LA County Scraps Exchange Upgrade for Office 365
The County of Los Angeles has nearly 100,000 employees on its payroll. When Richard Sanchez, CIO of LA County, saw an opportunity to begin evaluating a more matured Exchange Online Office 365 offering, he halted the onsite Exchange implementation and began testing out the cloud email service with some of his end users. Although Sanchez’s onsite Exchange migration was nearly 40% complete, Sanchez decided to put the project on hold.
What caused Sanchez to change the direction of Los Angeles County’s entire email system? Sanchez mentioned, “There were considerable costs we were incurring on for migration services, as well as for storage, computing facilities and the like.” While Sanchez’s crew hustled along with the traditional build out of on premises exchange server, Sanchez’s research showed him that his end users would get more functionality at a smaller price tag by choosing the cloud alternative. Once fully migrated to Office 365, LA County’s end users will receive full-fledged access to the Microsoft Office 365 suite including extras such as Sharepoint, Exchange and OneNote.
Office 365 allows end users to take their work with them on their mobile devices. LA County can now implement a BYOD policy with 365 in use. Office 365 makes sense for LA County because the government has many employees that work in the field such as health inspectors. Sanchez went on to say, “We saw Office 365 as an opportunity to leverage the additional technology and also relieve us from the burden of having to manage email and continue to acquire hardware for storage and software licenses.”
Another key factor that persuaded Sanchez to change course is the licensing needed to operate a 100% Microsoft on-premises infrastructure. Many organizations hire one person or one department to manage all software licensing. Sanchez saw an opportunity to not only bring cloud services to his end users, he used Office 365 as a method to simplify his Microsoft licensing costs. According to reports, Office 365 will begin rolling out to LA County employees in August of this year and En Pointe Technologies will consult with Sanchez and his team on the initial roll out.
