ACO Meeting Minutes February 23, 2017

Minutes of the Arts Computing Department meeting held on February 23, 2017

Present:  D. Keenan, R. Park, S. Hartung, H. Balagtas, S. Speers, N. Bromley, S. Paterson, J. Schildroth

Co-ops:   M. DiGiacomantonio, L. Glofcheskie, J. Hillo

Regrets: K. McGowan, W. Lewis, T. Marshall-Taylor, M. Byerley, C. Wallace

Attendees:

  • Sherry
    • Setting up online course evaluations and determining courses to be handled with paper. Email notification will be going out shortly to instructors to inform them of their online courses. Labels will be produced for paper evaluations.
    • Updating rollover processes based on using CALMS. Scott has looked over the section on the deployment process.
    • Gathering information and preparing for budget talks.
  • Dawn
    • Have received a request for Tableau software from Kathryn MacDonald in the Dean's Office to help in analysis and planning. Tableau is used in Institutional Analysis and Planning. Microsoft Power BI is being promoted by IST’s Enterprise Architecture group as a viable alternative that comes at no charge as part of Office 365 hosting. Further investigation is required to determine if Power BI is a suitable alternative.
    • Office 365 account provisioning is in planning stages for staff, faculty, and grad students (alumni excluded). Not going live until work completed for undergraduate students migration to Office 365 at the end of this term.
    • Skype for Business accounts in Arts can be created prior to Office 365 upgrade. There are approximately 3,000 accounts under the Arts OU in Active Directory. Nevil will work on a review and pending file cleanup.
    • Debbie Stanley-Pallas advised that Sociology is planning to change layout and furniture in PAS 2030 to provide more flexibility in setup for talks and presentations. Ideas from ACO on how to improve the usability of the room are welcome.
  • Lindsay
    • Nevil approved flowchart work for PowerShell project. Access to the ACO Gitlab repository will be set up for development work.
    • Helped Scott with thin client replacement in AL lobby. Cleaning up PAS 1084 from the returned cabling and thin clients.
    • Preparing to switch desks with Marco by reading over old Helpdesk+ tickets and being more involved with people who come in to the desk.
    • Received SharePoint resources from IST to help with client support. Will work with Janine to determine what useful information from IST that can be linked in the Survival Guide.
  • Marco
    • Installed Office 2016 on Sheila Ager’s laptop. Outlook needed to be reinstalled from source media. She will pick it up on Friday.
    • Helped Scott with thin client replacement in AL lobby.
    • Wiped departmental laptop to reimage as a hot spare. Scott advised any computer being reimaged does not need to be wiped.
    • Received feedback from Nevil on flowchart work for PowerShell project.
    • Completed Time Management course on Lynda.com as part of skill goal.
    • Picked up Patricia Cook’s desktop printer as it has run out of black ink and she no longer has use for it. This printer will be surplussed.
  • Janine
    • Alexander Statiev asked for help in accessing his Microsoft Pro Plus 2010 account on a personal computer. ACO nor IST had recorded of this previous purchase. He has purchased a Work From Home license now and it is working well for him.
    • Completed the first draft of the OFAS documentation and sent it to Herbert for review.
    • Edits for newsletter articles are finished and will be sent to Dawn and Scott to review.
    • Starting preparation for this term’s ACO Lunch and Learn session. Please send topic suggestions to Janine or Will.
  • Herbert
    • Had to reinstall a driver on Janelle Rainville’s computer to solve some graphics issues.
    • Created a sample Git repository to be used for future co-op training. Also found GitKraken, a GUI that is more intuitive to use than GitGUI.
    • Will review OFAS Documentation from Janine and forward to Heidi for her input.
    • OFAS updates to implement soft deletes and prevent display of deleted data are in progress.
    • Working on an asset importer for CALMS to import large amounts of data.
    • Pushed documentation for CALMS out to development site.
    • Assisting Andres Arcila-Vasquez, Research Assistant for Anna Ferrer (ECON), with TexMaker. Andres also requested Spotify. Spotify is not research related and its installation would need to be approved by Anna. Spotify is not packaged for distribution on campus: a manual install would be required.
