The Town Of Cheektowaga And Inergex Work Together To Successfully Build An Enterprise Portal For 500+ Employees Using Microsoft SharePoint™

Client: Town Of Cheektowaga
Client Location: United States
Client Industry: Government

Client Profile
As one of the largest towns in New York State, Cheektowaga is located in Western New York, and is a suburb of Buffalo. When Cheektowaga celebrated the centennial of its incorporation as a town in 1939 the population was 25,000. Currently Cheektowaga has almost 100,000 residents. Cheektowaga is and will continue to be one of the most progressive townships in New York State. Its residents and businesses have faith in its past and look forward to the towns bright future.

Business Situation & Challenge
The Town of Cheektowaga functions as 31 different departments. Because of this diversity, the need for streamlined communications is essential to ensure effective and efficient operations. Unfortunately, the internal ability to collaborate information has been poor, as is the case with most government entities. Interdepartmental communications were essentially non-existent and the department personnel were unable to easily share information—which created additional work as well as a lower level of customer service to the town residents. There was no central and standardized way to keep personnel updated on pertinent information such as policy changes, procedures, updated documents, meetings/events, etc. Cheektowaga needed a solid, scalable, and easy to use collaboration tool and process to resolve their ongoing communications challenges.

Solution
The Town of Cheektowaga was in search of a solution that was efficient and easy to use for all 500+ employees. The solution had to be:

• Easy-to-access and use (Web browser based)
• Simple to update allowing users to manage their own areas to post information
• User-friendly for users/administrators so they could be more self-sufficient requiring little, if any IT involvement
• Flexible and scalable to meet their changing needs and operational demands
• A solution that would leverage their previous investments in technology and technical training

Inergex, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, was selected to help the Town of Cheektowaga overcome their communications challenges after demonstrating a potential “Vision for the future of information and application delivery within the town”. Once reviewing the Town’s objectives for a solution, Inergex recommended Microsoft Office SharePoint™ Portal Server 2003 as the solution of choice. SharePoint offered some core functionality right out-of-the-box. In addition to the out-of-the-box features set, Inergex built more robust, customized features based on the users’ input and requirements. Inergex helps to implement the solution to all employees to ensure high levels of continuous user adoption. The SharePoint Portal provided the features, flexibility, and scalability to grow with the Town of Cheektowaga over time as additional customized capabilities need to be added for complaint tracking, permit and inspection management, and a variety of other applications.

Project Results & Benefits
The portal solution helped to overcome one of the biggest challenges that organizations of all kinds have today—finding, consolidating, and sharing critical information in a single, easy-to-access and manage location. The Town can now manage all kinds of information in a centralized location for all (based on authorization levels) personnel to view and/or use—i.e. special events listings, news and announcement alerts, policy changes, employee directories, procedural documentation, etc. The enterprise search capability has also helped employees find relevant information in a timely and more efficient fashion. By offering security features and easy integration with Microsoft Office products, SharePoint has successfully been able to save employees countless hours trying to find, retrieve, and decipher updated and/or outdated information. It has greatly improved overall communications and collaboration among employees from all departments. “Government is notoriously resistant to change. Working with Inergex and the implementation of Microsoft SharePoint in our environment has helped to drive and foster positive change where there was none,” said Tom Przybylak, Town of Cheektowaga. “It has helped our municipality work more efficiently and deliver better services internally to one another and externally to our community.” For more information about the Town of Cheektowaga, please visit www.tocny.org.

Inergex_Cheektowaga_CS.pdf