Committee meeting - January 27, 2022

Sarah McKone

Secretary to the Committee    
January 27, 2022
   
Present: Andrew McAlorum, Bill Baer, Don Duff-McCracken, Erick Engelke, Greg Parks, Jason Testart,  Lori Paniak, Pam Fluttert, Robyn Landers, Steven Bourque, Trevor Bain

Regrets: Adam Savage, Daryl Dore, Greg Smith, Lawrence Folland, Paul Miskovsky, Pratik Patel
 

Agenda 

  1. Chair’s remarks (Steven Bourque) [5 min.]
  2. Approval of the minutes from Thursday, December 16, 2021 [5 min.]
  3. Discuss if/when we will switch to the Canadian date format in major apps (Robyn Landers, Lawrence Folland) [10 min.]
  4. Other business and roundtable discussion – all [20 min.]
  5. Next CTSC Meeting [Will be held Thursday, February 10, at 1:30 p.m.]

Chair's remarks

  • Welcome to Pam Fluttert to CTSC as new director of ITMS; welcome to Sarah McKone who will be the committee’s new secretary

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting 

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

Discuss if/when we will switch to the Canadian date format in major apps (Robyn Landers, Lawrence Folland) [10 min.]

Comments and discussion

  • No movement on this initiative, but IST and other teams are investigating opportunities to implement this change.
  • Members encouraged to take change back to their respective areas to discuss and/or implement for their own systems.
  • Steven to re-visit circulating this with Relations and Daily Bulletin.

Other Business/Roundtable

Engineering, Erick

  • Concern that Human Resources can accept applications via Microsoft Word, which allows users to include macros that could potentially harm University resources
    • Jason‘s team will investigate whether the iCIMS system checks for potential malware

Arts, Bill

  • Looking for confirmation that RDP can be used for the remainder of the winter term
    • Steve will confirm use with Microsoft, but assumes as we are not back on campus, we may continue to use this service
  • Request for Andrew to pull up and review IST Customer Relations and Support liaison MOU’s due to recent turnover and hiring
    • Andrew will share the MOUs with each faculty IT director, and each can choose to work with Andrew to update

AHS, Trevor

  • Health runs SaaS on a serve that is accessible by all and no issues for 5+ years. However, this term, two students utilizing Macs are experiencing error “Can’t convert Chinese character set to Latin.”
    • Appears to be an issue with the browser but cannot be replicated
    • Current solution is to run a WVD and open a separate browser.
    • Trevor has opened an issue with the vendor
    • Suggested additional settings on user’s device needs to be investigated, particularly how the keyboard is mapping characters
      • Resolved
  • Clarification of who keeps their email after retirement
    • All retired employees keep their email, departments should request otherwise if necessary.

IST, Client Services, Andrew

  • RFP closed and vendor demos completed for Mass Email Management project; hopeful system will be selected soon for rollout during Spring term
  • Surveys distributed to employees and student groups for Web Conferencing Review and Consolidation project; responses will help determine which platforms will be supported by IST
  • Completed migration of most Confluence on-premises environments to Confluence Cloud; a few spaces will remain on-premises (approx.250)
    • Looking to complete a similar migration for Jira in 2022
  • IST Annual Report released
  • Winter term ITPD courses published
  • Completed N: drive migration to OneDrive project for academic support units; looking into migrating R: drives to Teams/SharePoint Online sites
  • Looking to begin project to extend email access and potentially other systems to post-doc’s

Environment, Don

  • If we are going to be moving out of remote work, Don would like to start thinking about how AVD is run, which should involve cost of running it and maximizing use/value of too
    • Clarification re: AVD vs. VDI
    • VDI seen as assigned to a workstation, retains user set up
    • AVD used to spin up a lab, new environment at each log in
    • Still a lot of work to happen before the full Azure environment can be implemented as a service, but IST has acknowledged that more investigation and effort needs to be made in this area. However, AVD is available now.
  • Would like to know plans for returning to campus February 7, including information on lab usage and health and safety guidelines
    • Environment will use lab space only as lab space, not for study space or other
    • Math will have labs open with outlined health and safety requirements (e.g., sanitizer)
    • Engineering is back full time
    • Arts has 4 physical labs; 1 will remain open from 8-5pm for labs, 3 will have hub monitors only, considering closing 1 due to aging and request electronic desktops so all students have access to Windows.

Math, Robyn

  • How long will current Request Tracker (RT) system remain and are there plans to upgrade to RT 5?
    • IST does not have any plans to turn off RT currently as there are still lots of groups across campus that use it
    • No immediate plans to upgrade RT at this time, unless there is a need or requirement for doing so identified
    • If RT were to be turned off, Andrew confirmed groups would not lose any institutional data
      • plans to create an appropriate repository are being discussed
      • there is also the option to keep RT running for read-only purposes

IST, Steve

  • RFP for telephony project is being reviewed and will be released as soon as possible