September Technology Work Group Notes

Posted By: Ian Feldman September 30, 2019

Good afternoon,

The following summarizes the September UASI Technology Work Group meeting.

  • The following individuals attended in-person: Ian Feldman (City of Houston), Jim Courter (Harris County), Lach Mullen (Fort Bend County), Bill Ray (Homeland Preparedness Project), Cynthia Jamieson (Montgomery County), Shelli Carter (City of Houston), Tina Rose (City of Houston), Jonathan Wiggins (City of Houston), and Michael Lambert (H-GAC). The only call-in participants were for the product demonstration.
  • The group saw a demonstration of the Drupal Content Management System. The system has features which would allow for very detailed configuration and control of a website, but these features may exceed what is needed by the region. Certain add-on features (like email distributions) may require multi-part solutions rather than single out-of-the-box add-ons.
  • The Jetty enhancements contract has finally left Fort Bend County Purchasing and will be at their Commissioners’ Court soon. Mullen expects the Jetty maintenance contract to follow shortly. Any site administrators facing page load time issues should be in contact with Mullen so the vendor can help diagnose the issues.
  • The hosting contract for the Regional GIS Server was approved by City of Houston IT to continue on Google, with specified security updates.
  • The group reviewed the Technology Training Appendix of the Multi-Year Training and Exercise Plan. Minor changes were made in most areas. The group identified that no WebEOC administrator training was specified and questioned the continued need for a Board Builder position; final action on these items requires input from the WebEOC Work Group, which has no upcoming scheduled meetings. A draft can be viewed online (see Appendix B).
  • Revisions of the Technology Governance are tabled pending the next WebEOC Work Group meeting (date unknown).
  • Lambert (H-GAC) queried the group on options to help modernize the Regional Evacuation Viewer (REV), a TxDOT/H-GAC product for planning related to evacuation traffic control points. The group suggested utilizing ArcGIS Online for display of data, possibly with integration into WebEOC for control/update of data. It was noted that TDEM’s LoneStar Server already has the ESRI-WebEOC connector, and since the REV is a state product, LoneStar would be the preferred WebEOC server to associate with this product (with options to fusion into local servers in the future).
  • The next meeting is Thursday 31 October 2019 at 1:00pm in Room 2081 of the Houston Emergency Center.

Thanks,

Ian