google Docs Online document creation, storage and
real time collaboration.
Calendar Schedule people and resources
Google Vault Unlimited storage for backup and
archiving. Allowed for easy eDiscovery.

How We Did It
Hired a third party integrator to
preform the migration
Trained staff and created super
users within the departments
Migration occurred over a
weekend
Friday we were Groupwise
Monday we were Google!

Performed more in-depth

training after a few weeks of use

Get People Excited!

Results and Benefits!

Savings of $47,000 annually
Eliminated 10 physical servers
Eliminated terabyte (and quickly
growing) of on premise data from storage
Reduction in utility consumption
Easier to manage licensing
99.9% uptime SLAs
Reduction of 1.5 FTE in support for on
premise email solution
Improved security
Disaster recovery
Happy customers!

Thank You!