2007/2008 Annual Report
Technology continues to move forward here in South Windsor. This year, we have assisted several departments in enhancing their services to our citizens. The Human Services Department has implemented a new system to track activities and membership within the Teen Center. We assisted the Public Works Department in implementing a new sign creation system. In addition, we deployed handheld computers to the Building Maintenance Division as part of their new Work Order system. Also by serving on a subcommittee at the Capitol Region Council of Governments we wrote and obtained a grant to receive new aerial mapping covering the entire CRCOG region. This mapping will be added to our GIS and serve as invaluable asset to Town Staff.
In addition to assisting town departments, we have been extremely busy with many activities ranging from routine requests for help, computer and network upgrades/repairs, evaluating new products/services, implementing MUNIS Permits and Code Enforcement and GIS. We have received over 1100 calls from staff for routine assistance this year. These help requests has been stored, managed and reported from a software package shared between our staff and the IT staff at the Board of Education.
To provide town staff with better mobile communications we have implemented a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). This equipment shares the users contact list, calendar and emails between MS Outlook and their phone. This technology has been reported as invaluable by the town staff.
A new emerging technology for municipal applications is the use of global positioning system (GPS). The Public Works Department is testing GPS to record and tracking the locations of equipment in use in their programs. The initial program was street sweeping and mowing. The department plans to deploy the technology to the leaf and snow programs.
While assisting town staff with routine requests, the Information Technology staff has been extremely busy upgrading the network infrastructure which consists of the servers, switches and the firewall. This has been a huge task as we had to create a new network to encompass both existing networks that are being phased out. This will allow staff to communicate better while improving security and disaster recovery capabilities. As part of this process we are reducing the amount of physical equipment we are running which will save the town money with respect to electrical, heating and cooling costs. The technology that is being implemented is called VMware and DataCore which allows us to have multiple servers running on the same computer hardware. In addition this solution allows the IT staff to dynamically
reallocate computer resources as staff demands change without purchasing more hardware and waiting the lengthy delivery time. Also should critical systems fail, we can automatically restart the server on the backup equipment to minimize the downtime for staff. The system is scheduled to be completed and tested in early 2009. Our biggest challenges on this project have been keeping the current systems online while work has progressed.
| 
