ACO Meeting Minutes July 14, 2016

Minutes of the Arts Computing Department meeting held on July 14, 2016

Present:  D. Keenan, B. Park, S. Hartung, H. Balagtas, S. Speers, N. Bromley, J. Schildroth, L. Tomalty, T. Marshall-Taylor

Co-ops:   D. Kingsley, I. Zinck, J. Hillo

Regrets: K. McGowan, S. Paterson, C. Wallace

  • Dawn
    • Internal audit report will go to Audit Committee on July 27th. IT staff in Arts will be addressing observations based on identified priorities. Work to be done in the next several months includes as moving servers to ACO’s machine room, process review and documentation (including configuration management, software development, and backups), completing our initial disaster recovery plan, investigating file share encryption, formalizing policies, and improving our use of RT to document our work.
    • eValuate development by Mirko Vucicevich is progressing to address identified issues impeding its campus-wide adoption. The next version will include more flexible permissions and arbitrary questions on a per-survey basis. Continuing Education courses are evaluated online; the logistics of results distribution is not complete.
    • Effective immediately, Arts graduate students who don't already have a mail routing address will receive Connect accounts when the matriculate. The matriculation process for Fall 2016 occurred on July 14.
  • Bob
    • Bob will have a dual role of Acting Chair in Anthropology along with his duties as Associate Dean of Arts, Infrastructure and Technology.
    • The Dean’s office is reviewing senior administrative structure in Arts and the future of the Associate Dean (Infrastructure & Technology) position.
  • Sherry
    • Working on the last of the orders for four Rollover and six New Faculty computers.
    • Spring Term Course Evaluation process has begun. As the volume is about 1/5th of the Fall Term, Stacy Reda from Anthropology will be helping with the processing and we will not hire outside help.
  • David
    • Have updated a few articles from 2015 Fall term that are helpful to new students, and written new articles on Office 365, how to protect your system from viruses, and differences between Windows 7/8 and 10.
    • Work is continuing with Rollovers and setting up deployment schedules.
    • Working on documenting setup of Laragon for development environment.
    • Updating documentation for Office 365 in Survival Guide. Information on the new student mail accounts will be included in ACO Lunch Session in August
  • Ian
    • Working through 2016 Faculty Rollover. Have three scheduled appointments, two new computers, and awaiting new faculty computers to process.
    • Newsletter Articles have been completed and sent to Janine for review.
    • Updating Documentation for Office 365, and Survival Guide for new co-ops on imaging and rollover process for iMac. Including information on using Thunderbold for file transfers: it substantially reduces time required.
    • Working on documentation for using the scanner to gather computer information.
  • Janine
    • Newsletter articles have been submitted to Lisa for review.
    • Will be creating process documentation for Evaluate. Met with Catherine Archibald (AHS) and Mirko (Science) to review information.
    • Working on ACO Lunch Session preparation with Lisa.
    • Set up checklists for Murielle Landry in PDF fillable format. Documented steps to create an accessible fillable form in process documentation for future co-ops.
    • Content is updated and pictures resized for ACO site move to Responsive Web near end of July or beginning of August.
    • Updates for Email and Nexus and ACO Help Desk FAQ bulletin boards have been completed. Updated Health & Safety posters have been requested.
    • Next bulletin topic is about uPrint.
  • Herbert
    • Joel Blit (ECON) and Goetz Hoeppe (ANTH) laptops are still having issues with corrupted documents in MS Office 2016. Closing Word and restarting is a workaround while we await a patch that addresses the problem.
    • Have disabled sleep and unistalled Symantec on Katherine White’s (PSYCH) iMac after reports of crashes. No issues were found during hardware diagnostics.
    • Have recovered the previous rollover computer from Hongying Wang (PSCI). She has requested a monitor for desktop. Awaiting cable order to hook that up. She wants to get a desktop for next rollover.
    • Working with Keith recovering data for John North (ENG) from his Time Machine backup for his stolen laptop.
