Before I go into my response to Councilmember Wieneke I would like to tell you a little about the job that I do every day. I am a PC/LAN Technician for a very large verywell established company. I troubleshoot hardware and software issues for the employees of this company. I have worked in the technology field for the past 23 years. I have taken part in testing and implementation of software as well as hardware.

I also serve the citizen's of Northglenn as a Councilmember, just like Councilmember Wieneke, here are my personal and professional counterpoints to Councilmember Wieneke's most recent BLOG.

I would also like to encourage everyone who reads this to listen to the Study Session tapes online for February 21 st and March 6 th.

There are a few things that Councilmember Wieneke has neglected to tell you in his latest BLOG POST as well as much mis-information in this post.

The very first piece of mis-information is that the Council has saved the city money. Not one dime has been allocated for this software as the Council has not even voted yet on the purchase of ANY software. Last time I checked we were suppose to be viewing demonstrations about at least 2 or 3 of the vendor softwares. We have only voted to postpone the choice of who will eventually be the company chosen to provide Northglenn with their much needed updated financial software. Therefore he could not have saved money because we have not spent any money on any software yet.

Councilmember Wieneke is also ill-informed about the city and it's use of thin-clients. The city does in fact use the thin client framework. And if people were to listen to the very first study session about the this subject Bob Lehr, Director of Technology states when asked about how many licenses we would have to purchase for the Springbrook software, that because we do in fact run on thin-clients that we could purchase around 50 licenses as there would be a license server for a user to check-out a license for use when actually in the software and once they log out that frees up the license for another user to use it. This would mean they would not have to purchase a license for every user who might need to only use the software occasionally.

The other point that Councilmember Wieneke forgot to mention, is that the favored software of the council, Innoprise, does not have a complete version of financial software to sell to the City of Northglenn. Their incomplete packet does not contain a payroll or A human resources piece to the package. They were in a competition with 3 other software companies for this project. Innoprise was the only one of these 4 demonstrated softwares that failed to execute the requirements requested by the city staff needed to purchase and implement the software. There is not a singlecity anywhere that has a complete package of financial software that Innoprise has created. All the cities mentioned by Councilmember Wieneke are JUST 1, 2, or 3 different pieces of the software.

I would also encourage residents to listen to Mr. Pond on the second night that we studied this software proposal, as he has definitely changed his tune about what a stable environment for a database is. In his remarks that night he stated we should not buy a software that did not run on a proven database platform such as Oracle or MS SQL server both of which he said have had years of sustainability.

Now Councilmember Wieneke says Mr. Pond is advocating the very thing that he spoke so strongly against in the Springbrook software. He has now changed his mind and believes that MY-SQL is the way to go because it is open source. That is a point I guess, keep in mind however we will have to train $$ someone to be able to write in this code and it is not a proven over time sustainable database platform as Oracle and MS SQL are. As to the comment about Springbrook using old software to program with .NET by the way is still a widely used little program - mostly by Microsoft. It is often used to help programs interface with the many different programming languages used today. Therefore this is not outdated at all.

Since Innoprise does not have a completed and tested set of financial software - should Northglenn proceed with this purchase, as it is quite obvious that Councilmember Wieneke has already determined we will. We will be the BETA testing for this software, which means that all mistakes, error and falicies with the software will get to be worked out at the citizen's of Northglenn's expense. Having worked in the field of technology for as long as I have, and working in a very large company as long as I have --- I can tell you right now that most companies that use technology as a mainstay for their everyday work BETA tests software in a production environment. Example.....many companies will not purchase any operating system until is has at least put out it's first service pack, which in layman's terms is ---their first set of code that fixes the first half of all the mistakes and security flaws in the new software. It is simply not practical nor cost effective to run beta software in a production environment.

Let this council move forward with this ill advised software that they have chosen-over the TWO YEARS of work that the city staff - who by the way will use every single day this software and are the ones who gave a presentation and all the reasons why they wanted to use Springbrook software. .. These people are the true experts as to what they need in a complete Financial software package and have worked extremely hard to find one that they feel best fits the staffs needs, the citizen's needs and the City of Northglenn's needs. Don't count the dollars spent until we are at least 2 years into the Innoprise adventure, time will tell if this has been cost effective. And only then will the citizen's know....if what Councilmember Wieneke is trying to sell you now is really a fact.

One point that must be remembered through all of this, no matter where we go, what we buy will be outdated within 6 months of purchase - because technology is moving much faster than we are, having the latest and greatest of anything is not as important as having the right software that does the right job.

Please citizen's of Northglenn; remember there are two sides to every story. This is my professional and personal view of the Financial Software purchase and the possible chaos it may lead us to. Non-tested non proven software is expensive in the long run.

One last thing that Councilmember Wieneke is wrong about - Brighton pulled out of their negotiations with Innoprise and is now sending the software out for re-bid, as they too were looking for a complete Financial Software package and Innoprise doesn't have what they are looking for.