Committee Meeting - October 30, 2014

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
November 10, 2014

Present: 

Dave Wallace (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Bruce Campbell, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engelke, Bob Hicks, Dawn Keenan, Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Terry Stewart, Jason Testart

Guests:

Kevin Paxman, Jeff Voskamp

Regrets:

Andrea Chappell, Bill Ince, Dave Kibble, Carl Nagel, Sati Singh

Agenda

  • Email (Bruce Campbell)
  • Active Directory (Bruce Campbell)
  • IT Security (Jason Testart)
  • IT Strategic Plan (Dave Kibble)
  • IT Governance (Andrea Chappell)
  1. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, November 13, 2014, at 1:30 p.m., in MC 2018A.]

Chair’s Remarks

  • Senate meeting took place last week; lots of interesting discussion on a Fall week off for students.
  • This past week was the Audit Committee meeting and Board of Governors meeting.
  • This week was audit committee and Board of Governors.
  • The first meeting for the ad hoc Committee on Technological Innovation is tomorrow.

Approval of the minutes of the meeting of October 16, 2014

The minutes from the meeting of October 16, 2014 were accepted as distributed.

Service Level Agreement project closure report

Bob Hicks presented the closure report for the Service Level Agreement project. Topics included:

  • SLA project objectives
  • Project team
  • Project outcomes
  • Lessons learned (gaps)
  • Remaining tasks
  • Questions

View the full presentation on the Service Level Agreement project closure report (PDF)

Comments and discussion

  • Where does this project go from here?
    • From Hicks’ perspective he is done with the project.
    • The initiative continues through the account representatives, who will review the SLAs every once in a while with their respective faculties/departments to ensure they are still meeting their needs.

Post Mortem on Drupal technical issue

Kevin Paxman distributed a post mortem document on the issue that Drupal had this past week. View the full WCMS redirect issue post mortem

Roundtable Reporting

Technology Integrated Services (Bruce Campbell)

  • We are getting ready to migrate to the data centre in EC2; still dependent on another conduit going under the train tracks.
    • Planning for two service windows:
      • December 2nd from 6-8am to migrate the data centre network to the new equipment. There will be some intermittent loss of service within that window.
      • December 29th for 8 hours to migrate to the new NetApp. There will be loss of service during this window (N drive will be affected).
  • Next step for email in the cloud will be to choose a provider; thinking of breaking into different groups to investigate the various requirements/features.

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • Will be moving behind the firewall sometime in the next week or two.
  • With regards to change management, the new version of MatLab required a new license server and caused it to intermittently not work; had a big impact in Math because of the high usage of the program.
    • Unsure if there are ways to avoid such issues or not.
    • Will Lewis worked hard on a fix for it and also created a post-mortem that can be distributed to this group at some point.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

  • Microsoft pushed out a patch that affected quite a few machines of the machines in Engineering.
    • It would be nice to have some consistency with regards to guidelines on change management.
      • The BRASS project came up with some guidelines around how to do change management; will follow up with Shawn Winnington-Ball about where that document lives.

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

  • Attended a presentation on a course evaluation software called BLUE by eXplorance; very solid product but some concerns about student privacy/anonymity.

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

  • One of our Xerox printers is periodically disappearing from the system. We are working with retail services to fix this issue.
  • All of Arts will be moving behind the firewall on November 25th.

Client Services, IST (Bob Hicks)

  • Andrew McAlorum was announced as the new manager of the Web Development unit. He will be taking over that role on November 10, 2014.

Updates (various) via email

IT Security

  • An email was sent to CTSC members on the topic of email forgery.
  • Draft policy is being done up on risk management; it discusses how the institution manages large risks. We need to understand what IT risks mean; Testart has come up with a draft of what he believes IT risk is and is exploring this with the Secretariat.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on November 13, 2014 at 1:30pm, in MC 2018A.