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City staff outlines Office 365 migration and new collaboration tools
Summary
City staff presented the migration from Network Solutions to Office 365, demonstrating OneDrive, Teams/Planner, Forms and shared spreadsheets; council members raised concerns about authentication on personal phones and asked for a slower, staged rollout and a policy update for a public community calendar.
City staff gave the Oglesby City Council a live overview of the city’s migration from Network Solutions to Office 365 and the new collaboration tools now available to council and staff.
The presenter (identified in discussion as Mac) said the migration included moving email accounts and a range of collaborative tools — OneDrive for file storage, Teams and Planner for task management, Microsoft Forms for intake (used to populate a shared code-violation spreadsheet), and shared Word/Excel documents. Mac said the goal is to centralize key records (building permits, grants, code-violation logs) so any authorized user can retrieve up-to-date information quickly.
“The complaints automatically go in there,” Mac said, describing the code-violation log that tracks complaint type, location, contact information, assignment, first contact date, follow-up date and administrative notes. Mac said the city is still migrating locally stored files from the F drive and that some documents remain only available on city computers until fully transferred to the cloud.
Council members praised the improvements but raised implementation concerns. A council member who identified themselves as Jason said the rollout has been too rapid and described multi-account authentication conflicts that left him locked out of email for several days after the migration; he urged staff to stagger future changes and to confirm that phone and tablet access will work for all members. Another council member said the web app worked for them but that phone apps may be more reliable and urged staff to provide configuration help.
Mac acknowledged the additional security on the city’s government-tier Office plan can require stronger authentication and suggested installing Microsoft apps on staff iPads and phones to avoid browser conflicts. Mac also said staff will follow up one-on-one to resolve configuration problems and to minimize disruption.
Council members asked that any public-facing project — notably a proposed community calendar that would list events and accept community submissions subject to administrative approval — be accompanied by a revised social-media/calendar policy. Mac said that policy work will be scheduled for a future meeting.
The council did not take a formal vote on the Office 365 rollout; members directed staff to continue the migration, assist members with device configuration, and prepare recommended policy updates for council review.
