County of Santa Clara Office of the County Executive

Information Services Department

1555 Berger Drive, Bldg. 2 San Jose, California 95112-2704

(408) 918-7127 Fax 286-6289

To Whom It May Concern:

Elizabeth Park provided services to the County of Santa Clara Information Services Department

as a Communications Specialist from August 2013 through August 2015. She was hired

primarily to develop communications for the Countywide Office 365 project I managed. The

project involved migrating 16,000 County staff electronic mailboxes to Office 365 as well as

deploying new features of Office 365 to all County departments. There were over 50 separate

migration events, and the project had the complexity of differing, multiple source systems. This

effort required an extreme amount of coordination between the Communications Specialist and

the technical team, support staff and business users. After initially concentrating on the Office

365 project, her skills were soon tapped for a variety of other County projects, including but not

limited to IT Security, electronic learning, and promotion of the internal County employee portal.

Elizabeth was extremely dedicated to the project and was always willing to do what was ever

needed at any time, including off-hours and last minute tasks. The team members knew they

could depend on her, and she was well-liked. She is extremely professional, and presented herself

well whether she was called on to speak to a group or just participate in a team meeting. She is a

self-starter and would find creative solutions to problems, often by calling on her experience in

prior positions to meet one of our communication needs.

The documents she produced included communications plans, marketing documents, “coming

soon” notices, technical how-to documents, executive dashboards, training materials and a

variety of other documents. She maintained the project web portal for the business users,

working closely with the SharePoint administrators. One of her many strengths was her ability to

translate our “information-technology-speak” to language that could be understood by a non-

technical user. Even with tight deadlines and stressful circumstances, Elizabeth always

maintained a positive attitude and a sense of humor, which I much appreciated.

I am providing this reference letter as I would highly recommend her to other organizations

needing her skills. I am available to provide more information at (408) 918-4781.

Sincerely,

Darlene Gardner

Enterprise Information Technology Product Services Manager

Board of Supervisors: Mike Wasserman, Dave Cortese, Cindy Chavez, Ken Yeager, S. Joseph Simitian

County Executive: Jeffrey V. Smith