    • Installed and configured Outlook for Gail Corning (retired/alumni) on her iPad. The default iPad mail client won’t send through an Exchange server even though the iPhone client can.
  • Sean
    • Completed evaluation code to generate reports from online and paper. Tested against Fall 2016 data and will be ready this term (Winter 2017).
    • Recovered data for Dean's office client who accidently formatted their 2TB external drive. Used PhotoRec to get files back minus their names (HFS+).
    • In another incident, tried to recover data from a damaged hard drive in a laptop that had been dropped. Used DDRescue and SpinRite but the physical hard drive was too damaged to recover any data. Current and recent ACO-provided laptops use SSDs.
    • Added features for tracking admin appointments and outstanding performance awards to the Faculty database for the Dean of Arts office.
    • Updated and pushed out Flash, Office 2016, and Skype for Business for Macs.
    • Updated firmware on both the H800 and H700 PERC cards on Artsstore1 so they will support non-Dell drives. Replaced two drives in 'predictive failure'.
  • Nevil
    • Investigating SCCM web failure report showing several false failures (software exists but package installation recorded as failed). This may be a recent phenomenon.
    • Working on LAPS implementation in St. Paul’s. Had to grant workstations AD privileges to change passwords to get it to work.
    • We need more participation in Vanguard testing. For the last five package updates, only two people completed testing.
    • A ‘usage-archive lab’ entry was created to maintain usage statistics for retired machines, such as Arts Lecture thin clients recently replaced and sessional machines. We should maintain up to one and a half years of data.
    • Psychology requested logon logs. Found out that the Engineering server is keeping logs for 66 rather than 180 days.
    • Corrected user profile issues for two Renison users.
  • Scott
    • Worked with Herbert, Jameson and the co-ops on the AL thin client replacement. The Nxsartsts server has been turned off and will be removed from the rack and wiped when Keith is back next week.
    • Searching for a possible VDI solution for grad students to access SAS software remotely and eliminate the need to have software installed on an inaccessible machine. Other packages that are not widely used (e.g. FileMaker, NVivo) will not be supported by IST in a VDI environment. If remote access to SAS is feasible, upgrades in HH 280 may not require an image that includes SAS.
    • Upgraded PsychoPy to version 1.84.2 for Psychology.
    • End of month co-op reviews will be held on Tuesday, February 28th.
    • Grad systems in French Studies, Classical Studies, Germanic and Slavic Studies, Sociology, and Philosophy have been upgraded to Windows 10. The upgrades uncovered an issue with Bitlocker. This issue has been solved for future upgrades with a task sequence update that has been tested. Political Science grad workstations will be upgraded on Tuesday, February 28th.
    • Documentation updates for processes for upcoming Rollover.
  • Jameson
    • Installed the wireless microphone in PAS 1237. A one page ‘How To’ document was taped to the top of the podium and a detailed troubleshooting guide has been put on SharePoint. Survival guide should be updated to include these links.
    • Helped replace thin client computers in AL lobby with NUCs.
    • Games Instituted [GI-IT]:
      • Worked on various computer moves and user account creations and/or resets.
      • Finished installing Windows 10 on Games Institute "Super Gamers".
      • Automating repetitive tasks and enabling Remote Desktop through GPO to better support the GI machines more easily and remotely.

General Items:

  • Kathryn MacDonald has finished reviewing staff evaluations. Supervisors will be holding meetings with staff over the next week.
  • Each ACO staff member is responsible for one Professional Development session each year. Options include presenting alone or with others on topics relevant to the department, demonstrating tools, teaching skills, or inviting an external guest speaker. The session in the last month of each term is typically reserved for co-ops’ project presentations if appropriate.