    • Sharon Secord’s (DRAMA) laptop makes random popping sounds. Hardware diagnostics indicate that memory could be faulty as it failed the test. Did not pass memory test so may need to send it back to Dell for repair.
    • Added finer grained reporting to printing stats for Sherry, upgraded to Laravel 5.2, and added latest version of access control.
    • Continuing development on CALMS.
  • Sean
    • Updated Office 2016, Office 2011, Chrome, Flash, Acrobat, Reader for Macs.
    • Course Approval Form updates completed. Had to re-send Renison submissions to new address as person receiving forms is away.
    • Drupal core updated on all our Drupal sites.
    • Set up safadvisor generic shared mailbox for Accounting.
    • Tech tip: Outlook can be sped up by disabling all add-ons except Exchange. Also cache only the last six months to a year of emails helps to increase speed.
    • Cleaned up a number of machines in SAF 178 lab and uninstalled Symantec. Colin will be working on further updates of these lab machines.
    • AUO copier package was added to Munki for Undergraduate Associate Deans’ Mac use.
  • Nevil
    • Local Administrator Password Solution is almost fully implemented.
      • Working on replacing existing bang accounts.
      • New criteria for administrative access are documented in ACO policies and being enforced. Requests should be sent to adeancomp.
      • Done except !account machines
      • Stratford still to be done. Need to discuss with Mark.
      • MikTex is an issue. Investigating portable version, which seems promising based on initial tests
      • Need to clean up acoadmin accounts that are not a member of the local administrators group
      • If an Active Directory object is deleted from AD it can lock out existing administrators.
      • Jameson will be adding information to event log to notify when artsadmin is being used
    • User Environment Visualization is being deployed to Vanguard but not turned on. Needs to be on machine before testing.
    • Investigating Engineering’s exam lockdown process.
    • New Arts CleanC has been deployed to Vanguard group with no complaints. To be deployed to offices. Machines will be forced to reboot at least once every 14 days.
  • Jameson
    • Created new user for Games Institute and added new computer to domain. Had issues with domain logons resulting from CMOS battery not working, causing the time to be off by five hours.
    • Have some more computer moves, set-ups, user creation requests coming up for Games Institute.
    • Worked on setting up a new laptop for Krista Fiolleau. Found that she has some issues with her N drive. Working on correcting those.
    • Exploring how to identify artsadmin logons through LAPS for reporting purposes. Will be writing a script to scrape data from security event logs.
    • Creating an updated version of the Vanguard Software Testing site to make it more functional.
  • Lisa
    • Investigating Chrome hanging in Academic Support. Suspect there may be incompatibilities between OS and browser for some versions.
    • Lorne Dawson is having printing problems related to the Write N Cite add-on to Word. Keith is looking into this.
    • Communication went out last week concerning Office 365 for new students. Topic to also be included at ACO Lunch session.
    • Worked with Janine on accessible checklists for Murielle Landry and ACO site review and updates. ACO site review is ongoing, so please advise if you find anything that needs to be fixed or updated.
    • Preparing for ACO Lunch session. Invites went out on Wednesday, July 13th. Catering has been pre-ordered to secure early bird pricing.
    • Editing Newsletter articles.
    • Attended CanHEIT in late June. Will be away on holidays the week of July 18th.
    • Coming up in late July/early August:
      • ACO Lunch session August 4
      • Responsive website move for Arts Computing
      • Organization of SharePoint sites and sub-sites if time permits
  • Todd
    • Renison English Language Centre will continue bookings for testing. Past bookings went well. Will continue to provide support for account usage.
    • Studies in Islam 101R evening lab sessions have completed. Will be returning in Fall term with fewer evening sessions.
    • There is an ongoing issue with water leaking from ML 101 ceiling. Awaiting response from Plant Operations (Peter Fulcher) to determine if repair work is done yet.