MINUTES
Members Participating:
Hon. Dale Sandstrom, Supreme Court Justice, Chair
Hon. Joel Medd, Judge - Northeast Judicial District
Hon. Frank Racek, Judge - East Central Judicial District
Becky Absey, Clerk of District Court - Grand Forks County
Donna Wunderlich, District Court Administrator - Unit 3
Hon. Doug Mattson, Judge - Northwest Judicial District
Penny Miller, Clerk of Supreme Court
Sally Holewa, State Court Administrator
Lee Ann Barnhardt, Director of Education & Communication
Members Absent:
Rita Fischer, Deputy Clerk of Court - McKenzie County
Hon. Daniel Narum, Judge - Southeast Judicial District
Hon. William Herauf, Judge - Southwest Judicial District
Guests:
Chris Iverson, Trial Court Manager - Unit 2
Samantha Martin, Tyler Technologies
Kyle Snowden, Tyler Technologies
Don Wolf, Director of Finance
Staff:
Larry Zubke, Director of Technology
Cammie Schock, Business Analyst
The meeting was called to order by Chair Sandstrom.
Approval of Minutes from February 24, 2012 Meeting
Donna Wunderlich moved to approve the February 24, 2012 meeting minutes. Becky Absey seconded the motion and the motion carried.
Tyler Session Works - Judge Edition
Kyle Snowden gave a demonstration of Session Works Judge Edition, a tool to quickly navigate case files in the courtroom. Key points Kyle stated were: The size, make and model of monitors used does not matter. He was using a 22 inch touch screen monitor for the demo. Judge Edition has touch-screen capabilities, but it can be used without a touch-screen. They recommend using Windows 7. It is judge and courtroom specific. You can add notes to the case as well as to the documents and they do transfer to Odyssey Case Manager. Currently, the State of Minnesota and Collin County in Texas are using the product. Version 2 will be coming out in July which offers e-signature capability using signature pads for external signatures such as defendants. Configuration of Judge Edition is quite easy and fairly quick.
Larry stated that we would need to have actual PC's at the judge's bench rather than Citrix boxes. Larry inquired into the costs associated with the product. Kyle stated originally they figured judges would need just one machine per court room and had priced that at $4500 per instance. They found later that judges wanted the application in their chambers as well. Tyler restructured the pricing to have a main license fee of roughly $5000 for each judge and additional license fees of $800-$1000 for each additional PC the judge wanted. The maintenance costs would be the same as our current Odyssey contract which is at 21%. Kyle said the all-in-one monitor/pc that he was utilizing is around $1200. He also recommended starting with a pilot county. The committee agreed to research further and decide on budgeting for a pilot in the next biennium.
Odyssey User Group Update
Chris Iverson reported that the user group has requested to proceed with modification to the confinement component of the sentencing screen which is changing the term 'suspended' to 'first serve' and eliminates manual calculation by the clerks. The cost estimate for this change is 12 hours at $155/hr.
Becky Absey moved to approve the modification to the confinement component. Judge Racek seconded the motion and the motion carried.
Chris reported the workgroup within the user group continues to work on several projects such as developing an event guide and organizing and updating the business practice manual.
Odyssey Status
Work in Progress
New statewide IVR system
Larry reported Tyler has moved the IVR system to a new server to improve response time. Tyler has also changed the prompts to sound more like a person then a computer. They are also working on a solution to eliminate the need for 53 individual phone numbers; rather have one state phone number. Samantha was hoping that within a couple months they would be close to having the project complete.
Kyle stated Tyler has reorganized internally, specifically around e-services which they have broken off into a separate group. This will allow for improvements in response time and support.
File & Serve 3.3
Larry reported we had received a demonstration on File & Serve 3.3. This version contains enhancements users have been asking for. He indicated his staff was very impressed with the improvements. He hopes to have the new version in the test environment this June. Some of the improvements include a template option for firms which will help eliminate re-entering the same event codes for similar cases. It also does not require an applet on the clerks PC, it is now web based. It also handles the image processing better.
File & Serve mandatory e-filing deadline
Justice Sandstrom discussed the need for additional training due to the different look and feel of the new version. We will need to reach out to external users, as well as, retrain clerks. There are roughly 1300 potential users needing to be trained on the new version. Because of all the changes and time needed to train it was recommended to move the mandatory e-filing of subsequent cases to April 1st, 2013. Judge Racek suggested not putting the new version in production until October 1st to allow ample time for testing.
Penny moved to recommend to the Supreme Court the dates of October 1st 2012 for the upgrade of File & Serve 3.3 into production and April 1st 2013 for mandatory subsequent filings. Judge Racek seconded the motion and the motion carried.
