Committee meeting - August 26, 2021

Carol Lu   
Secretary to the Committee   
August 26, 2021
   
Present: Andrew McAlorum,Don Duff-McCracken, Erick Engelke, Jason Testart, Lawrence Folland, Pratik Patel, Robyn Landers, Trevor Bain, Steven Bourque

Guest: Matt Harford

Regrets: Andrea Chappell, Daryl Dore, Greg Smith, Greg Parks, Adam Savage, Bill Baer,Paul Miskovsky
 
Agenda   

  1. JSM email management update (Matt Harford) [15 min.]
  2. Chair’s remarks (Steven Bourque) [5 min.]
  3. Approval of the minutes from Thursday July 29, 2021 [5 min.]
  4. Reminder about migrating mail servers/domains to M365 (Steven Bourque) [5 min.]
  5. Other business and roundtable discussion – all [20 min.]
  6. Next CTSC Meeting [Will be held Thursday September 9 at 1:30 p.m.]

JSM email management update (Matt Harford)

  • An automation rule is currently enabled to match Jira issue keys and subjects for duplicate tickets
  • Currently when UW users with a friendly email address reply to a Jira ticket via email, it creates a new ticket with a new ticket number
    • This is because user accounts in Atlassian only have one email address associated with the account at the moment (userid@uwaterloo.ca, not firstname.lastname@uwaterloo.ca)
    • Atlassian has plans to add the ability to have a secondary email address for user accounts but the timeline is TBD

Comments and discussion

  • The Jira automation rule will link duplicate tickets with matching issue keys in the subject line 
    • There are some instances where the rule does not work (e.g. if a user alters the subject line)
    • Additional improvements can be made to the automation rule to better identify duplicate requests
  • IST is in the final stages of prep work for moving IST queues from RT to Jira
    • Handful of outstanding queues that have not been moved yet are queues that require collaboration across different departments
  • There are approximately 80 projects in Jira Service Management
    • More licensing has been purchased to support the demand for the tool 
  • Communications have been sent out about the migration from on-prem Confluence to Confluence Cloud
    • Confluence Cloud is almost identical to on-prem Confluence; Confluence Cloud allows for integration with Jira Service Management
  • Global automation rules can be added to Jira Service Management but there is a cost associated with global automation rules

Chair's remarks

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting 

  • The previous meeting’s minutes were accepted as distributed.   
     

Reminder about migrating mail servers/domains to M365 (Steven Bourque)

  • Reminder to reduce the number of email servers for your faculty
    • Please submit an RT if you have servers you want to centralize or decomission
    • IST will reach out to coordinate the migration in the near future
  • Mailman lists for classes are not within the scope of this project; this is for user mailboxes and general sending and receiving of emails

Other Business/Roundtable 

Engineering, Erick

  • Does a statement need to be made for Power BI and its use of sensitive data? 
    • A lot of work is put in to ensure Power BI is secure by default 
    • SOC will be identifying Power BI users in more detail in the future
    • Messaging/statement will go out to Power BI users rather than a general audience that may not be familiar with the tool

Environment, Don

  • How do other groups support online thesis defenses? 
    • Currently thesis defenses are very time consuming for Environment; IT staff are asked to provide tech assistance throughout the entire duration of the defense
    • Science IT staff also assist throughout the entire defense
    • Math IT staff only attends a test tech call and the first 15 minutes of the defense
  • With Webex, not all users in the meeting have the ability to send other participants into another meeting room 
    • With Teams, the committee simply asks the student to leave to meeting and rejoin after deliberations
  • Would prefer Plant Ops power outages to be on weekday mornings instead of weekends
    • Shorter outages should be on weekday mornings
    • Longer outages should be on on weekends
    • Don to draft a message to communicate these preferences to Plant Ops

Client Services - IST, Andrew

  • The Application Inventory project concluded when Maher Shinouda left the Project Management team
    • All resources are available in Confluence
    • Permissions are currently set up so that users from a group can only see inventory for their group (e.g. Math users can only see Math inventory)
      • Permissions can be updated to make entire list visible for all authenticated users
  • HR is currently reviewing return to campus guidelines
    • Includes guidance on what to do with UW owned equipment (e.g. reimage machines that has been turned off for a year)
    • Users will be asked to contact their faculty IT for support; messaging has been shared with CTSC members for awareness

WUSA, Pratik

  • Additional stats for WUSA box project were shared with CTSC members