Committee meeting - December 8

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
December 16, 2016

Present: 

Bruce Campbell (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Trevor Bain, Colin Bell, Steven Bourque, Andrea Chappell, Don Duff-McCracken, Erick Engelke, Lawrence Folland, Bob Hicks, Dawn Keenan, Dave Kibble, Robyn Landers,, Carl Nagel, Jason Testart

Guests:

Lisa Tomalty, Liam Morland

Regrets:

Andrea Chappell, Dave Kibble, Paul Miskovsky, Sati Singh

Agenda

  1. Chair’s remarks [5 min.]
  2. Approval of the minutes of the meeting of November 24, 2016 [5 min.]
  3. Email routing (Steven Bourque) [20 min.]
  4. eVote presentation (Lisa Tomalty, Liam Morland) [15 min.]
  5. Other Business [5 min.]
  6. Roundtable discussion – all [15 min.]
  7. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, December 22, 2016, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 111.]

Chair’s Remarks

  • None.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed.

Email routing (Steven Bourque)

Steven Bourque presented on email routing – some issues experienced recently

  • History
  • Overview
  • Strategies
  • Recent incidents (as of Nov 21, 2016)
  • Issues

The full presentation was distributed to members.

Comments & discussion

  • Consultation with the campus community will occur prior to making a decision about removing mail forwarding.

eVote presentation (Lisa Tomalty)

Lisa Tomalty presented on the new eVote system.

  • Overview
  • Who uses current system
  • New evote system
  • Why change?
  • Approximate timing
  • Other options
  • Demonstration
  • Vote creation process
  • Request and support

View the full presentation on the eVote update (PDF).

Comments and discussion

  • Results can only be accessed once the vote is closed.
  • Following a discussion at UCIST, the linkage between who voted and who you voted for has been removed.
  • Met with the IST security team to discuss logs for when the vote is opened and closed to catch tampering.
    • More intended to ensure the vote administrator is not trying to affect the vote.
  • Turnaround time to have a vote set up is about 5 business days; currently investigating improving the turnaround time.

Other business

  • It was determined that the data centre in EC5 is not suitable to house the SHARCNET data centre; will be using the first floor of MC now.
    • Will be looking into using the existing data centre in EC5 at some point for those who are interested.
    • Steven Bourque and Lawrence Folland will set up a meeting for those who run machine rooms on campus to get an idea of how the data centre would be set up.

Roundtable Report

Applied Health Sciences (Trevor Bain)

  • Our Unix server Healthy has been migrated from physical hardware to a virtual server hosted by IST and is running RHEL 7.
    • The old hardware is off-warranty but we have repurposed it as a test/development Windows 2016 server.

Technology Integrated Services, IST (Steven Bourque)

  • Will begin advertising the mass migration of all undergraduate students to Office 365; this will happen in April following exams.
    • Will promote the opt-in option again in the New Year.

Instructional Technologies and Multimedia Services (Andrea Chappell)

  • The Teaching and Learning Spaces committee has been fairly active recently; looking primarily at classrooms.
    • Sent a survey out for best and worst classrooms; have been getting good feedback so far.
    • The group has also visited classrooms – new rooms, newly renovated rooms and some rooms in need of renovations.

Environment (Don Duff-McCracken)

  • Starting to work with Parallels in Environment; hoping to use it to manage our Mac labs in the Spring.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

  • Will be decommissioning myWaterloo at the end of April (coinciding with mass migration to Office 365).
  • Converted 300 workstations to Windows 10; have had some compatibility issues that we are sorting out.

Client Services, IST (Bob Hicks)

  • A while back, Stefan Idziak provided a demonstration of the exam scanning software that Science has developed; looking at May 2018 as an estimated timeline for when others will be able to use it.

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

  • Will be upgrading a lot of our labs over the next few weeks if we do not find a lot of incompatibilities with Windows 10.
    • Will be keeping the Finance lab on Windows 7 for now.
  • Upgrading all of our Linux servers to keep up with the support version of the OS.

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • Was asked by MapleSoft if we could have a room where 200 students could work on a MapleSoft test server.
  • When will there be training and publicity for the existing WatIAM admin staff for the new IAMNG system?
    • Still quite a ways off, but training and communication will be shared before the launch.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on December 22, 2016 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111.