Municipal Bites

Imagine how you would feel if years of work and data gathering was rendered useless by a new software system.

The data has not been lost or stolen. It is still in dusty files in those old filing cabinets. That drawer full of floppy discs still has some useful information. The computer archives go back a few years and contain hundreds of spreadsheet files from Excel® and as far back as Lotus 1-2-3®. And now you have to decide how to get all this important data into your new software solution. It could take months of arduous work to convert, and who knows if the new software can even use all that data.

With gariston™ municipal, this process will be far easier than you could have imagined.

When The Municipality of Tweed in Southern Ontario decided to switch to gariston™ municipal, the first data gathering session was an eye-opener.

"We sat around a large conference table and I asked them to give us each piece of data they had," said gariston™ municipal Product Manager Will Thornback.

Soon, the conference table was covered in large sheets of paper with spreadsheets printed on them. Floppy discs by the dozens were brought out. And backups of computer files were added. The end result was a pile of data that constituted a huge work effort by Tweed employees over the years.

"We did not want to undermine the work these people had done and we certainly did not want to waste this valuable data," said Thornback.

Tweed’s Treasurer, Betty Gallagher, was concerned about the length of time needed to convert all this information into useful and accessible gariston™ municipal data. There were worries that it would take weeks, if not months, of conversion efforts.

The conversion ultimately did not drag into months or even weeks.

"The data was up and running in gariston™ municipal within 48 hours," said Thornback proudly.

"It was an impressive effort and I was encouraged by how much of our data they were able to use in the new system," said Gallagher.

The ability to accept and utilize existing data is one of the key features of the gariston™ municipal solution. When you can re-use previous work and not have to re-do someone else's efforts, the power of gariston™ municipal becomes abundantly clear.

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