Meltem Y. Kurtman
July 19, 2013
Present:
Dave Wallace (Chair), Meltem Kurtman (Acting Secretary), Bill Baer, Bruce Campbell, Andrea Chappell, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engleke, Bill Ince, Dave Kibble, Robyn Landers, Dawn Keenan, Carl Nagel, Terry Stewart, Jason Testart
Guests:
Greg Parks
Regrets:
Melissa Conrad, Bob Hicks, Paul Miskovsky
Agenda
- Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) (Greg Parks) [1:30-1:50pm]
- Chair’s remarks (Dave Wallace) [1:50pm-2:00pm]
- Approval of the minutes of the meeting of June 27, 2013 and business arising [2:00pm-2:10pm]
- Desire2Learn and LEARN update (Andrea Chappell) [2:10-2:25pm]
- IT Strategy, Enterprise Architecture, and Organize for Success update (2:25-2:35pm; Andrea Chappell, Dave Wallace, Bob Hicks)
- Updates (2:35-2:50pm; Various)
- Email (Bruce Campbell)
- Active Directory (Bruce Campbell)
- Green IT (Marko Dumancic)
- IT security (Jason Testart)
- Campus Firewall project (Bruce Campbell)
- Student Printing (Bill Baer)
- Other business (2:50-3:00pm)
- Next Computing Technology and Services Committee (CTSC) meeting
[Will be held Thursday, July 25, 2013, at 1:30 p.m., in Mathematics & Computing building (MC) 2018A.]
Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) (Greg Parks)
Virtual desktops
- 3 Types of VDI Technology:
- Sessions virtualization
- Pooled desktops
- Personal desktops
- Licencing for students and staff
- Pilot: For Applied Health Sciences (AHS) students - will provide SAS for course use.
- Focus on automation: All servers are virtual machines
- Future possibilities
- Expand beyond single faculty and single application
- Focus on applications that are expensive or hard to install depending on faculty
- Applications such as AutoCAD are possible however user density much less than standard “knowledge worker” requirements
- Delegate administration of RDS environment o faculties
- Information Systems & Technology (IST) to maintain tools and infrastructure while faculties maintain software
Staff VDI
- Two pilot uses
- Staff VDI future uses
Questions and discussions
- Comment was made that students cannot use AutoCAD beyond first-year courses.
- People can use Remote Desktop or whatever client they want.
- Question was asked if open source was considered. Costs are adding up.
- Students are looking to this direction; labs can be re-purposed. Potential to offer a bronze level service across the board and charge for anything above this level. This approach would make things consistent.
- The issue of licensing has not come up yet.
- There would be upgrades or a new version out in 3 years; people would be upgrading their systems then. It would be nice if we all built a single system together at that time.
- Engineering would be able to provide a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) environment if IST/AHS need it, but if that is the case, then they should notified Engineering by Aug 1st so that they would have time to add extra memory to the servers to handle the increased load.
Parks’ RDS and VDI presentation (PDF).
Chair's remarks
The Chair noted that there was an Enterprise Architecture session yesterday that was well attended. The group is doing a governance review. Things are moving along. Dave Kibble held a session on portfolio management. There will be a Budget committee meeting tomorrow.
Approval of the minutes of the meeting of June 27, 2013
The minutes of the meeting of June 27, 2013 were approved as distributed.
Desire2Learn (D2L) and LEARN update (Andrea Chappell)
Chappell talked about:
- Development and projects with D2L
- Other projects and activities
- D2L directions
- Follow-up on outage
Questions and discussion
- Are we subsidizing D2L’s research?
- Their initial price was a lot higher. They came back at one third of the original price. They are saying that they are developing for us, but there are other Maple users.
- How do we do change management under continuous development?
- There will be monthly updates.
- ANGEL was different; you could turn on a feature for one course only, test it. That is not the case with LEARN. If you turn on a feature, it is system wide.
- How much impact do they take from the users?
- They came to us and talked to us.
Chappell will report back at the end of August.
Chappell's D2L and LEARN presentation (PDF).
IT Strategy, Enterprise Architecture, and Organize for Success update (Andrea Chappell, Dave Wallace, Bob Hicks)
Chappell noted that continuous communication and measurement of the strategic objectives are important. We have to find ways to make communication a continuous thing. Wallace added that the Task Force would like to be updated quarterly.
The Chair reported that a new Governance committee has been formed. He and Logan Atkinson will chair the committee. University Committee on Information Systems & Techonology (UCIST) will be reviewing this new committee and its role as part of an overall review of IT governance, including the mandate and membership of UCIST.
Wallace noted that the committee is up to date on the Organize for Success.
Updates
Email (Bruce Campbell)
- Return Path audit is ongoing, and we've been provisionally accepted into the program while we work on some outstanding audit findings. We’re making arrangements to sit down with Admissions staff to ensure they can modify their applicant emails to meet the requirements.
- Connect account maintenance continues
- Daily Bulletin item on e-mail in the cloud
Active Directory (AD) (Bruce Campbell)
Colin Bell finalizing AD governance documentation in consultation with stakeholders, for UCIST review early Fall/2013.
Green IT (Marko Dumancic)
The Green IT group has the draft guidelines. The members are expected to provide feedback sooner rather than later. The group will meet at the end of the month to review the new guidelines.
IT security (Jason Testart)
On April 8th, 2014, the Microsoft Windows XP operating system will be at end-of-life status. Operating system updates will not be available after this date. This presents a risk to the university since any new security vulnerability that is discovered cannot be corrected, which will endanger the confidentiality, integrity, and/or availability of information in the university’s care. Therefore, all members of the university who currently use the Windows XP operating system are encouraged to begin planning their move to an operating system with longer-term support.
Campus Firewall project (Bruce Campbell)
Installation of border firewall may be postponed until Steve Bourque returns from leave.
Student Printing (Bill Baer)
Had two presentations on Tuesday morning. The group will meet again next week. Things are running on schedule. There is a strong candidate.
Other business
The Chair noted that an onsite meeting was held with Apple. People from various areas of campus (Retail Services, Arts, Environment (ENV)) attended the meeting. Apple confirmed that they will not invest in back-end server OSX environment, a concern to some people around the table. There will be a workshop on Apple integration in the future and all CTSC members are welcome to attend. From a retail perspective, Apple will pull out of campuses where they have a weak presence. They will stay here. They are still making investments in standard laptops, but not as much. Wallace will notify the group when the next meeting will take place.
A question was about how IST’s budget realignment will affect projects. Wallace noted that they will need to review all priorities and where needed, will look at options to meet key commitments. It was noted that next year’s budget is expected to be worse, but 2015-2016 will be a lot better.
Next meeting
The next meeting will be held Thursday, July 25th, 2010 at 1:30 p.m. in MC 2018A.