Committee Meeting - May 1, 2014

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
May 13, 2014

Present:

Dave Wallace (Chair), Darren Bondy (secretary), Bruce Campbell, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engelke, Bill Ince, Dawn Keenan, Dave Kibble, Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Terry Stewart, Jason Testart

Guests: Steve Carr, Chico Silvestri

Regrets: Andrea Chappell, Bob Hicks

Agenda

6. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, May 15, 2014, at 1:30 p.m., in MC 2018A.]

Digital Signage update

Steve Carr and Chico Silvestri gave an update on digital signage. Topics included:

• Overview
• Project rational and objectives
• General findings
• UW situation
• Recommendations
• Installation guidelines summary
• Operational guidelines summary

View the full presentation on the Digital Signage guidelines (PDF).

Comments and discussion

• These guidelines were presented to UCIST last week; as a result of that discussion the Chair spoke with the Provost regarding the need of these guidelines and whether they can be amended to accommodate evolving technology.
  • The Provost agreed to take a look at the guidelines; it was suggested to integrate this with the way-finding exercise the Space Information Advisory Group has been working on; Beth Jewkes has been sent the guidelines.
• Accessibility of digital signs needs to be addressed because of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA); this should be discussed at a future UCIST meeting.
• It is important for all signage to have the ability to display emergency notifications; suggested to have Dan Anderson (Emergency Coordinator, Director of Police Services) attend a meeting to discuss this.
• Wallace will follow-up with Beth Jewkes regarding the digital signage guidelines with regards to the way-finding exercise.

Chair’s Remarks

• Presented an IT update to the President on April 28^th; it was well received and we have to continue to move forward with the federated model.
• Updated Executive Council on the Heartbleed issue and the Internet Explorer bug.
• The Ontario Universities Computing Conference (OUCC) was this past week in Windsor; a good conference for networking with computing staff at other universities.
• An update on the IST Annual Plan will be presented to this committee at the May 29^th meeting.
• A “no board decision” is being sought by the Ontario government with regards to some of their administrative staff; this may not have an effect on us, but could lead to a potential strike in 17 days if the no board decision is granted.

Approval of the minutes of the meeting of April 17, 2014

The minutes of the meeting held on April 17, 2014 were accepted as distributed.

Roundtable Reporting

Performance issues with InfoBlox

• Is the performance issues with InfoBlox related to hardware or is it an architectural problem?
  • It is an architectural problem; through the web User Interface (UI) it is slow, but when used through the Application Programming Interface (API) it works fine.
    • We will ask InfoBlox why it is faster through the API.
• We should be avoiding slow systems; as a technical group, when testing new systems we should ensure performance assessments are done before purchasing a product.
• It is also important to educate the users of these systems in order to reduce the load on it and to prevent people from ineffectively using the system.
• There is a Microsoft tool that is good for testing load balancing capabilities; it has been very helpful with the Portal.
• Will have this come to a future CTSC meeting.

Math (Robyn Landers)

• Had a half day training session on Django, just to expose people on our technical team to modern design frameworks.
  • Colin Bell has set up a site with tutorials for Django at http://watpy.ca/

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

• Met with Science to share ideas on digital signage; continuing to work on that informally.

Updates (various)

Email (Bruce Campbell)

• Proposing to disband the Campus Email Services Committee (CESC); in place of this committee we can form ad hoc discussion groups.

Active Directory (Bruce Campbell)

No update

IT Strategic Plan (Dave Kibble)

No update

IT Governance (Andrea Chappell via Dave Wallace)

• UCIST has been updated on the revised Terms of Reference (ToR) for CTSC; UCIST is now going through revisions to their ToR as well.

• Continuing work on developing agendas for future UCIST meetings.

IT Security (Jason Testart)

• A patch for the Internet Explorer bug is out. We are drafting a communication update to go out to the IT community on campus.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on Thursday, May 15, 2014 at 1:30pm, in MC 2018A.