The city of Stockton has rolled out a new cloud-based email system and productivity tools citywide for employees as of Oct. 15.
Stockton replaced its Groupwise email system with the Microsoft Office 365 hosted solution and has moved to Office 2013, CIO Nabil Fares told Techwire.
Fares, who previously was CIO of the state’s Department of Public Health, explored a range of solutions for the new email system, such as moving into the state of California’s new email system, which ultimately did not move forward earlier this year. So Stockton struck its own deal with Microsoft.
“I clearly saw that Office 365 will help our employees – we have about 1,600 employees – with collaboration and productivity, giving a good business solution which matches the century we live in,” said Fares.
Fares said Stockton is running Windows 7 right now and will soon move to Windows 10. The city also will be moving some data and documents, where appropriate, into Microsoft’s Azure cloud solution. Fares said he’s particularly interested in using Azure to house footage taken from body-worn cameras. He also plans a major digital document push, where 6 million documents dating back to 1804 would be scanned and stored in Azure.
“The city of Stockton today is a big field for collaboration, innovation and productivity tools. Stockton, for mitigating factors – mainly the bankruptcy [years ago] – was not able to spend as appropriate to supply technology for business solutions. And the leadership was aware of this and the importance of IT,” Fares said.
Consequently Stockton hired Fares 10 months ago and formed a new IT department.
Of note, as part of the transition, city email addresses have changed: email addresses for city employees have changed domain name from @stocktongov.com to @stocktonca.gov.
