Elected officials approved an accumulative expense of almost $13,000 last week for technological upgrades to improve staff efficiencies and productivity.
Slow Internet speeds as well as an increasing number of issues with the Town of Sundre's no-longer supported Apple server network had really become a time-consuming thorn in staff's side, resulting in a loss of productivity, council heard during its March 27 meeting.
"The bulk of our problems have been in the (town's) buildings, involving our network and our server," said Vic Pirie, director of finance and administration.
"The primary cause of that is we have an Apple network with an Apple server. And what has happened is, a couple of years ago, Apple basically has stopped providing the services to the server to keep it up to date."
So the town's server ó now unsupported and effectively obsolete ó cannot keep up as technology and software used by the municipality continue to get updates, resulting in an increasing number of issues and compatibility conflicts, he said.
"We had a meeting with our staff, and they expressed a lot of frustrations in some of the issues ó primarily around ëthe spinning wheel of death,' as we call it, because it does create a lot of problems for staff when they're working, and all of a sudden their computer freezes."
On Apple computers, a colourful spinning wheel replaces the mouse's regular arrow cursor icon to indicate when the machine is processing a task. However, there are times when the wheel endlessly spins, effectively resulting in a freeze that can generally only be resolved by rebooting the machine and potentially losing any work that was in progress before the crash. To remedy the situation, administration recommended replacing the no-longer supported Apple server with a non-Apple product, he said.
"That will alleviate the bulk of the problems that our staff is having."
Moving away from the Apple-based server will not negatively affect the office computers, which are also Apple products, he noted.
"Going to a non-Apple server is in the background. So it doesn't impact at all the work stations," he said.
"It will make no difference to the (front-end) user."
The other issue hampering staff efforts has to do with slow Internet speeds that prevent employees from downloading larger documents in a timely manner. A test run on March 21 indicated download speeds of almost eight megabits per second with upload speeds of more than two megabits per second.
"These speeds are not capable of handling the workload demands for successful remote access and research requirements by staff," reads background information compiled by administration for council's agenda package.
Mayor Terry Leslie inquired whether other municipalities generally tend to use Apple servers.
"I'm not aware of very many municipalities that operate in an Apple environment," said Pirie.
Coun. Chris Vardas wondered how the cost of the upgrades would break down.
Under an existing agreement, the municipality's provider, AireNet Internet Solutions, offers free basic access to the Internet in exchange for being granted space to use the town's tower. To increase download speeds up to 25 megabits per second as well as upload speeds to 10 megabits per second, the company will charge $100 a month, or $1,200 a year.
The company that maintains the municipality's server, OSI Office Solutions, quoted almost $11,000 for the purchase and installation of a new Dell server. However, administration suggested the work would likely have to be done on a weekend to avoid impeding staff since the network will have to be temporarily shut down for the better part of a day as the files are transferred from the old network to the new. That would potentially represent an additional labour cost for overtime of about $500, said Pirie.
Council went on to unanimously carry a two-pronged motion to authorize administration to enter into an agreement with AireNet to increase broadband speeds for the town's network at an annual cost of $1,200, as well as to approve a quote of almost $11,000 from OSI for a new server, plus the additional overtime labour cost with the total expense not to exceed $11,500.
