ONLYOFFICE in the City of Hopewell

During the pandemic, Hopewell, Virginia adopted ONLYOFFICE Workspace Enterprise to enable remote work for 500 government employees, including police, municipal workers, government officials, and others.

If you want to learn more about Hopewell officials’ experience with ONLYOFFICE, just continue reading.

About Hopewell

Hopewell is a city surrounded by Prince George County and the Appomattox River in the Commonwealth of Virginia with population around 30,000. Hopewell has been called the “Wonder City”. Despite many past challenges, including the loss of the industry that initially built it, and a fire that almost destroyed it in 1915, in 2016 Hopewell celebrated its city centennial.
Hopewell in search of collaboration tool

In the times of the pandemic, the city officials needed a powerful collaboration tool to ensure remote work for the city’s 500 government employees – police, municipal workers, government officials, etc.

Concetta Manker, the IT Director in charge defined the requirements:

• secure remote access,
• sharing and co-editing documents in real-time,
• on-premise installation,
• familiar user interface,
• compatibility with Word, Excel and PowerPoint file types,
• good customer support.

Office365 and other options vs ONLYOFFICE

The first obvious solution was to migrate to Office365 Cloud as Microsoft’s extension to its MS Office or to use cloud storage like Dropbox or Box. However, all online storages required migrating all local documents to the public cloud which was not the best choice for governmental documentation.

Dr. Manker searched for the alternatives and came across ONLYOFFICE Workspace Enterprise that seemed to have most of the features she was looking for along with good reviews.

Testing Workspace Enterprise

Dr. Manker and her team decided to give it a try and downloaded a free 30-day trial version of ONLYOFFICE Workspace Enterprise.

The City’s IT personnel prepared the hardware, installed and, configured ONLYOFFICE for production in 2 hours as the city’s new private cloud. The entire process was quick and painless.

After the installation, Dr. Manker and her team were pleasantly surprised by:

• DMS with a cascading folder structure that is self-explanatory and easy to use.
• Document editing with hundreds of formatting and styling tools and familiar interface.
• More tools to manage projects, calendar, mail, and a community module with the messenger app, blogs, and forums.

Dr. Manker states:

Working in our private cloud-based program such as ONLYOFFICE fosters effective teamwork, improves communication, and boost productivity in one central hub. The staff does not have to use several software platforms to get the job done. Within ONLYOFFICE, employees can now share files and ideas, edit files in real-time and chat with others within their departments or across the organization. ONLYOFFICE has quickly changed our employees’ perception to the new reality.

Conclusion

Thinking outside the obvious solutions and adopting ONLYOFFICE helped the City of Hopewell easily switch to remote work and save $30,000 of the budget. Dr. Manker states:

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the local government to changes its traditional views on how local government should work technologically. ONLYOFFICE has provided us with an affordable tool to allow small cities to pursue big ideas that most big cities already enjoy.