Minutes of 09/19/07

Approved 12/05/07

Ken Curley, Bob Young and Lucy Edwards were present to begin the meeting at 7 pm.  Ken served as chair until Pete Jones arrived at 7:10.  Bill Tappan was not present.

Minutes for the 08/22/2007 meeting were approved.

Ken Curley, Selectmen’s rep to the committee, announced that Network Managers, the town’s IT support company, could send a representative  to the next meeting on Oct. 17th.  The committee discussed at length what sort of questions would be appropriate to ask, and what questions should be submitted prior to the meeting.  Major issues are redundancy, back up and restoration of the network.

After some discussion Ken Curley reminded the group that not only were we paying for this person’s time, but that their contract only included fixing problems with the system, not assessment of the restoration capabilities and time frames, which he believed would be billed separately by the hour. The committee decided we could ask what the current backup setup was, how it worked, who was responsible, where the backup was kept.  But we couldn’t ask how long it would take to restore the system if there was a disaster to Town Hall, nor what suggestions for improving the system the representative might have, at least not without expecting to pay extra, which has not been approved by the selectmen.  However, once we know where we are now with this, the committee believes it has the expertise to make good suggestions on how to improve.

The committee also decided that we should invite one or more of the  Town Hall employees to join us for the meeting, so that communication about the situation would be improved.  It was suggested that Kathy Todt, the office assistant, be invited, and that the selectmen would discuss this.  Pete Jones will also write a script for the interim town administrator to pass out to the user of each PC to get printout of the current software configuration and model on each machine, so that we would have a better understanding of what operating systems and other software were being used.

There was a discussion of the e-mail hosting, and the spam problems that are becoming more and more challenging for all e-mail hosts as the volume of spam increases.  Pete Jones, who manages the e-mail for the town, feels that we will need to make a move to a larger company with more filtering capability at some point.  The e-mail at Town Hall has had several outages recently because of spam overload at the host.  Bob Young suggested that if we could, we should wait until we are ready to make our first report, perhaps next month after the  meeting with Network Managers, so that we can suggest changes at one time.

The meeting adjourned at 9:10.

The next meeting is Oct. 17 at 7pm at Town Hall.

Respectfully submitted,
 Lucy Edwards