“City employees benefit from easy access to the applications from anywhere they have an internet connection.”
Located in Oakland County, Michigan, Rochester Hills features a quality of life and a thriving commerce that few communities its size can match. The city features quality housing; award-winning school districts; over 80 miles of linked pathways and a regional interlinking rails-to-trails system; and an abundance of cultural, historical, educational, medical and entertainment venues. Rochester Hills is situated in Automation Alley, Michigan’s premier technology cluster, and one of ten SmartZones in Michigan.
Google Workspace Reduces Costs and Improves Productivity
Even with all of this going for us, we’re no stranger to the budget issues facing governments everywhere. All city staff are challenged by our Mayor and City Council to find ways to be more efficient and reduce operational costs. That’s one of the reasons why we decided to Go Google: We realized Google Workspace would save us an estimated $50,000 over the first six years, compared with upgrading and maintaining the existing Microsoft Exchange email system.
Google Workspace also simplified our IT infrastructure and reduces support costs. We eliminated two servers and the associated operating system and application software. That translated into less equipment and software to patch and replace in the future, which still makes our day-to-day maintenance less time-consuming and our next network upgrades less complicated.
City employees have benefited from easy access to the applications from anywhere they have an Internet connection. With a training portal built-in Google Sites, staff learn whenever and wherever they have the time. We use Google Video to provide training and informational videos to staff allowing them to learn at their own pace.
Rochester Hills selected Onix as our implementation partner. In order to keep the costs low, we did most of the implementation in-house, with Onix providing valuable support during the process as needed. It took about three weeks to move all 200 employees to Google Workspace We also trained our staff on the features of G Suite and answered questions. Overall, the transition went as smoothly as we had hoped it would.
Since going live on Google Workspace, I can say that we are very happy with our decision to move to the world of 100 percent web.
Posted by Wendy Wu, Google Government Team
Editor’s Note: Google Workspace is FedRAMP compliant. FedRAMP is a government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.
