Committee meeting - November 23, 2017

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee­­­
December 4, 2017

Present: 

Steve Bourque (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Trevor Bain, Colin Bell, Marko Dumancic,  Erick Engelke, Robyn Landers, Andrew McAlorum, Keith McGowan, Paul Miskovsky, Omar Nafees, Jason Testart

Guests:

Dave Hinton

Regrets:

Andrea Chappell, Daryl Dore, Dave Kibble, Adam Savage

Agenda

  1. Mailservices migration (Dave Hinton) [10 min.]
  2. Chair’s remarks [5 min.]
  3. Approval of the minutes of the meeting of November 9, 2017 [5 min.]
  4. Other Business [10 min.]
  5. Roundtable discussion – all [30 min.]
  6. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, December 7, 2017, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 1021.]

Mailservices migration (Dave Hinton)

  • IST is beginning to migrate users off of Mailservices to deprecate some of the functionality.
    • Started with academic support and it was divided into two groups:
      • Those that forwarded to Connect from Mailservices
      • Those that still actively use mailservices.
  • A communication is being drafted to be sent to those that will be migrated from mailservices to Connect.
    • All of their mail will be migrated into a folder (with their current folders transferred over as subfolders) on their Connect account.
    • Help documentation will be available for setting up/how to use Connect.
    • Will provide a 30 day notice for migration, then reminded 48 hours prior.
    • As soon as the help pages are ready we will begin the migration process.

Chair’s Remarks (Steven Bourque)

  • None.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed.

Other Business

Cost of virtual machines (VMs)

  • Engineering inquired about the cost of creating VM’s to help with their internal planning.
    • IST has the ability to create non-resource intensive VMs for faculties/departments at no cost to the constituencies but it would be beneficial to understand the actual cost of it.
      • It is difficult to predict the actual cost of a VM but Steven Bourque will create a summary of the average cost.

Old operating systems

  • Is the IST security team still scanning for old OS’s?
    • Depends on the exposure of the system; as we move forward the exposure is less of a problem (because they are obsolete). The Windows XP scan was important because of the significant vulnerabilities it had.
    • If you would like your area scanned, the SOC team has the resources to do that, just submit a request.

OneDrive documentation:

  • The Associate Dean of Computing in Math and the CSCF Director have sent a memo to faculty with advice on when to use (and not to use) OneDrive. This has led to an examination of the documentation on IST’s site.
    • Peggy Day’s team will be updating the documentation based on the feedback provided by Math.
  • Andrew McAlorum will be starting an Office 365 advancement project in the new year to address gaps like this.

Roundtable Reporting

Environment (Marko Dumancic)

  • Experimenting on how to virtualize our environment.

Applied Health Sciences (Trevor Bain)

  • A lot of interviews are being done via Skype for Business and it has been going well so far; lots of work for AHS computing to facilitate these.

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

  • eValuate working well this term; some minor issues but nothing major.
  • Met with the Associate Deans of all faculties to present on the online syllabus project.
    • Looks like Math and Science will adopt it next term.

Library (Nick Springate for Adam Savage)

  • Still working on getting staff onto the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).
    • Mix of thin clients running windows 10 1703 and it has been working well so far.

Arts (Keith McGowan)

  • Went through a privacy audit; some of the issues that were flagged from that were onboarding and change management.

Client Services, IST (Andrew McAlorum)

  • Shopify will be used on the webstore; faculty purchases will be able to use a credit card through ecommerce.
    • Will likely be available early in the new year.  
  • All Adobe products (except Acrobat) will be off the webstore soon. Can be purchased through their online store (subscription based).
  • Some student software purchases will be moved to Retail Services (Maple and ArcGIS) to be available in January.

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • We had a link that published lab usage data; the link was broken but is fixed now.
  • MathSOC has finally accepted our offer to provide them with managed OS’s to manage their services. Will be setting up virtual machines for them.
  • The Math and Computer building power outage has been deferred to next summer.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on December 7, 2017 at 1:30pm, in EC2 1021.