Committee Meeting - April 30, 2015

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
May 12, 2015

Present: 

Bruce Campbell (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Marko Dumancic, , Bob Hicks, Bill Ince, Dawn Keenan, , Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Terry Stewart, Jason Testart

Regrets:

Andrea Chappell, Erick Engelke, Dave Kibble, Sati Singh

Agenda

  1. Chair’s remarks [5 min.]
  2. Approval of the minutes of the meeting of April 16, 2015 [5 min.]
  3. Connect accounts for employees (Bob Hicks) [15 min.]
  4. Long term agenda topics discussion- all [50 min.]
  5. Roundtable discussion – all [15 min.]
  1. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, May 14, 2015, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 111.]

Chair’s Remarks (Bruce Campbell)

  • Will be attending the Executive Council Retreat next week; will update if there are any IT related items discussed.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the meeting on April 16th, were accepted as distributed.

Connect Accounts for Employees (Bob Hicks)

Lisa Tomalty is proposing that we create Exchange accounts for staff/faculty as a standard part of the onboarding process.

  • Members agreed that this is a good idea.
  • Any negative side to implementing this process?
    • Only if someone does not want an account; very few people would be upset about this.
  • Do we have a standard procedure for retiring an Exchange account?

Follow up from Bob Hicks (submitted via email)

  • Human Resources (HR) is OK with creating Exchange accounts for all new employees
  • When someone retires, HR no longer advertises that employees can keep their email accounts. It is taken away unless it is asked to be retained by the department at termination.

Long term agenda discussion

Members voted on the previously submitted and were also able to add additional topics.

  • Total votes were tallied and added to the SharePoint site.
  • Further review of the top suggested topics will be done at the next CTSC meeting to identify presenters/owners/sponsors and to define the topic for a focused presentation.

Roundtable Reporting

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • OAT is moving to the new hardware that was provided by Computer Science.
  • We are still trying to get MapleTA v10 up and running; it will not be ready for the start of the new term.
  • Did a survey of our Grad students; what they think about our services and what we should be doing etc.
  • We are still switching to our newly purchased NetApps.

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

  • IST has now moved out of the Physics machine room; did a very good job and were out quickly.
    • Working on moving things into that space now.

Library (Carl Nagel)

  • Almost all of the virtual desktops are deployed now and have been working well.
  • Library is informing everyone on campus who uses RefWorks that it will be upgraded and moved to the United States.

Applied Health Sciences (Terry Stewart)

  • The IT Director position has been posted; applications close at midnight tonight.  
  • The VDI project with SPSS has been very successful
    • Eliminates lab installs, provides for SPSS from anywhere.
    • Looking at moving to providing SAS and nVivo this way.
  • Research space in AHS
    • Still migrating researchers for NAS and USB drives
    • No issue to date
    • Propel Centre is the biggest user and will have several thousand dollars a year on backups.
  • SCCM
    • Common apps (Flash, Java) and Office 2013 rolled out to all lab workstations and managed office machines
    • SCEP rolled out to all managed machines in AHS; SEP will continue on servers
    • Installing SCCM client on laptops that we build so they get updated when attached to the wired network; looking at doing this if they attach to wireless on campus
  • AHS students now part of the Portal
    • Thanks to Keith McGowan for helping Lowell with the Lab Usage widget
  • Online voting software
    • In response to a request where the current e-voting and/or the WCMS forms were inadequate, investigating a new e-vote system for campus
    • Working with Andrew McAlorum to redo the campus e-vote system
    • Our list of requirements have been defined

IT Security (Jason Testart)

  • SEP update: UCIST advised that more student consultation should happen before going forward with discontinuing funding for student SEP licenses.
    • We will be beginning that process over the next few months.
    • Will renew the SEP license for 1 year including the students so we can investigate further.

Environment (Marko Dumancic)

  • Preparing labs, servers, etc. for the next term.
  • We have had our first meeting with the auditors for the privacy audit.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on May 14, 2015 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111.