Minutes of 12/05/07

Approved 02/20/08

The meeting was called to order at 7:15 pm.  Pete Jones, Bob Young and Lucy Edwards were in attendance.

The minutes of 9/19/07 and 10/17/07 were approved as written.

Chair Pete Jones handed out a grandfather-father-son backup system calendar, and a Network Managers estimate to set up an e-mail server in house, total $9995.  This was discussed versus the option of using Google, which is currently free.  Bob Young raised the issue of having a volunteer running the e-mail system for the town, whichever version we use.  Pete pointed out that right now he was doing the e-mail using JTAN,  which was not an intuitive program, and that the Google version was  probably easier for someone who was not as experienced as he was with software.  He stated that either Microsoft or Google provided more  than just e-mail, there were shared calendars, and other productivity programs included.  There was a discussion of the person who should  be handling this for the town and the consensus was that we really should have a person to manage our IT, perhaps someone we could share with other towns, or someone on staff who was expert enough to manage the system.  There was no decision made on changing the e-mail program.

Pete told us that JTAN changed their spam filtering to reject e-mail coming from dynamic addresses, and that the town hall reported much less spam recently.  There are still problems with that platform concerning ease of use and data storage capability.

The library is moving to their own website, which will be linked to the town’s site.  The question was raised about whether library staff would still be available to be administrators on the town site to approve and post articles.

There was discussion of who should be doing an RFP for the new  cabling at town hall.  After Selectman Curley arrived at 8:40, the decision was made that the committee would do this and have it ready for a warrant article.  It was agreed that we needed to have a specialized vendor, not simply an electrician.  Cabling should include coaxial for cable TV and internet hookups throughout town hall.  The committee will meet at town hall in the near future to survey the site and locate where the hub and outlets should be.  This will be easily expandable into any addition to the town hall in the future.

A decision was also made to submit a protocol and policy for backing up the information on the town hall system using the grandfather-father-son procedure Pete had submitted.  This would involve 20 tapes, one for each day Monday through Thursday for daily backups, one for each Friday in the month for weekly backups, and 12 tapes for monthly backups which would be archived in a fireproof lock box at  the library.  Pete will get prices and write up a protocol for submission to the selectboard.

Ken filled us in on the security groups and permissions, which had last been set up by Network Managers at the direction of Sandy Garrett when she took over as interim town administrator.  These limit who can access which files on the network.

There was a discussion of how to get all data on the server, since right now some data is saved to the server and some is saved on individual machines. The consensus was to implement new the back up policy first by Jan. 1.  Once we know we have a backup, then we would create a user friendly protocol on how to make sure that documents and other information gets saved to the server.  The possibility of having this done automatically was considered, but Ken stated he much preferred that employees learn how to do this, and that it be part of their job.

The meeting adjourned at 9:20.

Respectfully submitted,
 Lucy Edwards