2013 Awards |
Best Website of the Year
City of Livonia Awarded - Best Website of the Year
The City of Livonia recently redesigned their website to give it a more modern appearance and added information to use the site to promote the City. A key aspect of the redesign is that it was accomplished with NO city dollars. Four years ago the Livonia Marketing Consortium was formed, initially to develop some printed materials, two TV commercials and a website known as www.livoniaspirit.org. The group raised funds through donations provided by local businesses to accomplish their goals, however, the website wasn’t generating the traffic they had hoped. Dan Putman, IS Director for the City of Livonia, worked with the group for over a year to redirect their talents and redesign the City of Livonia website to help accomplish their goals. The consortium engaged a professional web graphics firm (Octane) to develop a concept for the site and then utilized the City’s web hosting company to make the design changes. Other significant changes include information on “Why Livonia”, Visitor Information and an Education Portal page. It also added a community calendar, that includes events that are not hosted by the City, and enhanced the use of social media including Facebook and Twitter.
IT Project of the Year
City of Riverview Awarded IT Project of the Year 
Lead by Kim Harper, IT Director for the City of Riverview, the City initiated the migration from Novell Groupwise email to Google Apps cloud based system and at the same time implemented an 18 mb/sec point to point wireless system to replace existing leased T-1 lines of 1.55 mb/sec (11 times faster than the original hard line system!). In addition, the City of Riverview replaced the existing phone system with an IP based Phone system capable of utilizing the new data paths. The City cancelled eight copper fax lines and brought them in over the Digital PRI Trunk.
This small Information Technology department (1 full time, 1 part time Staff member) was able to convert the existing Novell GroupWise email system to Google Apps utilizing remote migration assistance from a vendor, and only eight hours onsite consulting time. Greatly reducing the cost of implementation in addition to the cost savings the City of Riverview obtain from a cloud hosted email solution. The wireless and new phone system implementation have cut the City’s phone vendor charges by 60%, and allows the City to place telephones at remote locations, utilizing inexpensive Wifi gear. It also helped to combine the emergency dispatch center with a nearby community’s with minimal disruption. The Cloud based Email has been well received and is much easier to manage than the legacy system. The City of Riverview migrated all existing email, calendar and contacts to Google. Since part of the return on investment strategy was to cancel maintenance on an outdated Novell system, existing file and print data was moved to Microsoft servers and Novell systems were powered off, with no vendor assistance. We are using the Google Postini 10 year retention service for old email retrieval, (subpoena, FOIA etc...)and it has performed well.