Committee meeting - April 28, 2016

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
May 9, 2016

Present: 

Bruce Campbell (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Trevor Bain, Steven Bourque, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engelke, Bob Hicks, Dawn Keenan, Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Sati Singh, Jason Testart

Guests:

Jonathan Woodcock

Regrets:

Andrea Chappell, Colin Bell, Dave Gawley, Dave Kibble

Agenda

  1. Shopify email address discussion (Jonathan Woodcock) [15 min.]
  2. Chair’s remarks [5 min.]
  3. Approval of the minutes of the meeting of March 17, 2016 [5 min.]
  4. API Access Statement (Bruce Campbell) [15 min.]
  5. Office 365 discussion (Bruce Campbell) [15 min.]
  6. Other Business [5 min.]
  7. Roundtable discussion – all [20 min.]
  1. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, May 12, 2016, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 111.]

Shopify email address discussion (Jonathan Woodcock)

Jonathan Woodcock discussed the use of a generic email address for the Finance e-commerce pilot initiative and is seeking an endorsement from CTSC.

Comments & discussion

  • It is meant to provide a “centrally provisioned solution for e-commerce needs currently unmet by tailored solutions in use by other departments.”
  • The pilot is meant to determine how to manage this service and cover the broad expectations of campus; aiming to complete the pilot by August.
  • Seeking approval to use shop@uwaterloo.ca as the email address to send receipts to customers after transactions; it would be a “no-reply” email address.
    • Members expressed concern that the email is too generic and could be confused with other shops on campus (e.g. Retail Services, machine shops etc.)
    • If it is just a “do not reply” email why not use no-reply@uwaterloo.ca and have the display name be something more user friendly?
      • For usability sake we tried keeping it the same as the site name itself.
    • Woodcock and Sati Singh will discuss the idea of using a different name for the email with Finance and report back.

Chair’s Remarks

Last week it was announced the Bruce Campbell will be the permanent Chief Information Officer beginning in May.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed.

API Access Statement (Bruce Campbell)

Document distributed that provides a statement to be used in RFPs regarding API access.

  • CTSC members endorse the statement.

Office 365 discussion (Bruce Campbell)

  • Distributed documents to CTSC, UCIST and Alumni Relations via email with more information regarding the undergraduate student email in the cloud.
  • The FAQ have been improved to better help answer questions and concerns and explain some reasons for the change. 
  • Will be sending this out to campus in the next two weeks.
  • Before rollout we will be engaging the student community to address any issues or challenges with the new services.
  • New undergraduate students will be using this email service and the rest of the undergraduate students will be moved over some time in the Fall.
  • We will be providing a self-serve migrating tool to move all of their old mail to the new one if they wish to.

Other business

None.

Roundtable Reporting

Applied Health Sciences (Trevor Bain)

  • Finishing up deployment of Office 2016; so far it has been successful, most issues we’ve encountered are easily fixed.
  • Implemented a monthly reboot for workstations; we’re running into problems with people never rebooting their systems. Currently excluding laptops.
  • After some testing, we implemented a 6 month password expiry for administrative and user accounts.  

Environment (Marko Dumancic)

  • Finishing off lab rebuilds.
  • Implementing Office 2016 and it is going well so far.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

  • Edits were made to the website https://uwaterloo.ca/email that changed a link to a site to http to https. Campbell sent a follow-up email and the issue has now been resolved; Bob Hicks can provide more information if necessary.
  • Made changes to AssetMan so that it now collects information from unmanaged systems to show what software they have installed. 

Client Services, IST (Bob Hicks)

  • Waterloo Photos will be going live in May or June; AHS is part of a pilot for testing.

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

  • Rogers has completed their feasibility study and will not be putting a TV cable into Hagey Hall in our new finance lab; arranged through Plant Operations.
  • Pushing out a Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS) for faculty who intermittently need administrator access to a machine; occasionally faculty need to install software and cannot wait for IT staff to respond.
  • Have been encountering some issues with our Windows workstations being slow; traced it to a SCCM client breakage and have a workaround in place.
    • This is a campus-wide issue and the IST Windows group has a ticket with Microsoft.

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • Working towards moving off of our own Active Directory (AD) and moving to Nexus.
  • Never heard anything more about the power outage in MC.

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

  • We will be subjected to the power outage this weekend; currently backing everything up and making sure all batteries are good.
  • Met with the Math undergraduate advisors regarding eValuate; working on generating a report automatically in the program that normally takes a very long time to create.
  • We have 3 co-ops lined up for next term’s projects.

Library (Carl Nagel)

  • We have all of our digital displays up and the boxes that will be running them have come in.
    • Paul Miskovsky’s group in Science has continued to make tweaks and add new features to their system; it fits the needs of the Library really well.

IT Security (Jason Testart)

  • Reviewing the data breach investigation report that Verizon releases each year; interesting stat is that 89% of attacks are external and most are financially motivated.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on May 12, 2016 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111.