une has been a busy month for the IT Department for a number of reasons. First and foremost is the July 1st deadline for the new HST sales tax. With numerous systems that require upgrading, configuration and training, and the limited information available from the government, this has proved to be quite a challenge. Although there are a few changes that cannot be made until the end of the business day June 30th, I believe we are currently well prepared. We will find out on July 1st and 2nd if that is the case.

I was also busy the first 2 weeks of June preparing for the start of the Martin Mars contract with the BC Forest Service on June 15th. Again there are numerous systems that needed to be setup for a potential remote relocation of the Mars and support vehicles. A number of changes and upgrades were also required due to the fact that our last remote location was in the US. As of this writing everything on my end is ready to go.
The long awaited upgrade to our Terminal Server to allow remote printing is still a work in progress. We actually went live with a new system in May but ran into some issues with Windows Server 2008 on the old server hardware. We have since purchased a newer server and should be ready to go live again by mid July.

We will also be performing an upgrade on the email server on the evening of June 30th. This procedure will take somewhere between 2 and 4 hours. All email services will be down during this time. All incoming email will be queued and delivered to your inbox once the server is back online.  I will send an email a couple of days ahead of time to remind all users of the outage.