Committee Meeting - March 19, 2015

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
April 2, 2015

Present: 

Dave Wallace (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Bruce Campbell, Andrea Chappell, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engelke, Bob Hicks, Dawn Keenan, David Kibble, Carl Nagel, Terry Stewart

Guests:

Sandra Laughlin, Jim Johnston (for Robyn Landers)

Regrets:

Bill Ince, Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Sati Singh, Jason Testart

Agenda

  1. Updates (Various) [10 min.]
  • Email (Bruce Campbell)
  • Active Directory (Bruce Campbell)
  • IT Security (Jason Testart)
  1. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, April 2, 2015, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 111.]

Chair’s Remarks (Dave Wallace)

  • Dave Wallace announced that Bruce Campbell will be taking over as the Chair of CTSC as of April 2nd.
  • Natasha Jennings has brought forward a recommendation for a Twitter account for IT (not just IST) on campus; this will be a very helpful tool and other IT groups are welcome to use it.
    • Please contact Natasha Jennings if you are interested.

Software licensing discussion (Sandra Laughlin)

Sandra Laughlin attended the meeting to present on software licensing. Topics included:

  • Adobe
  • Microsoft campus agreement

View the full presentation on Software Licensing.

Comments & discussion

  • We will not be purchasing a campus agreement for Adobe because of the high cost.
    • If a license is purchased can it be used on more than one machine?
      • No, it can only be used for one machine.
  • Are you considering alternatives?
    • Corel Draw is attempting to enhance their product to compete with Adobe; we do have it available on campus if anyone is interested in trying it.
  • The Microsoft agreement has been place for over 6 years and there haven’t been many complaints about it.
  • For those interested in testing out Windows 10, contact Sandra Laughlin.
  • Microsoft is wanting us to implement the free offer for Office 365 pro; free for staff and students.
    • The challenge is that it comes with OneDrive; if we choose this route it will appear as though we are choosing OneDrive storage for staff cloud storage.
    • More thought will have to be put into this, as we will come under increasing pressure to offer it because it is free for students.
    • A more detailed update will be given at second CTSC meeting in May.

IST Annual Plan & Pain Points discussion

Dave Kibble presented on the IST Annual and pain points. Topics included:

  • Shifting to growth and innovation
  • Why do we need to do this?
  • Cost of status quo
  • The landscape & emerging IT ecosystem
  • Annual planning process
  • Recent successes: FY14/15
  • Priority initiatives: FY15/16
  • Other notable initiatives
  • Next steps

View the full presentation on the IST Annual Plan.

Comments & discussion

  • The list of top 100 projects and pain points will be addressed at the next CTSC meeting.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the meeting on March 5th, were accepted as distributed.

Roundtable Reporting

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

  • Planning to upgrade the computers in the student Mac labs; currently have different OS’s and variations of software in the labs, we want to make them consistent.

Math (Jim Johnston for Robyn Landers)

  • Drupal migration from our server to IST server is well under progress.

Library (Carl Nagel)

  • We have finally solved our uPrint issues.
  • Adam Savage will be giving a Friday morning seminar on virtual backup and disaster recovery.
  • Our audit is almost complete.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

  • We are dealing with some complaints about Microsoft products not integrating/working well together. The default settings are not doing what they want them to do.
    • Will provide an update at a later date.

Applied Health Sciences (Terry Stewart)

  • The faculty is currently voting to determine if Jim Rush will remain on as the permanent dean of AHS.

Instructional Technologies and Multimedia Services (Andrea Chappell)

  • Sent an email out to this group about add-ons for LEARN.
  • Had out interim meeting for the video storage and delivery project; we will be looking to include lots of people on that.
  • Lecture capture: Currently do not offer as service but we do try to help when someone requests it.
    • We have a number of tools that can help with this. Just met as a group to see what we have available.

Environment (Marko Dumancic)

  • We are having some printer issues with 3700 series printers from Xerox; randomly stops connecting with systems it has previously printed from.
    • Has been happening for about 3 weeks on and off.
  • Preparing for end of term rebuild of our labs; getting our software ready for that.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on April 2, 2015 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111.