Klamath County, Oregon

Project: Office Productivity

Klamath County, Oregon is one of Oregon’s geographically largest counties spanning 6,000 square miles. The county has about 70,000 residents and a staff of 600 employees spread across the expansive county. County employees typically leverage video conferencing on a regular basis. When the county’s director of IT realized that the need to upgrade IT capacity was imminent, coupled with the fact that the county faced a budget crunch, he began evaluating cloud-based solutions.

After considering the options, the county decided to migrate to a hosted solution, and selected Microsoft Online Business Productivity Suite. This would not only free up valuable human resources from managing the server environment, but also cut costs. The county also noted the potential for dependability of the system to improve since performance was not tied to county IT staff’s ability to keep the servers optimized.

With this migration, the county was able to keep costs low and ensure that IT personnel and other resources were used appropriately amidst the flat county revenues. The personnel required to manage the e-mail solution decreased by 1.5 full time equivalents, an 86 percent reduction. The county also managed to implement new features including integrated messaging, collaborative tools to increase productivity for the entire county, and the ability to archive emails for a longer period of time.