Committee Meeting - August 6, 2015

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
August 19, 2015

Present: 

Bruce Campbell (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Trevor Bain, Steven Bourque, Marko Dumancic, Bob Hicks, Bill Ince, Dawn Keenan, Robyn Landers, Carl Nagel, Jason Testart

Regrets:

Andrea Chappell, Erick Engelke, Dave Kibble, Paul Miskovsky, Sati Singh

Agenda

  1. Chair’s remarks [10 min.]
  2. Approval of the minutes of the meeting of July 23, 2015 [5 min.]
  3. Other Business [10 min.]
  4. Roundtable discussion – all [30 min.]
  1. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, August 20, 2015, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 111.]

Chair’s Remarks (Bruce Campbell)

  • Sent the Independent Routers & Fibre Diversity risk document to UCIST with our recommendation to accept the risk; told them if we have broad support from the members we will take it to the Provost for a formal risk acceptance.
  • The project budget for IST has now been approved for the highest priority items; a summary will be distributed to CTSC in the near future and Dave Kibble can provide a more detailed presentation at a future meeting.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the meeting on July 23, 2015, were accepted as distributed with minor revisions.

Other business

  • The SHARCNET proposal was approved; includes computers, funding for air conditioning upgrades within the EC5 data centre.
    • The Office of Research will provide a sum of money for general improvements to the non-SHARCNET part of the data centre.
    • We may have access to the building as of August 15th; could be a year before it is open for others to put their equipment in.

Roundtable Reporting

Technology Integrated Services (Steve Bourque)

  • Starting to look at Windows 10 to see what it’s like.

Client Services, IST (Bob Hicks)

  • The Asset Bank project (repository for photos) that has been led by Andrea Sweet is now ready to be passed off to IST; just received funding to acquire licenses.
    • Will start a project to get this into production; will likely introduce one user group at a time.

Computer Science (Bill Ince)

  • There will be (a small amount of) some central money for (campus-wide) staff support of research machines.
  • We have a new digital sign that is using Visibull; some issues with aesthetics.
  • Contacted Central Stores regarding some old dividers to be discarded in our teaching labs; they misinterpreted us and sent 6 desks off to be destroyed.
  • Computer Science is in a continuous state of renovations. We have staff that can review the designs for proper networking layout. what do others do?
    • IST can be involved early in the construction process to ensure networking is done properly.
  • One of our staff wrote the ITIL Foundations exam and passed.

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

  • We are now using SCCM in production; setting up a distribution point that should be in production by end of August.
  • The Arts Computing office is almost completely moved into our new space in the PAS building.
    • We engaged IST in February when we knew more about the move so they could ensure the proper networking was in place.
  • Our new Administrative Coordinator, Sherry Hartung, will be starting soon; coming over from Computer Science.
  • Waiting for Human Resources approval to fill one of our vacant positions.
  • Ran our pilot for eValuate this term for 53 course sections; had an overall response rate of 47%.
    • Will be hearing feedback from professors/instructors over the coming weeks.

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • The new NetApp is now being snapmirrored to IST now so we can decommission the other one.
    • Need to review the verbal agreements we established with IST a while ago.
  • We should have MapleTA running on production hardware for the Fall term; may be contacting IST regarding the possibility of expanding it for campus-wide use.

Library (Carl Nagel)

  • Still on schedule to move to uPrint for September; need guest-cards for community members to have access to printing.
    • Just a matter of time before we can pull out release stations and put the new ones in.
  • Met with IST regarding updates to AV equipment in our main conference room.

IT Security (Jason Testart)

  • Made a change in Connect so that it strips Zip files as attachments in emails; some departments have issues with this because their workflow relies on Zip files; will need to figure out a workaround for those cases.
    • The login pop up warning about Zip files will likely be gone in the next few days.
    • Blocking Zips is not a long term solution; have been approved to investigate a class of products regarding email security.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on August 20, 2015 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111.