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FROM THE IT FORUM

The IT Forum gives AGC members an opportunity to discuss best practices and garner feedback about products and services that increase efficiencies. The following questions and answers were taken from recent forum posts

Q: I am preparing a proposal to move our Prolog/Encompass infrastructure from a hosting company to our in-house infrastructure. Is anyone hosting Converge or Encompass in house? If so, would you mind sharing your infrastructure architecture as well as number of users?

Scott Auge
Clark Construction Company

A: Currently we house Prolog and Encompass. Prolog is a standalone VM server. Encompass is loaded on a separate server – Encompass services and a web server. Users in house and out in the field can access Encompass via the web and utilizing their client on the tablet. Users for Prolog access it via the local client or the Citrix server for outside users. We have about 20-30 users on Encompass and about 75 using Prolog.

CJ Rainer
Doster Construction Company, Inc.

A: We are just rolling out Converge in house right now as well. We have Prolog manager virtualized in our Xenapp 6 environment. Converge is also virtualized 4GB single core Windows 2008 R2. Right now we are just rolling it out so our Converge user load isn't that high.

Ben Stromberg
Knutson Construction Services

Q: Does anyone have a cell phone policy I can review?

Jim Gaba
Sierra Nevada Construction, Inc.

A: Here's a policy we just sent to all staff. Verizon Wireless cell phones and air cards provided by Schimenti Construction are to be used solely for business related purposes such as company email, daily field reporting and other activities necessary to meet business objectives. Our wireless voice and data plans provide sufficient usage allowance for business functions only. Other data intensive applications such as downloading music, movies, games, etc. will cause extremely costly overage fees. Please be aware you are responsible for any overage charges incurred. We are asking everyone to reply back to this message indicating you have received and understand this wireless service policy. Your response will serve as policy acceptance and responsibility for any wireless overage costs.

Keith Murley
Schimenti Construction

A: Two items to add to the cell phone policy list:

SAFETY: Cell phones are such a common cause of accidents it needs to be addressed as a company policy, so something like: "Employees of ____ Company will not use cellular phones for business purposes when driving their personal/company vehicles. If the job requires you to communicate by cellular phone while driving, pull out of traffic to a safe area, stop the vehicle and then begin communicating."

REASONABLE: Lots of policies say things like an employee can NEVER receive or make a personal calls on a company phone, but then in practice you allow it because the policy isn't practical so it’s not worth having. My opinion is make reasonable policies and hold people accountable to them.

Chandler McCormack
OxBlue Corporation