At the March 12, 2018 Park Board meeting, Park District staff and the Board’s ad hoc IT committee provided updates regarding the District’s registration software, RecTrac from Vermont Systems, Inc. (VSI). The software ran at an unacceptably slow rate of speed during registration on February 24, 2018, causing concern amongst residents trying to sign up for programs.
Park District Staff has worked with VSI to understand the issues that caused slow processing times and identified two items. First, the registration software experienced issues processing receipts, documents, and patron transactions, causing patrons to experience significant slowdowns. VSI has indicated an issue may reside in recently applied updates pertaining to the coding for logos on receipts and documents. They are currently working on providing a system solution for the registration system. In the interim, District staff has removed all logos from all documents in the registration system, emailed or printed.
Secondly, the VSI process for viewing documents online (which included the coding issues identified above) is to preview the document on screen in advance of printing or emailing to patrons. This process had been working fine on a daily basis, however the process failed on Saturday, February 24 with the high volume of registrations in the first few minutes and caused the registration server to slow down to an unusable state by our residents. Upon analysis, VSI has acknowledged their code for previewing of web documents on screen was inefficient resulting in this server performance issue and has directed that all web documents be sent directly to email without previewing.
On Tuesday, March 6 the Board’s ad hoc IT Committee met with staff from multiple departments to review the issue and discuss the District’s next steps. From the short term perspective, staff was directed to do everything that can be done to insure that the Summer Registration on May 5, while much smaller, goes smoothly. From the long term perspective, staff has begun to gather information about other software vendors to help determine whether or not VSI is still the best option to meet the community’s needs.
Staff and the Board ad hoc IT Committee will continue to work to resolve this issue and provide updates to the community.
