Committee Meeting - October 15, 2015

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
October 21, 2015

Present: 

Bruce Campbell (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Trevor Bain, Steven Bourque, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engelke, Bob Hicks, Bill Ince, Dawn Keenan, Dave Kibble, Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Jason Testart Dave Gawley

Regrets:

Andrea Chappell, Sati Singh

Agenda

  1. CSCF Management group introductions [5 min.]
  2. Chair’s remarks [10 min.]
  3. Approval of the minutes of the meeting of October 1, 2015 [5 min.]
  4. ID cards update (Bruce Campbell) [10 min.]
  5. Other Business [10 min.]
  6. Roundtable discussion – all [30 min.]
  1. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, October 29, 2015, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 111.]

CSCF Introductions

Bill Ince introduced Dave Gawley who will be the Computer Science representative for the first 6 months at CTSC; Lawrence Folland was unable to attend today’s meeting and the other CS manager has yet to be publicly announced.

Chair’s Remarks (Bruce Campbell)

No remarks

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the meeting on October 1, 2015, were accepted as distributed.

ID cards update

  • Erick Engelke introduced the idea of ID cards at the last CTSC meeting.
  • Bruce Campbell discussed it with Dan Anderson, Director of Police Service, and he is fully supportive of this idea.
  • Campbell will discuss with IST management at the meeting on Monday to get a volunteer to get this process started.
  • When we get close to a decision point in terms of design or other necessary items, we will bring it back to CTSC for comment.
  • This process should be able to go fairly quickly and we can pilot it within IST first.
  • Some things to consider with regards to ID cards:
    • Cards should have expiry dates; some thought should go into length and how to go about this.
    • Needs to be built into decommission process so that they are handed in with keys etc.
  • Campbell will update the group as necessary.

Email in the cloud update

  • RFP is near completion with some minor revisions; hoping to have it posted by end of November.
  • Planning to start implementation at the beginning of 2016.
  • CTSC members can expect to see the RFP for comment prior to it being posted.

Other Business

uPrint

  • Bob Hicks is the contact person for any technical concerns.

OwnCloud

  • Ray White from Engineering presented to UCIST on OwnCloud.
  • Bob Hicks is going to put together a group to look into OwnCloud and possibly deploying it in IST and to put ourselves in position to potentially offer it to others on campus.

Visibull

  • There has been some discussion amongst the group regarding their price rate via email.
  • They would consider a site license, but we would need to figure out the cost and who would benefit from it.
  • Originally some areas were receiving free licensing but that is no longer the case.
  • Campbell will begin discussion with Bob Hicks and others to determine next steps.

Roundtable Reporting

Robyn Landers, Math

  • OAT has received the security sign off.
  • Have had some issues with inappropriate changes to our recently migrated web pages.
    • Bob Hicks will look into this and get back to Robyn.

Paul Miskovsky, Science

  • We have been ramping up with our new co-ops; one was paid for by Mechanical Engineering to work on the form fill application. The other is working on a tablet app for signing off/checklists for our chemistry labs.
  • Mirko continues to work on eValuate; SSL has been added to the front end and security has been improved as well.

Carl Nagel, Library

  • The issue we were having with our NetApp has disappeared; must have been fixed by some other fix.
  • Ontario Library Research Cloud went live a week and a half ago.

Trevor Bain, Applied Health Sciences

  • An AHS professor wanted students to use the SAS University Edition on their laptops; it has caused many support issues for us. It is beyond the technical capability of many of our students.
  • We have purchased some new Mac computers for our staff; now looking at Mac management options.
  • With Office 2016 looming, we are trying to track down who is still using Office 2010.
  • Thanks to Arts for setting up lab tracking and lab usage of our machines.

Steven Bourque (Technology Integrated Services)

  • Last week we upgraded Allstream to 4GB from 3GB.

Marko Dumancic, Environment

  • Working with AHS on the client management for Mac’s side.

Erick Engelke, Engineering

  • We are rethinking the storage space we give our users (faculty, staff, students) for storage

Bill Ince, Computer Science

  • We are considering using a much smaller form factor (Intel "NUC"s) for CS grad student workstations.
    • They're surprisingly powerful for their size, however they aren't expandable the way a conventional chassis is.
  • The director of CS spoke to us about the new resource allocation model; since we will now be paying for space, we need to reevaluate.
    • We lend some lab space to ESQ and others at times, but it is all done informally; who will pay for this use of space under this new model?
  • CS tracks regular activity and see how time is spent; do other areas track time? If so, what are they using to track that?

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on October 29, 2015 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111.