Finance Director intervenes to fix Councils biggest IT problem, Outlook in the cloud

Problem

Outlook was locking screens  for up to 30 seconds, finding names in the address book was slow, and complete disconnections from the cloud server were common - it was costing Ealing council lost of productivity every day and people reverting to other email systems.

"We can’t carry on having thousands of staff inconvenienced by simple emailing any longer, it is our single biggest problem"

Quadnet was told by Ealing

Quadnet found that just looking up a name to put in the ‘To’ field of an email was taking up to 25 seconds, while disconnections were a repeated daily occurrence. This is not only annoying and morale-sapping, but eats away at productivity too.

Simply appointing an independent assessor of Outlook’s speed was, in itself, enough to finally encourage the outsourcer to improve that speed. Even before actual monitoring had begun, the time needed to send both normal and encrypted emails fell to less than seven seconds, having been above 30 seconds throughout the previous year.