Committee Meeting - October 1, 2015

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
October 7, 2015

Present: 

Bruce Campbell (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Trevor Bain, Steven Bourque, Andrea Chappell, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engelke, Bob Hicks, Bill Ince, Dave Kibble, Dawn Keenan, Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Jason Testart

Regrets:

Sati Singh

Agenda

  1. Chair’s remarks [10 min.]
  2. Approval of the minutes of the meeting of August 6, 2015 [5 min.]
  3. uPrint update
  4. Other Business [10 min.]
  5. Roundtable discussion – all [30 min.]
  1. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, September 3, 2015, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 111.]

Chair’s Remarks (Bruce Campbell)

  • The Fibre Diversity and Independent Routers document distributed by Steven Bourque has also been taken to UCIST and we received their support.
    • Campbell sent it to the Provost and the Secretariat and discussed with the Provost in person yesterday; we have formally accepted the risk now.
    • Campbell will present to the board audit committee in mid-October which should draw this item to a close.
  • Bill Ince will be retiring in the coming months; Computer Science will be sending a new representative on a rotating basis (likely rotating every 6 months).
    • Dave Gawley will attend the next meeting with Ince to begin the transition process.
  • If you have any agenda items that you would like discussed at upcoming meeting please let us know.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the meeting on August 20, 2015, were accepted as distributed.

uPrint Update/Feedback

  • The Library has had some issues with uPrint and are experiencing a degradation in service in comparison to their old system. 
    • Staff and faculty require guest cards to print; we were under the impression that they would be added into the system manually. Very few staff and faculty use our printing services but we have had a number of complaints so far.
      • Bruce Campbell and Bob Hicks will investigate the underlying problem and update the group accordingly.
    • Library is also experiencing another issue regarding time it takes to send print job to printer; affects a small number of print jobs but is still having an impact.
  • uPrint has worked well so far for Environment, AHS and Arts; there has been a noticeable decrease in the amount of printing issues they need to deal with since being on uPrint.
  • IST is working on setting a date to stop using xas altogether (potentially May 2016); Engineering is the only faculty on xas still.

Other Business

None.

Roundtable Reporting

Steven Bourque (Technology Integrated Services)

  • Looking at deploying Lync lite.
  • IST is beginning the Proof of Concept for migrating the solaris environment to x86 next week.

Andrea Chappell (Instructional Technologies and Multimedia Services)

  • We have been trying to integrate CrowdMark with LEARN but it has not worked well so far; investigation is ongoing.
  • The project group for the Course Evaluation project has been putting together recommendations for next steps.
  • Centre for Extended Learning has now moved into EC3.
  • Sent out a memo to all instructors at the start of the term about DVD players eventually going away; if you hear comments from anyone in your respective groups please feel free to pass them on to me.
  • At the mini town hall last week, it was announced that the University will begin putting some money into the classrooms on campus for renovations, upgraded etc.

Marko Dumancic (Environment)

  • We have a joint program with WLU that has been having issues with students being able to access their program on LEARN.
    • Jane Holbrook from the Centre for Teaching Excellence is trying to fix this issue now.

Erick Engelke (Engineering)

  • We have solid state drives (SSDs) in about 500 of our lab workstations; a number of these are incompatible with BIOS.
  • The Hack-The-North hackathon that happened last weekend was a huge success; thank you to IST for their help.
  • We have met with OAT and don’t anticipate any problems consuming data from them for a number of our projects.
  • It would be beneficial to discuss the idea of having a UW ID card to identify everyone on campus and also be used to open doors, podiums etc.
    • We are capable of doing this but someone needs to champion this topic.
    • Bruce Campbell will look into this further.

Bob Hicks (Client Services, IST)

  • There is another hackathon taking place on October 17th for the Student Portal; participants will develop widgets for the Portal.
  • IST has taken control over the Asset Bank project; Natasha Jennings is the lead on the project.
    • Will begin implementing it one group at a time.

Bill Ince (Computer Science)

  • There was a small reorganization within CSCF.
  • We finally got permission to hire the missing manager in our group.
  • There are a lot of sessionals in CS; normally we would just give them an office and nothing else. Now we'll provide a "thin client to each sessional.
  • Having direct access to your data is very beneficial; our faculty recruiting system allows the director to easily access information.
  • CrowdMark will begin working to integrate with our current exam seating system.

Dawn Keenan (Arts)

  • We have worked closely with Sean Mason over the past month because of oddities encountered with WatIAM; people being assigned to certain areas and being unable to move them.
  • We are making some infrastructure improvement to improve some slowness issues between the Stratford campus and Waterloo campus.
  • Since using the VDI for one of our big courses we have found there is a drastically reduced demand on our service desk; significantly less issues with software on personal computers etc.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on October 15, 2015 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111.