News

IT Update

Jan 13, 2016

Posted in: Uncategorized

By Gareth Griffiths

Staff Changes

It is with great regret that IT had to say goodbye to Brody Parent. Brody accepted a position with the Finance Department in Saskatoon, and will be greatly missed. I would like to thank Brody for his hard work in IT at our Prince Albert Centre, and wish him all the very best in his new position.

Regarding IT Support for Prince Albert and the north, we have just conducted interviews, and hope to be able to announce a new hire very soon.

CommunityNet

Working with SaskTel and the Saskatchewan Ministry of Advanced Education, we now have enterprise grade high speed connections to our Saskatoon, Regina and Prince Albert campuses, operating at a speed of 50 Megabits/s (50Mb/s).

We recently signed an agreement for La Loche for a CommunityNet connection, to be installed over the coming months. These super high speed connections will allow us to look at the possibilities of video conferencing, and distance learning.

IT Support System

In November 2015, 64 new Work Orders were received into Track-IT. Of these, 53 are now closed (82% completion rate). Overall we closed 44 Work Orders in the month (November was a tough month due to being a staff member down). There are currently 47 open Work Orders.

Don’t forget to email support@gdins.org for any new requests. In the event that an email cannot be sent for any reason, you can also call any member of the IT Team, who will log the support Work Order for you.

Website

The website saw 3,289 Pageviews (2,671 Unique Pageviews) in November 2015. Some highlights of activity: 23% of visitors to the home page clicked on What We Offer, 13% clicked on Contact Us, 13% clicked on Work with Us and 6.5% went to Métis Culture.

GP 2015

In November, a major upgrade to Microsoft GP (Finance Accounting System) was undertaken. This involved the commissioning of a new SQL Server, migrating data from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2015, program and database upgrades, plus configuration and implementation services. The upgrade went seamlessly in under four days. Many thanks to our support partners Encore Business Solutions in helping us achieve this transition with minimal downtime.

The new upgrade offers many enhancements to existing services including a web based Management Reporter Viewer, workflow processes, different abilities to sort and set views, and an increased user experience. This is also a foundation step to us being able to implement other functions to improve the efficiency of the Finance, Human Resources, and Payroll Departments. This will allow us to start planning to incorporate services such as the HR Module, Document Attach, EFT payments, automatic scheduling of Management Reports, to name a few.

Closing Thought

I wish you all Geeky Holidays and a Nerdy New Year. May you get all the upgrades available, and don’t forget to recharge your batteries. May the Force be with you.

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