ACO Meeting Minutes March 22, 2018

Minutes of the Arts Computing Department meeting held on March 22, 2018

Present:  S. Hartung, R. Park, K. McGowan, H. Balagtas, S. Speers, N. Bromley, S. Paterson, J. Schildroth, G. Parks, W. Lewis, T. Marshall-Taylor

Co-ops:   A. Sanchez, L. Ma, S. Luckhurst

Regrets:  M. Byerley, C. Wallace, B. Baer (on secondment)

Attendees:

  • Sherry
    • W18 course evaluations are underway. Of the 612 courses, we have 80 paper requests, representing 13%. Largest request for paper from English with 20, then Philosophy/Women Studies with 11, Sociology/Legal Studies and French, each with 9, Psychology/HRM and Economics, each with 8, then five departments with a few each.
    • Working with Herbert on getting Sessional rollover information captured on CALMS.
    • Any purchase requests for current fiscal to be done ASAP. Any purchases made must have product received before end of April. As a result most purchasing from mid-April on will be held until new fiscal, unless there is a guarantee of next day delivery (Staples).
    • Completing 2018 Staff Rollovers. One additional computer to purchase. Four deployments left (including new purchase) but are on hold awaiting equipment or answers.
    • Starting to gather information for 2018 Faculty Rollover program. Data from 2014 is not complete so cannot rely on CALMS yet.
  • Keith
    • Dean of Arts SharePoint Dev site has been updated. Ready for testing the new layout. A number of folders did not move with the site. These were sub sites using a different template. IST is aware of that situation so all files get copied in the future. The Dean of Arts development site will be reimaged to check for completeness and that links work.
    • Theatre of the Arts is looking to install network cabling to control lighting. IST Cabling Group will do a site visit to provide costing. Funding will be from one of the productions.
  • Lee
    • Working on rollovers for Richard Nixon, Janelle Rainville, Juli-Ann Sannuto, and Stacy Reda.
    • Take-Home Software installation script.
  • Samuel
    • Setting up rollover for Sheila McConnell.
    • Preparing to deploy rollover for Andrea Charette on Friday, March 23rd, 2018.
    • Continuing to work on transferring draft ACO Lab webpages to the ACO website with Angelica. Resource owners of bookable labs will make them public. Keith still working on getting this process to work. Looking into having all bookable labs shown.
    • Working on take-home PowerShell script that encrypts the device and saves the key.
    • Preparing to update CALMS for Dean of Arts office, Arts Undergraduate Office and Master of Public Service office equipment.
  • Angelica
    • Working on third round of edits for the ACO newsletters.
    • Preparing to do the lab web pages move (from practice site to ACO website) with Sam this week.
    • Preparation for ACO lunch session with Will is underway. Working on - Faculty Social Media accounts as a topic of discussion. Setting up a meeting with Wendy Philpott to discuss more about what information is important to present to the Staff.
    • Will be away tomorrow (Friday March 23rd).
  • Herbert
    • Sam reported some issues with regards to loaning out assets in CALMS. If anyone sees anything else needing fixing in CALMS, let Herbert know.
    • Deployments missing other support staff.
    • Working on a way to classify assets in the system for sessionals or lab machines. Keith asked that naming conventions be standardized to make searching easier. Nevil is exploring a way to identify by serial numbers, but different manufacturers have different numbering systems.
    • Working on additional fields in CALMS to show the admin contacts in each department and ACO support staff.
  • Sean
    • CrashPlan server updated to 6.5 release. New clients pushed out and put on filed share for new installs.
    • Migrated vcenter server from version 5.5 running on Windows to 6.5 running in a virtual appliance. Esxi hosts will be upgraded once we replace one esxi server with new hardware that has more RAM in the new fiscal year.
    • Fixed DeployStudio issue with Hi Sierra workflow not setting a Munki manifest.
    • Office 2016, Firefox, Flash, and Chrome updated for Macs.
    • Globalsign non-public root certificates package created for Macs and deployed to all our managed machines. This will allow Skype 4 Business to work while on campus and access some other websites using these certs.
    • cae.uwaterloo.ca detected running old vulnerable PHP code. Re-directed to it's WCMS site.
    • Odd issue with Word >16.x not showing a print dialog box when attempting to print on some Macs (two I’m aware of so far). Adding the anthro copier as a direct connection seemed to cause the issue for the user. Removing it and setting up a connection via nxsartsapp fixed the problem.
  • Nevil
    • Investigating issues with my scripted deployment failure report from SCCM. Implemented changes to check for campus-webstore deployments. Also implemented changes to account for Windows updates in deployments by collection script.
    • MBAM issue with my computer that encrypted a second drive with a password I did not know. I was able to recover it from the MBAM self-help web site.
  • Scott
    • Some new computers imaged for St. Paul's caused issues with Bitlocker when plugged in at St. Paul’s. Brought equipment back and reimaged, and that seemed to fix it.
    • Having difficulty in upgrading current SCCM package for Skype 8. Install runs part way then refers to MicroSoft store. Mike Cocker is looking into this.
    • New co-ops have been selected. Job shadow days scheduled for April 24th and 27th.
  • Jameson
    • Working on bug fixes and feature improvements on new Vanguard site.
    • Working on imaging remaining laptops from ML109 lab.
    • Investigating issues with upgrading to 1703 and 1709 with ML109.
    • Troubleshooting and investigating issues with AV system in HH 2104 while Colin is away.
  • Greg
    • Cleaned up printer DNS names for printers not associated with Psychology.
    • Deployed two new podium iMacs for Fine Arts in ECH.
    • Presenting PDAG session on Microsoft licensing on Friday.
    • Had two computers with Adobe Reader + IE problems. A repair install of Acrobat resolved the problem.
    • Met with Retail Services about Staff and Faculty use of PaperCut. Using the existing uPrint environment for Faculty and Staff seems a bit awkward, needing to set up fake money in account so Staff and Faculty can print. Environment is piloting this solution.
  • Will
    • MATLAB R2018a has been released. I am working on updating our license server infrastructure for the research license. Classroom license is usually updated between terms (test deployments in Spring, update podiums/labs in time for Fall term).
    • Notification/Action Center has changed in Windows 10 1709. It will be useful to write some documentation on how to customize notifications. Outlook notifications for new mail broke but there is a fix going out with future deployments. Mike Cocker has a fix where pop ups can be kept to view later.
    • IST is discussing how we handle the major Windows updates. Trying to figure out how many phases there should be (test, pilot, Vanguard, deploy) in order to streamline the process. Some areas want to be early adopters of updates.