Minutes of 05/21/08

Approved 06/25/08

Members present were Ken Curley, Pete Jones, Bob Young and Lucy Edwards

Meeting started at 7:07pm.

Minutes of the April meeting were approved as written.

The committee reviewed the short term goals set at the last meeting:

Getting the pdf software up and running:  Pete made a CD with the instructions and software.  He showed the committee how it works.  He will give it to the town administrator and Mr. Martel will implement loading it on the work stations.  There are instructions included.

E-mail migration to a different host:  the committee approved a move to Google Mail from JTAN.  Google is free.  There have been issues with receiving e-mail from town attorneys; JTAN’s new spam filters, which really cut down the amount of spam, also block e-mail from any server that does not have a static address, and the server that some of the attorneys use does not.  There are also issues with the amount of storage space on the servers, especially for the planning department staff who receive large attachments, Google will provide much more storage.  It will also make it much easier to access e-mail from computers outside of town hall, which will increase the staff efficiency.  Pete says this change will take some time because the company that manages the nh.us domain names works by phone and fax, not e-mail or web interface (government domain names were given to certain companies in the different regions, and only they handle these domain names). Pete will notify the selectmen that this will be taking place sometime over the next month or two, probably over a weekend.

Partial wireless access for Town Hall LAN (local area network):  
There is now wireless access in the meeting hall portion of Town Hall.  A cost estimate of $1000 was received to map the wiring in the office part of the town hall, rather than incur the cost, the plan is to place a wireless router in the building department area to use as backup.  That way if the wired network fails there would still be access for PCs with wireless adapters.  Eventually all the PCs will fitted with wireless.

Data organization policy:  to be addressed at a later date purchasing/procurement policy (Bill Tappan was identified as the best person to write this):  Bill has not been able to attend the meetings 
due to work commitments, this will be addressed later

Bob Young, who is also the head of Northwood’s emergency management, brought up a questionnaire that the town will receive regarding the national standards for emergency management organization.  Two of the questions concerned communication networks at our level of government and he will have to answer no to both of them, because we really do not have good networks for disseminating information in an emergency or for coordinating the response.  He suggests that once we get the Town Hall in a more secure and effective state, we should work on this issue. How do we make sure that all the emergency responders can communicate effectively?

We also added password security on our list of things to address.

Meeting adjourned 8:50pm

Our next meeting will be Wed., June 18th, at 7 pm at Town Hall.  
(Changed to 6/25)

Respectfully submitted,
 Lucy Edwards, Secretary