Committee meeting - March 17, 2016

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
March 18, 2016

Present: 

Bruce Campbell (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Trevor Bain, Dave Gawley, Bob Hicks, Dawn Keenan, Dave Kibble, Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Sati Singh,

Guests:

Barb Daly, Isaac Morland, Shawn Winnigton-Ball

Regrets:

Steven Bourque, Andrea Chappell, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engelke, Jason Testart

Agenda

  1. Exam management demonstration (Barb Daley, Isaac Morland)
  2. File sharing investigation (Shawn Winnington-Ball [40 min.]
  3. Chair’s remarks [5 min.]
  4. Approval of the minutes of the meeting of March 3, 2016 [5 min.]
  5. Other Business [5 min.]
  6. Roundtable discussion – all [20 min.]
  1. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, March 17, 2016, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 111.]

Exam management demonstration (Barb Daly, Isaac Morland)

Isaac Morland introduced a system created in Computer Science (CS) called Odyssey for exam management; demonstrated by Barb Daley.

  • Originally designed for labelling exams, then evolved to include assigned seating etc.
  • Integrated with CrowdMark.
  • Being used for many examinations in CS, AFM, Centre for Extended Learning, an assortment of other instructors from ECE, CHE, STAT, CHEM, and other departments. Also being used to feed the Portal student examination schedule view.

If anyone is interested in more information about this system they can contact Isaac Morland.

File sharing investigation (Shawn Winnington-Ball)

Shawn Winnigton-Ball attended the meeting to provide an update on the file sharing investigation. Topics included:

  • What triggered all of this
  • IST investigative process to date
  • Observations, highlights, concerns
  • Timeline
  • What we need from you

View the full presentation on the file sharing investigation (PDF).

Comments & discussion

  • There is a campus-wide need for file sharing options that are reliable and secure.
  • There is definitely interest in Owncloud within the faculties; some areas do not like using DropBox because of sensitivity around where data resides (in the US or local).
  • Winnington-Ball sent an email out to various areas asking for input on file sharing needs/wants; will distribute that email to this group to seek feedback.
  • Will continue to update this committee as further information is gathered and the investigation continues.

Chair’s remarks

  • The announcement regarding the student email in the cloud project and the selection of Microsoft Office 365 was in the Daily Bulletin on March 16, 2016. 
    • Will announce the domain name discussion next week.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed.

Other business

None.

Roundtable Reporting

Applied Health Sciences (Trevor Bain)

  • Treasury board audit came up with 4 recommendations for us; all relatively minor and we have completed 3 of them already.
    • We will need to make changes to our password policy; 2 tiered policy, password changes after 6 months and reduce amount of login attempts.
  • We had a crypto virus attack that hit a researcher in Tech Town; thankfully we were able to recover because of snapshots.
  • Phishing attempts are increasing; trying to provide more awareness to staff/faculty so they do not fall victims to the attempts.
  • Deployed Skype for Business across the faculty.

Computer Science (Dave Gawley)

  • Going forward with the Casper Suite by JAMF for our Mac management.

Client Services, IST (Bob Hicks)

  • Student Portal hackathon event was held on March 12, 2016
    • 38 students participated and all of the projects developed widgets that could potentially be used in the Portal going forward.

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

  • Mostly working on the internal IT audit at this time; they expect to have a report ready for the end of April.
  • The Finance Lab should be up and running for the start of the Spring term.

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

  • Mirko has done some work on Scinage that allows us to provide each screen with a unique ID and we can point slideshows at the different screens.
    • This also allows us to monitor each screen.
  • The new Raspberry Pi 3 boxes are a little bit slower than the Chrome boxes but have clearer text/fonts.
  • CEL just informed us that they want to go live this term with eValuate; needed to create two templates for them and add 50 courses.
    • There is an added complexity to it because CEL has courses within each faculty.

Library (Carl Nagel)

  • Pascal Calarco will be leaving the University to become the new University Librarian at the University of Windsor; his last day on campus will be April 8th.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on March 31, 2016 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111.