County agrees to go with complete cloud solution

GREENFIELD — Adair County employees will have greater convenience from their technology provider and maintenance might also be easier after the county switches this summer to utilizing the services of Infomax.

Doug Paskel and Neil Hyde were present at the April 28 board of supervisors meeting presenting the group with services they offer and how that can benefit the county.

The county currently utilizes Access Systems for these needs. A server is on site in the county, and when there’s an issue, Access Systems has to remotely access the server to provide maintenance or come to the county to fix it.

The primary draw of Infomax’s proposal is that there will no longer be a server on site.

“It would be in the cloud,” she said. “Everything would be on their site and we would remote into it.”

The advantage to that is an expected lower amount of times that Infomax would have to come to the county to fix problems. Instead, they could cut right to the problem because everything is on the cloud.

“If something goes wrong, we would have to wait for [Access] to come out and fix those things. This would help eliminate the waiting of that,” Berg said. “If the Infomax system works the way they say it would, they could go right to the problem and it would be a little less down time for us.”

The secondary roads department might also benefit from this new system, which Berg doesn’t expect will cost the county any more than the current system does. Secondary roads employees currently have to log into the county’s financial server in a different way than those at the courthouse do, and connectivity issues usually impacts them and what they can accomplish in the system. With the new system, even employees working from home will be able to confidently and safely enter the system to work.

“We can scan in documents and save documents in the software, and they can’t because of the way they access that software, so that would alleviate that problem also,” Berg said.

The current contract with Access Systems expires June 30, so the county is hoping to have its agreement with Infomax in place by then.

In other county news, the board:

• Acknowledged receipt of manure management plans.

• Approved a child abuse prevention grant draw down

• Heard committee updates from board members

• Made a slight adjustment to Engineer Nick Kauffman’s contract and heard a report from him on the latest maintenance and activities going on around the county.