Sheboygan County’s employees take pride in providing courteous, responsive, and effective service. Its existing email and productivity tools, however, were outdated and created challenges for an IT team that wanted to enhance collaboration across the organization.

To replace its aging, on-premises mail server, Chris Lewinski, IT Director for Sheboygan County, sought a cloud solution that would offer improvements for county employees, in addition to being easier to maintain for the IT staff.

Connecting anywhere, without limits

“Mobility and scalability were two important benefits that Google Workspace delivered immediately,” says Chris, “while providing the foundation to modernize our productivity and collaboration tools so we better serve the public.”

The first phase of the Google Workspace rollout focused on publicizing Gmail and Calendar, along with education on how to migrate and manage contacts for use with the new tools. With Gmail, even employees who were initially reluctant to change welcomed the unlimited storage that the new solution offers. “It was a big selling point for us to be able to tell employees that they would no longer get ‘mailbox full’ warnings,” says Chris.

Employees can now easily and more securely access email or check their schedules on any device, wherever they are, without needing to use VPN. Sophisticated spam filters further boost productivity and security. “Only about 40% of all email sent to the county reaches a person’s inbox. Gmail filtering contributed to diverting the other 60%, which is either malicious or spam content,” Chris says. “The phishing risk reduction is a great benefit on top of the 100% email encryption and other Google Workspace security features. Plus, employees save the time of wading through junk mail, freeing up their time for more impactful work on administering county programs.”

The county is using Mobile Management, requiring its installation on any personal or county-owned device for users signing in to their county accounts to access their Gmail or Calendar for work. This provides good visibility into who is accessing the organization’s Google environment remotely and allows enforcement of security best practices, such as encryption and passcode protection, along with device wiping in the event of loss or theft.

Collaborating to serve the public

Although some of the Google Workspace apps will be promoted more widely to employees in future phases, early adopters at the county already enjoy using Google Chat, Docs, and Sheets. “It’s a hybrid approach to phase the training, while letting enthusiastic self-starters explore and use more of the tools on their own. The tools are so intuitive, it makes it easy for the early adopters,” explains Chris.

One example is the Sheriff’s Department, which is excited to be able to concurrently edit important shared documents and worksheets. The online collaboration eliminates previous challenges from multiple versions floating around or staffers finding files locked for editing. This makes routine tasks, such as updating the sheriff’s daily roll call spreadsheet, easier and frees up more time to focus on the sheriff’s primary mission to protect and serve the community.

Future projects under consideration include use of YouTube for training videos, Google Meet for video conferences in lieu of traveling for some meetings, and Sites to make it easier for employees to update web pages about different county programs, further promoting collaboration within departments and across teams.

“Agility is highly prized in the private sector. It’s also important for a government organization to continually adapt to changing circumstances. With the shift to the cloud, Sheboygan County is embracing new tools to be more responsive to citizens,” Chris says.