Committee meeting - September 29, 2016

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
October 12, 2016

Present: 

Bruce Campbell (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Trevor Bain, Colin Bell, Steven Bourque, Don Duff-McCracken, Erick Engelke, Lawrence Folland, Bob Hicks Dawn Keenan, Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Jason Testart

Regrets:

Andrea Chappell, Dave Kibble, Sati Singh

Agenda

[Will be held Thursday, October 13, 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.

Long term group plans (Lawrence Folland)

• We have been working on a long term plan for our department in Computer Science; interested in what other areas are doing.
• Most of IST’s area specific long term plans can be found on the IST site. Lawrence reviewed the Client Services 3 year plan.
  • The Client Services plan is considered a living plan; managers update their respective areas after every term.
• Arts has a plan in place as well. View their Operation plan for 2016.
• Science currently does not use a plan but the Dean has requested one; will begin working on one mainly based on Faculty needs and requirements.
• Environment uses a 3-4 year plan; easy to handle things like lab hardware upgrades, but more difficult to anticipate needs in your department.
• Applied Health Sciences has an IT committee with representatives from different groups; the committee is in charge of drafting the 3 year plan.

Qualtrics survey tool (Bruce Campbell)  

Derek Wright came to UCIST to give short presentation on a survey tool called Qualtrics.

• There are many instances of Qualtrics on campus.
• IST is investigating getting a site license, the cost is reasonable and a fair amount of money is already being spent on it on campus.
• Bruce Campbell left it with UCIST members to canvas their respective faculties about their interest.
• It we license it for campus, there would be a primary administrator that would need to provide other admin access across campus. Will need to investigate privacy between various groups on campus.
• There is an API option that we would look to include in the site license.

Other business

• Is there a timeline for when we can expect the extract files to stop?
  • Not date set yet; will need to wait until we get our data warehouses up to date with current information before we can discuss replacing the extract file.
• The MC power shutdown has now been officially scheduled for Saturday, October 22.
• WaterlooWorks is on schedule and is set to go live in Winter 2017.
• Bruce Campbell will follow up with Brandon Sweet and MSC regarding the Daily Bulletin being emailed to all faculty and staff.
• Any update on when the Media Production group will be moving out of E2?
  • Scott Nicoll is exploring suitable space for allocation.

Roundtable Report

Applied Health Sciences (Trevor Bain)

• We shut down Red Hat 5; have moved over to IST’s VM platform.
• Have been using the SAS Educational Analytical suite (which allows students to run SAS through a web browser); not a lot of users at this point but expecting it to increase next term.
• New AHS building addition is open; grand opening is happening this weekend. Many thanks to IST and the TIS group for all of the networking they did in that building to get it ready.

Technology Integrated Services, IST (Steven Bourque)

• What we thought was a change in Windows 10 is also a change for current Windows systems; cannot individually select what you want to update. More information to come on this topic.

Environment (Don Duff-McCracken)

• Thank you to IST for setting up the Windows 10 proof of concept training last week; it was a very valuable experience.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

• Arts used LearnLock last term but had some issues with SPSS; we have added an IPv6 which will hopefully resolve the issue.

Computer Science (Lawrence Folland)

• We have set up a Mattermost server (alternative to Slack); just beginning to work with it now.
• Still working on setting up our Nextcloud instance; doing some failure mode testing to make sure everything continues to work.

Client Services, IST (Bob Hicks)

• Media Loans moved this past weekend to MC 1009; Equipment loans is now in MC 1088.

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

• Thank you to Engineering for getting the new drivers to help with LearnLock; will be using it again at the end of term.
• Will not be able to move to Office 2016 in the Finance lab because of incompatibilities.

Math (Robyn Landers)

• Slowly working on updating our accounts management; currently gets important input data from the extract file. Have been discussing with Computer Science on collaborating to solve our account management needs.

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

• Having ongoing discussions with financial auditors and space managers; looking at inventory management software for space (tracking labs, equipment in labs etc.).
• Mirko is currently rewriting the back end of eValuate; should be done by end of term.
• We have hired a 4^th year Engineering student to work on MarkBox; working on the forms creation aspect right now.

Library (Carl Nagel)

• We purchased a 4^th node in Nutanix shelf; the intent is to roll it out to the VM’s in the Library.
• Upgraded from Horizon v6 to 7.
• Will need to talk to IST regarding more storage space.

IT Security (Jason Testart)

• Having issues with the email gateway product, mainly the high availability aspect.
  • Still dealing with the outstanding issue of quarantined emails.
• WatIAM project is going well; trying to implement a self-serve system where the workflow allows people to use a self-service tool to match identities.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on October 13, 2016 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111.