We now have a working committee with a weekly workshop that tackles practical problems facing Chebucto.
The work of the committee can be divided into two categories: operations and development.
Of course, this kind of growth has put increased demands on equipment and staff. We replaced the SPARC 10 computer that was on loan from Sun Microsystems with a more powerful SPARC 20 that we purchased. We are now in need of more system memory and other upgrades to meet the demand, even before we add more phone lines and modems.
We will work to automate more and more routine tasks to free up staff time. Better statistics will be generated to guide decisions and predict needs before they become problems.
Challenges met during the year included the transition to a new Internet Service Provider, the change in name for the system and numerous software upgrades which included new services for our users and many new programs to facilitate administrative tasks and revenue generation.
We distributed the "Alpha 2" version of Chebucto Suite to many other communities in Canada, the USA and beyond. We will soon complete a business plan for further development of CSuite. We began the work of bringing the Town of Windsor on board as a "Virtual Community Net" (VCN).
We hope that our business plan will lead to funding for CSuite development in the coming year. This will accelerate the development of features for our own community and for many others. A good deal of work will go into facilities to manage VCNs.
We will be providing more cable-TV connections to PATs including the connection of entire school classrooms, with community access to these facilities after hours. We will continue to examine new technologies for incorporation into CSuite.