Committee meeting - September 1, 2016

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
September 8, 2016

Present: 

Bruce Campbell (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Colin Bell, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engelke, Lawrence Folland, Dawn Keenan, Robyn Landers, Jason Testart

Regrets:

Trevor Bain, Steven Bourque, Andrea Chappell, Bob Hicks, Dave Kibble, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Sati Singh

Agenda

  1. Chair’s remarks [5 min.]
  2. Approval of the minutes of the meeting of August 18, 2016 [5 min.]
  3. OneDrive use by employees (Bruce Campbell) [10 min.]
  4. Other Business [5 min.]
  5. Roundtable discussion – all [20 min.]
  6. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, September 15, 2016, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 111.]

Chair’s Remarks

None.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed.

OneDrive use for employees

  • Shawn Winnington-Ball will lead investigation into OneDrive use for staff/faculty and explore the options.
  • The process should be fairly quick and will likely result in a web page on the IST site providing details on the conditions of the use of OneDrive for staff and faculty.
  • A future investigation could potentially look at OneDrive replacing the N drive if a department was interested in doing so.
  • If you would like to participate directly in this process, please contact Shawn Winnington-Ball.
  • The current discussion is only about storage.
  • CTSC members are interested in trying OneDrive; Bruce Campbell will discuss with Dave Hinton the possibility of getting access, however there has been a large volume of requests coming in at this time. 
  • A noted concern is that having storage provided by an external provider opens up the opportunity for concerns outside of the control of the University.
  • Is the sync to OneDrive selective or full?
    • Will need to investigate.
  • Will need to investigate necessary steps to remove access if someone leaves the University or is terminated.
    • Will they still have access to their data?

Other business

  • No date set yet for upgrading Exchange to 2016.
  • Decommissioning the News server has been deferred for later in September; there will be an announcement prior to turning the server off.

Roundtable Report

Environment (Marko Dumancic)

  • All labs now running on Windows 10
  • Only one lab had the solid state drives installed; issue with supply from the vendor’s end apparently.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

  • Two labs running Windows 10 for fall term; choosing a slow rollout in case issues arise.
  • Started a project with Jason Testart and the IST security team for authenticating some of our web applications.

Computer Science (Lawrence Folland)

  • Currently in the midst of office renovations in the DC; lots of shuffling around.
  • Is there a statement on the IST website regarding end user network capacity?
    • No statement, but everything purchased at this time is 1GB; if there is a need for more, contact Steven Bourque to discuss options.

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

  • As of August 22, we have a permanent lab manager for the Finance Lab in Hagey Hall, Mulham Al Akhras.
  • Not upgrading to Windows 10 until December; waiting to see how things are going for other faculties that are testing it out this term.
  • We have a Group Policy Object (GPO) in place to deal with profile data so it will be interesting to see if there are any changes/concerns if students cross faculties and use labs with a different version of Windows on it.
  • Previously mentioned using LearnLock for some exams in Arts; it was generally acceptable but had some slowness.
    • As staff time is available we are going to look at a possible server to try this out again; Keith McGowan will be in touch with Erick Engelke and Ray White in Engineering to discuss further.

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • Completed the change from our Active Directory to Nexus over the past weekend; generally went fairly well.
  • Still intending to eventually feed group information into Nexus via Grouper.

IT Security (Jason Testart)

  • Just started SalePoint implementation to replace WatIAM; initial phase will end in the new year.
    • No date set to turn off WatIAM, will know more as the investigation continues.
  • Having some issues with the stability of the email security gateway product in high availability mode; the launch has been delayed until later in fall.
    • The issue is with the quarantine capability; having sync issues when in high availability mode.
  • Patrick Matlock is investigating OAuth 2.0 and the IST security team has met with Erick Engelke regarding specific needs.
    • Investigation is ongoing.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on September 15, 2016 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111.