Enterprise Custom Reporting training
Larry explained Enterprise Custom Reporting is a module added to Odyssey which allows users to develop custom reports. He stated Paul Crompton from Tyler will be here on May 21st for the entire week conducting training on the reports. The IT staff will be attending along with several clerks. He will be training 3 days on reports with the remainder of his time focused on cleanup of temp files and answering configuration questions.
Other Odyssey
Lee Ann Barnhardt updated the group on the GoToTraining her and Kim are developing. She stated the faculty, sessions and tutorials have been identified for clerk training. The training sessions will be offered the third week of every month on Thursdays and repeated on Friday. They will begin in June.
2013-2015 IT Budget
Larry asked to have everyone's requests that will affect the budget before the next meeting. He will then submit something electronically to everyone. He is about 90% complete.
Larry went on to discuss some of the special projects. The first project he discussed was a publisher-subscriber project with CJIS. He has been meeting with CJIS, Attorney General's Office and States Attorney's offices due to their requests for data from Odyssey. He stated Minnesota had started to develop individual interfaces with all their different agencies and the process began to consume their IT staff time. They then choose to go with a publisher model which allows the agencies to obtain the information they are looking for themselves. Basically, when a clerk creates a case it will automatically send certain data fields to the CJIS hub. CJIS will have a subscription service for the state agencies which will allow them to gain access, via a login, to our data. The login will determine what information is available to them. The information will not be stored; it will directly update their system. The estimate that Larry came up with was $130,350. Sally's office will be doing some research to determine what information the clerks offices are currently sending out via fax, email and mail and if that can be eliminated with this project.
Larry moved on to explain the Supreme Court docket system updates. He received an estimate from Vision Tech for $15,000 to make modifications to the system. This will keep the current system compatible with Microsoft operating systems.
Larry inquired if a Supreme Court video / audio upgrade for the courtroom is something we want to consider for the next biennium. Justice Sandstrom stated we should take it to the court. Penny stated if we don't do video we will have to update audio due to press complaints of the out-of-date system and their equipment not being compatible.
Larry explained that last biennium we capped new interactive video installations at four. He has requests from unit 2 for three additional units, one from unit 4 and one from unit 1. Donna stated that unit 3 is not requesting any additional units however some of their systems are 12 years old. She would like to plan for ongoing replacement of those systems. Larry reported the price has gone up to $32,000 - $34,000 for a new system install. Sally expressed concern over this committee making the decision of people appearing by video and thought the Supreme Court should take up the matter. She also stated we should find out what Judge Narum's needs are for unit 2. Larry will put the interactive videos into the budget for now and will take them out if need be. There is also an annual maintenance contract that would need to be taken into consideration.
The requests Larry has received for new digital audio installations are as follows: Unit 1 needs a complete sound system with a digital audio server for Bottineau, Devils Lake would like microphones and Pierce would like a low cost recorder which costs about $1800. Unit 2 has requested two low cost recorders, one for Lamoure and one for New Rockford. Unit 4 requested five low cost recorders. Donna stated she has a low priority request for a sound system in Logan County.
Larry continually receives requests for iPad's. He stated they are roughly $820 for the higher end iPad. He also said there would be an additional cost of $40/month for a global communications plan. Sally requested information on how judges would utilize them and suggested we have a test group use them. Justice Sandstrom asked for more pricing information. Larry stated he would talk to the unit administrators to have them poll their judges to see who would use them and what for.
Donna Wunderlich inquired if we should look further into a pilot site for Session Works Judge Edition. The group agreed that they would like to continue working with Odyssey rather than spending the money on Judge's Edition at this time. However, Larry will have numbers for the next meeting on what it would cost to do a pilot project.
Sally Holewa reported there were suggestions for the juvenile court system to either be updated or replaced. She suggested we put money in the budget for an initial assessment. She stated it would cost roughly $95,000 for this assessment.
Justice Sandstrom suggested we put money in the budget for continuity of government / disaster recovery again this biennium in the event of a catastrophic event. He stated last biennium the legislature took the money out due to a statewide study being done however that has not taken place.
Other
Spring Power Outage - May 12th
Larry received further clarification on the outage. It will only affect the computer room downstairs with one power feed remaining live while the other is being worked on. He thinks only 2 or 3 servers will be down with none of the major systems being affected. However there is an additional outage being scheduled for after hours where the judicial wing will go dark to test and make sure the generators will come on-line and everything works as expected. He does not have a date on this outage yet.
For the Good of the Order
Justice Sandstrom stated Rita Fischer is in the process of retiring and there should be a replacement for her on the committee by the next meeting.
The meeting was adjourned by Justice Sandstrom. The next meeting is scheduled for June 8th, 2012.