City of Paterson Retired SolarWinds Serv-U for a Citywide Files.com Exchange

Paterson is New Jersey's third-largest city, the seat of Passaic County, and home to roughly 160,000 residents. Its municipal government carries everything a city that size requires: the City Clerk, Planning and Zoning, Billing, public safety, public works, and other departments, all supported by one small central Information Technology department.

A government like that runs on documents, and the heaviest ones are the ones that have to leave the building. Commissioners review plan sets before board meetings. Architects submit drawings for review. Departments exchange records with each other and with the public. Those files are routinely too large for email, and the people who need them sit outside the city's network. A commissioner is not an IT user, and neither is an architect or a resident. None of them can be asked to install software or keep an account.

A Server That Was Slowest on the Largest Files

The city's file transfer ran on SolarWinds Serv-U, hosted on premises. The server had degraded into latency and slow downloads, and it struggled most on the large files that were its whole job. Alongside it, anything too big for email had no sanctioned path at all. Getting a plan set to a commissioner ahead of a board meeting, or taking a submission in from an architect, meant a manual workaround.

Paterson's file exchange had two ceilings: what email would carry and what an underperforming server would deliver. For the documents municipal work most depends on, both were too low.

A point fix would not have solved it. The City Clerk, Planning and Zoning, Billing, and other departments all needed the same capability, so anything built for one office would leave the rest improvising. And a small IT department could not answer a failing on-premises server by standing up another one to host and patch. The replacement had to deliver to anyone with a browser, take uploads in as well as send files out, keep each department's content separate, carry the city's own name so a recipient recognizes what they are clicking, and run with nothing installed at City Hall.

Paterson selected Files.com to be that platform, replacing Serv-U at cutover.

A City-Branded Exchange With a Folder Per Department

Paterson deployed its Files.com site under a branded file-exchange address on the city's own .gov domain, carrying the city's logo. What a commissioner or an architect sees is Paterson, not a third-party tool.

Inside, the IT director built the structure to mirror the government itself: a folder per department, subfolders per user within it, and access decided by permission groups rather than granted one person at a time. City staff hold accounts secured with multi-factor authentication. Outside recipients hold nothing. Using Files.com Share Links, staff send documents that arrive as a web page in any browser, and outside parties upload through the browser the same way, with no account and no software.

The rollout was a one-person operation. The IT director built the folders and permission groups, then brought staff on department by department, with training ahead of each wave.

Large Documents Move by Link, With No Server Behind Them

With the Files.com site in production, Paterson replaced a slow on-premises server and a set of manual workarounds with one governed exchange channel.

• Documents too large for email move directly by share link: plan sets go out to commissioners ahead of board meetings, and architect submissions come back in through the same surface.
• The on-premises Serv-U server is retired. There is nothing at City Hall to host or patch, and no slow downloads to troubleshoot.
• Several departments run on one common pattern instead of separate workarounds. Bringing another department on is a folder and a permission group, not a new project.

One Administrator, a Whole City Government

The distance travelled is worth stating plainly. One IT director, in a city of 160,000, gave city departments and outside parties a branded way to exchange the files email cannot carry, and did it without owning a file transfer server. For a municipal IT shop watching its own transfer server age, that is the lesson: The infrastructure did not need to be rebuilt. It needed to stop being theirs.