Committee Meeting - December 12, 2013

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
December 20, 2013

Present:

Dave Kibble (Acting Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Erick Engelke, Bob Hicks, Bill Ince, Dawn Keenan, Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Terry Stewart, Jason Testart

Regrets:

Dave Wallace (Chair), Bruce Campbell, Andrea Chappell

Absent:

Marko Dumancic

Agenda

  1. Chair’s Remarks (Dave Kibble for Dave Wallace) [1:30 – 1:40pm]
  2. Approval of the Minutes of the Meeting of November 28, 2013 and Business Arising [1:40-1:45pm]
  3. Roundtable Reporting – all [1:45 – 2:45pm]
  1. Updates (Various) & Other Business [2:45-3:00pm]
  • Green IT (Marko Dumancic)
  • IT Security (Jason Testart)
  • Student Printing (Bob Hicks)
  1. Next CTSC Meeting [Will be held Thursday, January 9, 2014, at 1:30 p.m., in MC 2018A.]

Chair’s remarks (Dave Kibble for Dave Wallace)

No remarks

Approval of the minutes of the meeting of November 28, 2013 and business arising

The meeting minutes of November 28, 2013 were accepted as distributed.

Roundtable reporting – all

  • The group discussed the possibility of adding a template to the roundtable discussions at meetings to provide some guidance to members. It would help categorize topics within a certain framework. The proposed categories are:
    • Policy questions
    • Projects/proposals
    • Soliciting feedback
    • System management/evolution
  • Members were asked to consider the framework and to bring their thoughts to the next CTSC meeting to refine the categories for the committee.

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • Questions surrounding security audits for research projects.
    • Does this fall under IT security or is it our responsibility to deal with?
    • A similar scenario that other faculties deal with too; would be worthwhile to formulate a set of standards.
    • Different granting agencies for research projects have different security standards which makes it more difficult to have a universal set of standards.
    • A small group will get together to discuss this further to find commonalities amongst the different security standards; will formulate a document to provide guidance.
  • Demonstrated a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) client app that Math is working on that allows you to move your desktop to other devices while working on certain programs.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

  • Showed the group the Engineering Computing Service catalogue. It lists services we offer by category (faculty/staff/students) and in real-time displays whether the service is available or offline.

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

  • Working with Math Faculty Computing Facility (MFCF) on configuration management; using the tool SaltStack.
  • eValuate course evaluation tool is an ongoing project. Have tested it with a few different groups, ran the online survey on 14 courses this term. Better return rate than traditional paper surveys.
  • Continuing work on MarkBox, which is a way to supplement scantron sheets. Lots of workflow involved as it is quite sophisticated.
  • Digital signage: Rekindling this project; old policies in place regarding digital signage making it difficult to put signs of various sizes where we want too.

Computer Science (CS) (Bill Ince)

Library (Carl Nagel)

  • Forging ahead to get the last of our servers off of Active Directory Services (ADS).
  • Assessing all of the library servers with relation to the firewall project.
  • Working on constructing a teaching and training facility; Instructional Technologies and Multimedia Services (ITMS) is assisting with this process.

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

  • Staff in Arts Computing are collaborating with IT staff in Math and Engineering on the lab monitoring framework originating in Engineering Computing. We are using IST’s “git” repository to coordinate changes to the system.

Client Services (Bob Hicks)

  • Service Level Agreement (SLA) Project: Templates almost ready. Starting with University Relations (academic support department) and Faculty of Math. Bruce Campbell working on SLA for wireless service, and Greg Smith working on SLA for Home. Meeting with Wayne Oldford on January 7th and with Ellen Rethore in early January. Phase 2 (winter term 2014) is to document current agreements and Phase 3 (spring term 2014) is to meet with each area to review SLA and document “wish lists”.
  • Absence Management: Creative Services has been providing an absence management system for a fee and will no longer do that as of May 1, 2014. None of the faculties present at the CTSC meeting used this system. A corporate solution for absence management is being investigated.
  • MappedIn: MappedIn has a kiosk in E5 that provides information to visitors about the various parts of the building. Very impressive. It would be nice to have 2 more of these kiosks showing the campus map, one in the Visitor Centre in South Campus Hall (SCH), and also in the Student Life Center (SLC).  MappedIn is giving a presentation of their mobile product to key stakeholders (UW Police, IST, Student Success Office (SSO), Secretariat) on December 19th. More information will be available in January.
  • Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA): There have been some concerns regarding web accessibility. IST is working with Rose Padacz (campus AODA coordinator); ensuring staff is in place to continue WCMS migration, training and support. Also looking at web accessible leadership options to ensure ongoing communication and support.

Updates (various)

Green IT (Marko Dumancic)

No update

IT Security (Jason Testart)

Two new instituted legislation that will affect IT:

  • Copyright Modernization Act (C11)
    • Affects how we deal with abuse complaints.
    • Required to forward copyright complaint to the accused, notify the copyright holder we have done so, record that we have done so, and keep that record for a minimum of 6 months.
  • Canadian Anti-Spam legislation
    • Key theme to legislature is consent of the user.
    • Includes installation of software on someone’s computer without their consent.
    • Still lots of questions and uncertainties about what is considered spam and what is not.
    • Secretariat is working on this and will inform us as to how it affects us.
    • Need to consider consent management; how do we manage who has given consent and who has not.
    • Visit the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation website for more information

Student Printing (Bob Hicks)

Infrastructure almost in place and pilots will start in January in Applied Health Sciences and Environment.

Other business

None

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on January 9, 2014 at 1:30pm, in MC 2018A.