Committee meeting - October 3, 2019

Carol Lu
Secretary to the Committee
October 3, 2019

Present: Jason Testart, Trevor Bain, Erick Engelke, Don Duff-McCracken, Andrea Chappell, Robyn Landers, David Gawley, Adam Savage, Nevil Bromley (for Bill Baer), Steven Bourque, Carol Lu (Secretary)

Guests: Matt Harford, Lisa Tomalty, Mike Patterson, Natasha Jennings, Wendy Hague

Regrets: Andrew McAlorum, Paul Miskovsky, Daryl Dore, Greg Smith, Dave Kibble

Agenda

  1. Killing Firefox DNS requests to CloudFlare (Mike Patterson) [5 min.]
  2. Presentation: O365 update (Lisa Tomalty, Matt Harford) [45 min.] 
  3. Chair’s remarks [5 min.]
  4. Approval of the minutes of the meetings of Thursday September 5, 2019 [5 min.]
  5. Other Business [10 min.]
  6. Roundtable discussion – all [20 min.]
  7. Next CTSC Meeting
    [Will be held Thursday October 17 at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 1021.]

Killing Firefox DNS requests to CloudFlare (Mike Patterson)

Presentation: O365 update (Lisa Tomalty, Matt Harford)

  • Lisa Tomalty and Matt Harford attended the meeting to provide updates on the Office 365 Employee Email Investigation. 

Comments and discussion

  • Once the transition is complete, will we be able to use Active Directory to create mailing lists? 
    • Azure is different than Active Directory
    • IST's Information Security Services team is looking at how to use Grouper to create campus groups; this is not specific to O365
  • Global address list: are we able to restrict staff/faculty lists so that they are separate from students? 
    • Yes, this can be done
    • Other universities who have implemented O365 staff email have been able to restrict address lists
  • Will students be able to see a faculty member's availability on their calendar? 
    • This feature might be configurable
  • Will Mailman be phased out? 
    • Mailing lists are not going away; Mailman is not a part of this project
  • Will there be a mailing list created for every course? 
  • A solution for shared email accounts will be investigated
  • Having two tenants currently complicates the ability for users to collaborate in O65
  • How will we convince faculty that this solution is ideal? 
    • There may be some faculty members who require on-prem email
    • There are some concerns that some members of the community will not accept the mandatory push towards O365
    • Older mail clients are not up-to-date with best practices and security requirements
  • CTSC wasn't given the option to provide UCIST with recommendations regarding the decision to move students to @uwaterloo.ca domain
  • Do the benefits outlined in this presentation still apply if the move off the .edu tenant doesn't happen? 
    • The phase out of .edu will definitely be happening
  • The information provided in the presentation displays a bias towards moving forward with the project
    • A lot of slides about pros, not enough slides about cons
  • Will retirees have access to O365? 
    • Retirees will continue to have email service at no cost, but will not have access to O365 apps
    • Retired professors will have to be taken into consideration during consultations
  • AHS currently uses the Exchange admin control panel to change user display names and other administrative settings
    • Certain users can be delegated admin access in O365
  • Will this presentation be provided to faculties? 
    • There will be drop-ins provided to the faculties instead of presentations
    • Material presented to the faculties should be reworded to be more clear
      • The role the faculties have should be clarified
      • It should be more clear that the project is asking whether or not employee email should move to the cloud, not which cloud vendor should be used
  • How long will the migration take? 
    • The migration would be done in blocks of times
  • Will the same forwarding service that is currently being used exist within O365? 
    • Mass forwarding of email is not recommended

Chair's remarks (Steven Bourque)

  • A communication will be sent out regarding changes in Oracle Java licensing on October 4
  • A Campus IT Team has been created in Microsoft Teams in replacement of the Campus IT channel in Mattermost
    • Users that were part of the Mattermost channel have been imported into the Campus IT Team

Comments and discussion

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

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

Other business

  • Wi-Fi (Robyn)
    • People are running their own Wi-Fi in the Math buildings, is there any way to stop this?
    • UCIST has a document about the use of shared resources, but there is no official University policy
    • IST can help find rogue Wi-Fi networks; can send over heat maps 

Roundtable

Math (Robyn)

  • What is Shah Chandon's job title? What is DCA? 
    • Shah Chandon is an Information Systems Specialist in the Departmental and Campus Applications (DCA) group within IST
      • DCA manages any campus systems that are not enterprise systems (e.g. DCA manages Police Services, Housing, Parking Services, etc.)

Environment (Don)

  • Glenn Anderson helped the department with the migration from the Volume Purchasing Program to Apple School Manager
    • Volume Purchasing Program is being discontinued in December
    • A message will be circulated to Mactug outlining the details of the process

AHS (Trevor)

  • AHS has moved digital signage screens over to Scinage 
    • Working well so far 
    • Many thanks to Science Computing for the work done on this application over the past year

Computer Science (Dave)

  • Looking for feedback regarding course collaboration/communication/Q&A software/applications between lecturers and TA's as well as between lecturers, TA's and class mates, interested in what other departments are:

    • Supporting in house

    • Providing user-level help with

    • Recommending as possible to their clients

Instructional Technologies and Media Services, IST (Andrea)

  • A follow-up message about Akindi has been sent out and published in the Daily Bulletin