Borough E-Mail Moves to the Cloud Today!

Today might have seemed just like another rainy Wednesday to you. But it was a BIG day for me. After months of research, planning, preparation and living through "co-existence", today, May 4, 2011 the on-premises exchange (e-mail) server was shut down, hopefully for the final time. I crossed my fingers after shutting the server down and was elated to see mail flowing normally. After a tweak here and there other services that we have all come to rely on such as fax-scan-copy to email, unified messaging and help desk work orders were all up and in service as well.

The magic of the cloud is this. Without having to maintain a mail server and replacing it on average every 4 years at a cost of $20,000 the Borough now has more efficient mail services including enhanced security, superior data protection, liability protection and more ways than ever of connecting in to our email services.

Some of these enhancements include

• 14 days back-up of email is expanded to 10 year compliance archiving.

• As opposed to our email residing on one server at our facility, our email is written simultaneously to 6 "department of defense" certified data centers located at various locations across the United States.

• Enhanced liability protection because “open records” rules require local government to maintain files, including email for information and court requests. The compliance archiving will protect our government because these files will accessible upon request.

• Built-in spam filtering as opposed to having to pay a third party for this protection.

• Our partnership with Microsoft will keep the borough up to date with the highest standards of office productivity while controlling cost.

• The Borough has an information technology staff of one. Moving the e-mail service to Microsoft’s cloud will continue to support maintaining a minimal staff while providing effective technology services.

There are many more exciting things on the horizon in reference to our move to Microsoft’s Cloud like Microsoft 365.
Standby for more news from cloud and enjoy. Boy is it comfortable up here.