Kane County Reporter

Trustees in the Village of North Aurora expect to save thousands of dollars by upgrading to a single-source Microsoft cloud-based solution for storing village documents.

The village had money in the budget to replace the police file server, establish a new document management system, and upgrade its Microsoft Office products, but found it to be more cost effective to consolidate to Microsoft O365.

"I, just personally, I think that's the way to go," Trustee Mark Carroll said during the Dec. 5 meeting. "And I think if you get a FOIA request to have to manually go through the actual documents, that would save so much money to find that document management system and be able to search it. And you can, what you could do in five minutes and probably don't need employees to carry that out. It would save the village a lot of money."

Currently, the village uses some cloud storage and some physical storage and is using Office 2013. Village IT officials stated that switching to 0365 would eliminate the need for most of the servers at village hall and the police department, plus provide extra security and automatic updates.

It's estimated just to upgrade 84 licenses for the Office Software alone would cost the village about $43,000. The cost for consolidating to the single cloud server is estimated to be $134,000 over the next six years, compared to the little more than $300,000 it would cost to to keep operating as the village is currently.

Trustees also approved upgrading mobile devices to AT&T FirstNet from Verizon. IT officials said FirstNet is catered to first responders that prioritizes their ability to communicate should a cell tower go out or if there is a natural disaster. The cost of the data plan is also cheaper than the one offered through Verizon.