Information Technology Advisory Committee - Jan 19th, 2017

Town email addresses were the first topic of the evening. I proposed this agenda item. The proponent of last year's warrant article (re: town email addresses for significant town bodies) feels that sufficient action has not been taken, and he's planning to re-submit the article this year.

To date, some town email addresses have been created for significant boards. This issue has come up in the past. David Good found a 2011 opinion from town counsel, stating that town business should be conducted using town email addresses.

Some individuals have expressed a desire to have a town email address forwarded to their existing personal email. We discussed the disadvantages of this approach -- it captures some communications, but not all of them.

David was contacted by an individual from Southborough, who's interested in seeing an ITAC-like group in his town. We thought it would be a nice idea to invite this individual to one of our meetings.

The Munis upgrade is progressing. The new accounting and payroll modules are fully integrated. We're testing new modules for W-2 and ACA record keeping. We're also looking at workflow changes, specifically ones that would provide for decentralized data input. For example, the inspectional services could directly enter money received through building permits, without having to send the treasurer a list of checks for entry.

Munis/RMV integration is proving to be a significant challenge.

We're also trying out a module called Tyler Content Management. This module allows town offices to scan documents and attach them to Munis records. It has to potential to simplify a lot of record keeping.

Utility billing is out for bid. Munis and north star responded to our RFP and gave demonstrations of their products. North Star's package is more full-featured, but we're not sure if those features are part of the base package, or add-ons. We're working on follow-up questions for vendors.

We discussed the recent outage of the town's DNS provider. Our DNS provider let their domain registration expire; they disappeared from the internet for a few hours, and we did too. The town is looking into new DNS providers. Several members of ITAC suggested dyn-dns.

We discussed several measures for email anti-spam and anti-spoofing: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. https://dmarcian.com/ was mentioned as a good resource for information about DMARC.