Information Technology Advisory Committee - Feb 20th, 2020

VoIP. The IT department is working on the last of approx. 25 site installations. The fire and police departments have a slightly different phone system that needs special consideration. Some of the wiring in the Robbins library was redone, in order to accommodate the VoIP system. We'll install VoIP in the AHS main office before construction starts. This will allow administrator numbers to move with the phones, which could be useful during construction phasing.

The water meter project is moving along. We'll do pilot meter installations in 40 homes. Currently working out data exchange formats between the various systems.

Central School. Each former tenant in the central school installed their own wiring. The plan is to re-do all of the wiring in the building; we won't try to salvage what the former tenants put in.

Several HR forms have been converted from paper to Munis. We're adding a backup check entry station in the treasurer's office.

During the high school construction, the IT department offices will move from the basement of the high school into the DPW facility. The DPW has a vault room where most of the network equipment can be housed. The high school is the hub of the town's network infrastructure. During school construction, the goal is to move the network equipment no more than once. We may move Munis to a hosted service, in order to prevent possible disruption.

The IT department is in the process of identifying all of the places where network cabling goes into and out of the high school, so it can be marked off prior to construction. The goal is to prevent backhoe outages (i.e., having buried cables damaged by excavating equipment).

The GIS department is working on a new project with the schools. The project involves adding school buffer zones to the GIS system, along with bus routes. The visualization capability is useful when planning school enrollments, and for kindergarten registration.

The LinkedIn learning agreement is still on hold.

We're working with the school Superintendent and police chief to pilot the new In-Force 911 software. We started to adopt the product, then discovered that the Chromebook version of the software lacked several features that were available on other platforms. The schools use Chromebooks extensively, so this was an issue. There's some administrative setup to do, and some testing.

In preparation for town meeting, the IT department installed two new wireless access points in the town hall auditorium, and upgraded the WAPs that were already there. We're looking into the purchase of mounted display screens, so presenters can see the slides they're presenting (rather than having to turn around).

The town is installing a printer management system called Paper Cut. It integrates with Active Directory and allows employees to print from all sorts of devices. The queue management facilities are rather good.

The town has looked into working with a state agency in order to do a cyber security assessment. Both we and the state agency were surprised by the costs involved.

Still working on the application for Cyber Insurance.

MCAS exams will start in March. We'll have to test our caching servers and connectivity to the state's testing system.

Property card generation went very smoothly this year. The process involves Munis, the GIS system, and Patriot properties. We provisioned a better server for data preparation and instituted more process management around the project. And that made a difference.