{"id":2488,"date":"2017-05-17T15:04:55","date_gmt":"2017-05-17T22:04:55","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2019-10-16T02:21:55","modified_gmt":"2019-10-16T02:21:55","slug":"city-golden-simplifies-email-management-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/industry\/microsoft-in-business\/customer-experience\/2017\/05\/17\/city-golden-simplifies-email-management-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"How the City of Golden simplifies email management with the cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
<\/a><\/td>\nFocus on: Empowering employees and optimizing operations<\/span><\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Tucked in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, roughly 18,000 people call the City of Golden, Colorado home. The city itself is commonly known for two things: the final resting place for William \u201cBuffalo Bill\u201d Cody and one of last opportunities for travelers to stop and get gas before they venture further into the Rocky Mountains. But since 2006, the City of Golden has evolved from a \u201cthrough city\u201d into a thriving destination. A local urban renewal campaign brought a revitalized downtown to the city, filling its streets with visitors, its stores with out-of-town shoppers, and igniting the economy in an era where many municipalities suffered.<\/p>\n

Today, thousands of visitors stop in to explore \u201cWhere the West Lives.\u201d There\u2019s the Coors Brewery, Buffalo Bill Museum, Colorado Railroad Museum, high-class dining experiences, and quaint bed and breakfasts with breathtaking mountain views. Every day new shops and service providers are flocking to the City of Golden to seek their fortune, sales tax revenues are increasing, and the city is thriving in a way that recalls the gold rush of its founding\u2014but that success comes at a cost.<\/p>\n

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As the City of Golden continues to grow, so must its infrastructure. More visitors means adding more utilities, more city employees, more recreational services\u2014and every new development puts a greater strain on the city\u2019s IT.<\/p>\n

City IT Manager Kirk Dickson was tasked with the technological infrastructure demands of Golden\u2019s rapid growth. \u201cOur challenge internally is that although Golden is a relatively small city, we\u2019re still a full-service city,\u201d Kirk explains. \u201cEven though we might only average 300 employees a year, we still provide a full host of services.\u201d<\/p>\n

In many cities, services like parks and recreation, water treatment, or even golf courses are maintained and operated by separate departments, but not in Golden. The Golden IT team supports ten separate lines of business\u2014email, internet, networking, telecommunications, maintenance, and more\u2014and 200 service applications, many of which are 24\/7 critical services like 911. Every day, they must make limited resources stretch between each facility, and that challenge brought Golden to Microsoft and Exchange Online.<\/p>\n

This is a real story of digital transformation.<\/p>\n

\"\"Freeing employees to focus on high-value projects<\/strong><\/span>
\nWith Exchange Online, Kirk and his team discovered an opportunity to automate many of their daily struggles\u2014tasks like email management\u2014without sacrificing performance.<\/p>\n

According to Kirk, \u201cIt\u2019s the problems that they\u2019re not seeing that have been the real benefits. The hours that we spent supporting email in a week, that\u2019s time that we\u2019re able to put into implementing a new application. We\u2019re seeing that time come back into the staff.\u201d<\/p>\n

This newfound flexibility allows the City of Golden\u2019s IT team greater opportunities to invest in high-value tasks like improving those service applications or discovering and applying new innovations to better serve their citizens.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really became a question of where we wanted to invest our time and resources.\u201dImproving efficiency and removing worries<\/strong><\/span>
\nWith Exchange Online, Kirk took advantage of an opportunity to automate many of their daily struggles\u2014tasks like email management\u2014without sacrificing performance.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the [cost] aligned pretty evenly [between cloud versus on-premises hosting], we knew we were going to be saving the time that we spent supporting Exchange\u2014it really just made sense to let someone else handle it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Exchange Online is a standalone piece of Office 365 that can serve as a stepping stone to the full Office 365 suite. It provided the City of Golden with a familiar platform that didn\u2019t require lengthy onboarding. In addition, City of Golden is running Exchange Online on Microsoft Government Cloud, which offers industry-leading compliance features, including CJIS for criminal justice data and IRS 1075 for Federal tax information, and specifically caters to the needs to U.S. government agencies. The service integrated directly into the tools city employees had been using for years, to the extent that many employees didn\u2019t even realize it when their inbox migrated to the cloud. Now, their previous issues with spam and server space are a thing of the past.<\/p>\n

But this experience goes beyond email\u2014with Exchange Online the City of Golden can better continue the growth they started ten years ago, confident that they have full access to the resources they need to better serve a thriving community with efficiency and diligence.Transforming a city, transforming a region<\/strong><\/span>
\nThe City of Golden isn\u2019t the only Colorado community upgrading their IT. Across the state, the Colorado Government Association of Information Technology (CGAIT) works with government employees like the members of Kirk\u2019s team to better drive government transparency and connect smaller municipalities with other communities to share the load of on-boarding new platforms.<\/p>\n

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\u201cAs a citizen and a tax payer, it\u2019s always a bummer to know that my organization and ten other cities are literally doing the same thing 10 times over,\u201d Kirk says. It\u2019s his vision to see smaller cities and towns throughout the region band together to adopt government cloud technology, rather than each location grinding through those efforts independently. By binding the efforts of each city represented in CGAIT, Golden\u2019s IT team can leverage their resources and capabilities to meet the needs of their region.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of people that could really benefit from this,\u201d Kirk continues. \u201cIt\u2019s not about Golden or [other cities] and it\u2019s certainly not about making a profit; it\u2019s absolutely about the citizens.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

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