This was a busy morning for my team. Mark was up a bit before
midnight to do security updates in the
PCI environment. Scot was up at 4:30 moving customers to newer,
faster servers running the latest version of Oracle. I met Grant at
the Hosting Facility at 6:30 to install a new server,
decommission two older ones, and to meet the EMC engineer to
install more drives in the SAN.
It was a busy morning, but we don't mind. That's what we do. We
want our customers to be able to focus on managing...
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This week I set a new personal record for the ratio of
time-in-a-plane to time-on-the-ground. I spent about 9 hours on
Tuesday flying to/from Arizona to hang out with the good folks at
the Southwest Parking Association for about 5 hours. I landed just
in time to hear Liliana Rambo give the keynote address. She talked
about her initiatives with High Performing Teams as she works with
the three Houston-area airports and her experiences with City
Parking Solutions in Miami and Houston.
After a great...
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Recently, I got a question from a customer
about PCI – one of the many that I answer on a regular basis - and
it caused me to pause and think about what PCI means for T2 and our
customers. One of the things I'm very proud of about the T2 Systems
Hosted Parking Solution is that we're a PCI-DSS Level 1 Service
Provider. That said, PCI is a *pain*. It is a really big pain to
become a Level 1 Service Provider. It is expensive. It is
time-consuming. It is difficult. So why do we do it? So...
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I just passed my four-year mark working in parking. After
nearly nineteen years in banking, it took me a while to really
understand. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a long, long way from
being prepared to sit for the CAPP test, but I think
I can honestly say "I get it" when taking about Parking
Access and Revenue Control, Parking Garage Software, Handheld
Ticket Writers, and a lot of what goes into managing them.
For me, all that complexity translates back to computing systems
that talk to all of...
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So I was one of those folks that stood in line to buy an iPad
2. I've never been one to do that kind of thing, but this thing
just looked cool to me. It is cooler than I ever expected. It
has changed the way I access the online world. That got me
thinking...
How many of the consumers that are accessing the parker side of
T2's enterprise parking management software are using mobile
devices? We took a quick and informal look at our the logs from the
parker portion of our parking enforcement system...
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Working with Advanced Parking Solutions every day can change your
perspective. I've been with T2 Systems for almost four years now
and the time has just flown by. This week we were having
a technical discussion about some possible enhancements to the
features in the eBusiness (parker-facing) portion of T2's
suite of Parking System Software and it reminded me of my
first day at T2.
On my first day at T2, I got the first and only parking ticket
of my life. Yeah, that's what I said. I'd never gotten...
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Recently I was talking the manager of the company that cleans our
office building about facility security to insure that they were
following all appropriate security procedures in our space. During
that discussion, he told me a story about one of their employees
that had a very bad day. The cleaning company has a company-wide
policy against propping open doors (even for just a minute). This
policy exists to protect their clients as well as their employees.
One of their employees didn't follow...
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In my last blog entry, I said I thought I should
stick to what I know (technology) and not dive too deeply into
the industry side of parking that many people know so much better.
I'll be keeping that in mind again today. So last month I went
to the IPI (International Parking Institute) Conference and
Expo in Las Vegas. This was my second IPI (after a bit over three
years working in the technology side of the parking
industry).
After seeing everything there, I have to say that I'm proud to
work...
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Last month I wrote about all of the data in the T2 Systems Hosting
Environment. Since then we've added three more customers and almost
two hundred million rows of data. Talk about a growing Parking
Management System.
After writing my last Blog entry I realized that I should probably
stick to what I know. Technology. T2 Systems' Parking
Solutions are just the reason I get to play with really cool stuff.
I'm a geek. I like working with things that have lots of blinking
lights and lots of acronyms....
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So when I first joined T2 systems nearly three years ago, I knew
very little about parking or parking management systems. My only
real exposure was as a parker on a college campus. And even with
that, my experience with the Campus Parking Solution was only
in the form of paying for my permit once a year.
So here I am running a data center full of Software for Parking.
Just three years ago we had only a few dozen hosted customers. As
of this week we're up to 135 and we're using all sorts of...
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Having worked for a banking technology company for nearly 19 years,
I'm relatively new to the parking industry. Since Joining T2
Systems in 2007, my eyes have opened to the complexity and scale of
modern parking. That said, one thing still baffles me. Why are
there still so many facilities that don't accept credit cards?
Don't get me wrong. I understand how hard it is to take credit
cards when you're standing in a grass field that usually isn't used
for parking. There are Parking Management...
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