Information Technology Advisory Committee - Jan 18th, 2018

There are two new hires working in the town CTO's office.

There's another Munis upgrade in the works. This upgrade will allow the town to distribute A/R functions across town groups.

The Treasurer's office used Munis to close the year's financials, rather than ICS. It worked reasonably well. The town will use Munis to issue 2017 W-2s. Employee self-serve is a future Munis project.

On the school side, we need to make a decision about what to do with 1,800 older iPads. Earlier grades use tablets. Older grades use Chromebooks.

The Thompson school addition opened in November. That meant keeping the modular units longer than anticipated. The Thompson modulars are still in place, and will allow the town to relocate some functions from Gibbs (e.g., recreational programs). The Gibbs renovation is getting started and should be finished by Aug 2018 or so. Construction meetings are ongoing. The Hardy school may need a similar six-room addition. The town is planning a kick-off for the high school renovation.

Charlie Foskett asked the town's IT department to set up equipment, to allow the finance committee to meet over Skype. This was done in the public safety building's O'Neil room. It worked well, but not super well. The CTO's office is starting to think about facilities for remote meeting, like Skype for business.

The Stratton school renovations were completed on time, with all IT services up and running.

The Hardy PTO sponsored a project to put projectors in classrooms. There are some challenges in getting the Chromebooks to work with the new projectors. An ITAC members asks if a large TV would be better than a projector. Teachers want the ability to project onto a whiteboard, and then annotate the image with whiteboard markers. You can do that with a projector and a whiteboard, but you can't do it with a TV.

The town has replaced Kaspersky anti-virus with a product from Web Root.

The town is planning to revive the VoIP project, with a new RFP.

The town is comparing Google for Government vs. Office 365. At the moment, Office 365 is more price-competitive, and appears to have better licensing options.

Town IT has adopted a new helpdesk tool; the same one that's currently used in the school system. There are typically 500 tickets/month from the school district. This information is helpful in planning IT/helpdesk workloads. It also permits analysis of common issues.

The IT department is doing application development work with the water department. Meters report usage once per day, and sometime there are issues with missing readings. We had planned to use Munis for water billing, but it's turns out that you need a water meter management system to clean up raw readings, and provide that as input to the billing module.