Information Technology Advisory Committee - Jan 24th, 2019

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The Hardy school's six new classrooms are now in service, each having a cart of thirty chromebooks and an A/V system. It cost around $15k to outfit each classroom. The new classrooms have VoIP installed; the rest of the school will get VoIP over the next break.

The school's social media policy is still being drafted. Principals will be responsible for content posted by their teachers. The policy still needs review by the superintendent and school committee.

The Google issue. Several of our students discovered a bug in Google's auto-login system. Logging in to the school department's Google for Education tools automatically logged the students in to YouTube. This enabled a number of under-13 students to create YouTube accounts, post material, and join groups. In effect, this amounts to sharing information about a child with a site that shouldn't have it. The flaw was discovered by a tech-savvy parent.

The town had several discussion with Google, and are working to resolve the issue.

Munis. We've done Q3 real estate taxes in Munis, migrated the parking system, installed the cashiering module, and implemented parts of employee self-service. We're planning a version upgrade. The new version of Munis is more powerful, but requires more server resources.

Utility Billing. We've selected two finalists for water meter data collection and management. The town is in the process of checking their references, and looking for other towns that have done multi-stream utility billing.

Server room DR testing went well. We'll do more DR tests in the future.

Powerschool was upgraded to version 12. Customized pages have a different style of coding in this version, so the upgrade required page conversions.

VoIP was installed at the Brackett school during the winter break. Three small facilities will receive VoIP next, and then the Ottoson. The Ottoson has a different phone system than any other town building, which may pose unique challenges. We're working on a schedule for the rollout.

David Good and Steve Nesterak are working together on security, video, and energy management systems for the different town buildings.

The senior center renovation will involve the re-use of existing network cabling. Each building tenant has done their own data wiring, so it's a real patchwork in there.

The IT department will move from the Arlington High School into the new public works facility (once the new DPW facility is built).

The town is looking at the feasibility of using its fiber to carry signals to emergency responder radio transmitters. The current thinking involves adding one transmitter to each of the town's two water towers, with the goal of eliminating radio dead zones. Attleboro has a system like this.

Assessors property cards are being updated on the town website. We're currently working with Patriot Properties to resolve several issues. They're using a batch job to generate PDFs from property card data, but the job never gets through the entire batch -- it stops a few thousand cards short. A fix is still pending.