| Issues |
Since the last report furnished to General Council in March, ALIAnet has experienced further growth and significant hardware and software enhancements. A massive upgrade to our ISDN bandwidth in late March proved beneficial for all concerned, and now allows more users faster access to our site. We are now year 2000-ready, and have recently-installed software that is fully-compliant. We have also upgraded our mail server software to prevent mail relaying and other spam-meister tricks, and have added further disk space and RAM to cope with the increased demands placed on us by the use and expansion of the recently-upgraded listserving software (ListProc). Whilst the list serving software has proved to be the biggest headache until recently, we are relatively confident that the recalcitrant software will begin to understand who is the real master and allow us to regain full control. At present, ListProc the Invincible is reluctant to allow the list manager to act as a true administrator, and prefers to make its own decisions about the management of the lists.
As one would expect, e-mail delivery is still the biggest ticket item on ALIAnet, and requires a considerable degree of maintenance to ensure that all runs smoothly (ListProc notwithstanding), but following various upgrades across the network, problems should be easier to deal with, and less frequent.
On the web front, ALIAnet now offers an update form that allows divisions to send in updates and have them processed and mounted on ALIAnet more quickly. One of the most significant delays to getting material onto ALIAnet has been through the delivery by some divisions of poorly-formatted documents, often sent when only a change of phone number is required. Additionally, much of the formatting needs to be unformatted to allow reformatting - a labour-intensive process.
Notable additions in the previous months have been Salary scales 1997/98, the Children's and Youth Services section, the Acquisitions section [and many other sections have provided updates, following a push from ALIA national office], Western Australia's Biblia, the 1997 Annual report [published on the web before in print], many branch updates and additions, and a complete redesign of the most popular pages of ALIAnet - ALIAppointments has been expanded to include a plethora of information [and will continue to expand]. We have also tweaked the graphics somewhat, an evolutive process. |
