The city of Chula Vista is in the first phase of overhauling more than 1,150 computers throughout each department in the city and upgrading its computer software.
Chula Vista Director of Information Technology Services Edward Chew said phase one includes an extensive personal computer replacement project and an upgrade to all personal computers to Windows 7 from Windows XP, an outdated operating system that no longer provides security and software updates.
“That obviously presented an issue for us that we needed to actually get fixed from a security standpoint, because without security patch updates from Microsoft, it kind of leaves us a little bit vulnerable,” Chew said about the operating systems upgrades.
On top of security failures, Microsoft XP had other limitations including incompatibility with the latest version of Internet Explorer.
The finance and planning departments are required to have Internet Explorer 10.0 or above for the programs they use, therefore those departments immediately got new computers.
“Between the security issue that we’ve got to deal with and the upgrades that we’ve been doing with the software, we’ve got to get out of XP as soon as we can,” he said.
Upgrading the computers’ security is the primary reason for the overhaul and upgrade of the city’s operating system, Chew said.
The city’s computer system has not been compromised but the upgrades are a proactive measure to prevent a hack, he said.
Chew said Windows 10 is a new operating system the city will need to test first to see if it’s compatible with all of the city’s computer programs.
Chew said Windows 7 has shown compatibility so, for now, that is the operating system that will be used.
The IT department has a $60,610 annual budget for the overhaul and upgrades.
Chew said the city has entered into a lease with Dell and has ordered the first 200 computers for replacement with the second phase coming before the end of the year. He anticipates all computers will be replaced with Windows 7 by February 2016.
The leased computers will be on a four-year replacement schedule, with a replacement fund of about $240,000 in four years.
Other system changes include the installation on all personal computers of Office 365, a cloud- based email service for both email and the Office suite.
Office 365 will be the standardized office environment for all the PCs, meaning every employee will work from the same versions of Excel and Word.
Currently computers in the city are running on three different versions of Microsoft Office — 2003, 2007 and 2010 — which all use a different file naming convention, making the three versions incompatible with each other.
The fire department is testing a virtual desktop which, if successful, could be rolled out to every department. A virtual desktop would allow city employees to remotely access their desktop.
Chew said the city now has the funding to undergo such an overhaul. He said during the economic downturn that saw many city cuts, the technology department lost all of its equipment replacement funding.
“So we are now just kind of coming out of those hard times from an IT standpoint,” he said. “And this is really the first time we’ve had any appreciable funds to actually do computer replacement.”
The IT department has a staff of 16, with about a quarter of them working on the overhaul and upgrade project.
Chew said the new computer system will make the city run more efficiently.
“That’s what major companies do (overhaul computers), and we’re a major company,” he said. “Providing the IT for the city is really helping us with our ability to service our customers and make sure that it also drives that economic engine for the city.”
