Committee meeting - November 29, 2018

Carol Lu
Secretary to the Committee
November 29, 2018

Present: Steven Bourque (Chair), Andrew McAlorum, Trevor Bain, Bill Baer, Andrea Chappell, Paul Miskovsky, David Gawley, Marko Dumancic, Adam Savage, Erick Engelke, Dave Kibble, Jason Testart, Robyn Landers, Carol Lu (Secretary)

Regrets: Daryl Dore, Greg Smith

Agenda

  1. Chair’s remarks [5 min.]
  2. Approval of the minutes of the meetings of Thursday November 1, 2018 [5 min.]
  3. Email in the cloud (Andrew McAlorum) [20 min.]
  4. Other Business [10 min.]
    1. Looking for project plan resources and related documentation (Adam Savage) [10 min.]
  5. Roundtable discussion – all [20 min.]
  6. Next CTSC Meeting [Will be held Thursday December 13, 2018 at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 1021.]
     

Chair’s Remarks (Steven Bourque)

  • Welcome back Bill Baer
     

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

  • The previous meeting’s minutes were accepted as distributed
     

Email in the Cloud (Andrew McAlorum)

Andrew McAlorum provided an overview of initial discussions regarding email in the cloud. Topics included:

  • Investigating email in the cloud
  • Current email environment at UW
  • Employee email in Canadian Higher Ed
  • If we went down this road, what would it mean technically?
  • Privacy, data sovereignty, etc.
     

Comments & Discussion

  • There will be additional discussions regarding email in the cloud in the future
  • Currently in early stages of generating discussion and getting feedback
     

Other Business

Looking for project planning resources and related documentation (Adam)

  • Currently undertaking a project to create an internal knowledge/content database, seeking advice from others who have completed similar projects

Comments & Discussion

  • IST has recently built a knowledge base on TeamDynamics to manage how-to documents
  • Environment has recently switched from using Confluence to Microsoft Teams, which has been working well for the department
     

Follow up: Dell computer service procedures (Andrew)

  • Starting January, Dell computers can be dropped off at DP and DC service desks for maintenance
     

Follow up: Instructional Technologies and Media Services, presentation tech update (Andrea)

  • Another team member will be leaving ITMS, which may lead to an increase in project wait times
     

Roundtable

Environment (Marko)

  • Department has recently transitioned from using Mattermost and Confluence to Microsoft Teams
     

Client Services, IST (Andrew)

  • Microsoft Teams will be launching soon
  • Requests to use Microsoft Teams can be submitted now to helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca
  • There is a new SEW course available for Microsoft Teams
  • 30 teams on campus are currently using Teams
     

Math (Robyn)

  • It may be helpful to re-outline the IST help desk staff responsibilities vs. faculty computing staff responsibilities in order to get IT help requests directed to the correct people
     

AHS (Trevor)

  • Received some surface tablets with no wireless adapters, unable to search or connect to Wi-Fi
     

Technology Integrated Services, IST (Steven)

  • Network has been increased to 10GB
    • One of the redundant internet connections has been upgraded to 10GB. An RFP is being created for the second connection.
       

Engineering (Erick)

  • Noticed an unsatisfactory Wi-Fi performance recently

Comments and discussion

  • New equipment has been installed to fix the issue

     

Science (Paul)

  • There are concerns with the lack of responsiveness to IT work orders

Comments and discussion

  • If there are any concerns or issues regarding IST services, please contact the respective IST director.