Achievements

• Capabilities now on par with larger cities

• Addressed Sunshine compliance issues

• Improved communication with staff and residents

• More polished, professional public image

• Improved disaster readiness

Benefits

• Easy self-management

• Outstanding reliability and uptime

• No internal servers or IT staff

• Pro-active management

• Easy expansion to add permitting, payments, budgeting, and more

Additional Info

Whitepaper

Sample Report

Enterprise Email

Vistalogix Portfolio

Home to 1,972 residents, the Town of Zolfo Springs has been in existence since 1904 and exemplifies old-Florida charm. However, the town recognized that their public website did not convey such charm, nor was it fully compliant with Florida's Sunshine Laws.

Not only was the site looking dated, but it did not allow easy updating, which meant that documents and information for residents were far out of date. "Anytime we wanted to update something, we had to call [their provider] and there was another fee," remarked Amanda Gibson, Town Clerk.

Documents like meeting minutes and budgets were not updated regularly, nor was the layout of the site consistent, or appealing to the eye. In addition, the town did not have reliable, Sunshine-compliant email in place, either. So, in 2012, Finance Director and Town Manager Linda Roberson, along with the mayor and town council, decided it was time to rectify the whole situation.

The new Zolfo Springs website has opened the door to an assortment of options, such as online payments, managing citizens' requests, activity-based budgeting, online document management, and much more. Simple as it may seem, their email system now gives staff easier access to their calendars, contacts and email without having to be in the office - at a far lower cost than their neighboring municipalities are paying for in-house servers.

Of course, it would be remiss to not mention the vastly more professional public image of the management and council being presented by the better organized, and more polished, public website.

Bringing Zolfo Springs up to date with technology, without disrupting operations was a 2-step process for the Town. Step one (and most urgent): address the frequent outages and compliance issues with their email. This involved not only migrating all of their historical mail, but defining new addresses, since they were no longer limited by the naming requirements of their previous email system. Amanda Gibson oversaw the project for the Town: "Vistalogix's staff and migration tools made bringing our mail over to the new system painless - even with last minute changes because we had more freedom to name mailboxes differently than we had."

The next step was to completely refresh the town's website using Vistalogix's Portfolio software as the foundation. This entailed more "creation" than "migration," as the limitations of the town's previous website and provider left them with minimal content. "[Vistalogix] really held our hands when it came to what our website should contain and how it should be organized, as well as helping create the look of it," said Amanda. "It was nice not having to deal with giving them a lot of extra guidance on top of everything else going on here."

Zolfo Springs is now in a better position than even some of their larger neighbors to leverage technology for things like online payments, permitting, citizen request management, budget optimization, and much more.