Committee meeting - October 20, 2022

Sarah McKone  
Secretary to the Committee     
October 20, 2022 
    
Present:  Steven Bourque (chair), Andrew McAlorum, Bill Baer, Don Duff-McCracken, Erick Engelke, Greg Parks, Jason Testart, Lori Paniak, Nick Springate, Pam Fluttert, Paul Miskovsky, Pratik Patel, Robyn Landers Trevor Bain 

 
Guests: Koorus Bookan, Nathan Lee 

 
Regrets: Adam Savage 

 
Agenda   

  1. Presentation: Video Management and Delivery Platform project (Koorus Bookan,Pam Fluttert, Nathan Lee) [10 min.] Chair’s Remarks 
  2. Approval of the minutes from Thursday, October 5, 2022 [5 min.] 
  3. Discuss Adobe Acrobat Pro enterprise licensing (Andrew McAlorum) [10 min.] 
  4. Discuss student Atlassian licensing (Andrew McAlorum) [10 min.] 
  5. Discuss research storage (Andrew McAlorum) [10 min.] 
  6. Roundtable discussion – all [20 min.] 

  7. Next CTSC Meeting [Will be held Thursday, October 20 at 1:30 p.m.] 

Presentation: Video Management and Delivery Platform project (Pam Fluttert, Koorus Bookan, Nathan Lee) 

  • Panopto is being called a video management platform, but instructors may see this more as a video creation platform. This could be confusing to professors depending on how this information is communicated to them. 
  • Who is the platform for? It is user-centered, for faculty, staff, students, and anyone in the University of Waterloo community.  
  • Scoring an RFP is time intensive and so the core team is smaller but there is faculty, CTE, and CTL representation. There will be other ways to hear faculty voices, example being short-listed demos.  
  • It may be most important for faculties to be able to provide feedback on summarize data points. IT faculty groups could be leveraged for this. Faculty engagement will likely be better if it is solicited during the requirements phase not once it has gone for RFP. 
  • It should be made clearer where else/ who else there is participation from, not just the scoring group. This can include information on the resources who are consulted through the process for feedback, and the FYI list. 

Chair's remarks 

  • None. 

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting  

  • The previous meeting’s minutes were accepted as distributed.  

Discuss Adobe Acrobat Pro enterprise licensing (Andrew McAlorum) [10 min.] 

  • There is a use case for contract employees to have access to the Adobe Acrobat Pro enterprise license. There is a desire to pursue an add-on to include contract staff in addition to the existing FTE’s, and there are two options to do this. 
  • Option 1: Add all contract staff to the Azure group granting these licenses, which would be an additional ~3000 staff and likely cost around ~$30,000.  
  • Option 2: Contract staff can request a license as needed. This can be completed by creating a Grouper group to provision licenses and computing support would manage access as needed. 
  • Consensus that likely not all contract staff require a license, and option 2 is preferred. 
  • The timeline for this will be confirmed, after approval from UCIST. Andrew will confirm when a process on how to request this license is established. 
  • There could be an opportunity to consult with Adobe regarding staff who count toward FTE count. Additionally, those who require and pay for an Adobe Creative Cloud license still count towards the FTE count. 

Discuss Atlassian student licensing (Andrew McAlorum) [10 min.] 

  • There is a growing interest in Atlassian products on campus, and the dedicated Atlassian support is investigating license cleanup to ensure licenses are available for those who need them. In doing so, they found multiple student-led spaces that were primarily made up of students. Currently, there is no employee affiliated with these projects and spaces, and a lot of off boarding is not happening. Moving forward if there is a student license request, they need to have an employee affiliation, be requested by an employee, and have a 1-year license expiry, to ensure that student licenses are be revoked as needed. 
  • One student group in Engineering is utilizing $38,000 of $148,000 total in licensing costs. Atlassian support has reached out and offered to explore other options or reduce the number of licenses with this group.  
  • There has been a site license quote requested for all Atlassian products. Confluence is the priority, as it would act as an intranet platform, allowing Confluence to only have authenticated access only to the university.  
  • There is a potential for faculties to share the cost of licenses required for students, but this is the least favourable option. 
  • The current suggestion is to no longer add student groups, and semi-grandfather in the existing projects and spaces that belong to student groups. 

Discuss research storage (Andrew McAlorum) [10 min.] 

  • Andrew is co-chair on the research computing theme of IT Review. Andrew can give a short presentation at a future meeting of the 6 recommendations. 2 have been identified as action items, inventory of services for researchers and storage for researchers.  

Other Business/Roundtable 

Environment, Don Duff-McCracken 

  • Tracking computer lab usage in the Environment faculty this term, usage has been as expected but not as high as previously. The numbers would indicate they are still purposeful with 5-6 unique users per computer. 
  • Students have requested to go back to being able to remote into lab computers as they did during the pandemic. Microsoft wants to charge additional costs for this feature. 
  • There has been an increase in use since professors suggested computer labs as an alternative to utilizing OneDrive when handling large data. 
  • One issue is that users do not know how to log off of Windows machines, Trevor is wondering if others are experiencing this? 
  • The computer could be pinged and if it’s 4am and the user has been on more than 6 hours the computer reboots.  
  • One issue is that AVD sessions don’t save and sync unless the software is closed. 
  • Engineering’s classrooms are always booked for labs because professors do not need to answer support questions as the computers are already configured.  
  • Potential to convert larger rooms to sessional space and handle to volume of users in 1-2 private computer spaces.