Committee meeting - November 9, 2017

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee­­­
November 10, 2017

Present: 

Steve Bourque (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Trevor Bain, Colin Bell, Andrea Chappell, Marko Dumancic,  Erick Engelke, Robyn Landers, Andrew McAlorum, Keith McGowan, Omar Nafees, Jason Testart, Lawrence Folland

Regrets:

Daryl Dore, Dave Kibble, Paul Miskovsky, Adam Savage

Agenda

[Will be held Thursday, November 23, 2017, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 1021.]

Chair’s Remarks (Steven Bourque)

• Beth Jewkes presented at UCIST regarding space management and lab usage. Requested information about lab usage within the faculties and academic support areas.
• Have discussed with Bruce Campbell that we will be providing a document for UCIST to review regarding using student cell phones as a point of contact for locked accounts.  

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed.

Access control discussion

A discussion regarding access control was started via the mailing list this past week.

• TIS will be restructuring the hierarchy of the grouping system for access control.
• The system is currently complicated based on the various door groups.
• The podium fob system is different than the other access control options on campus due to the very specific requirements for podiums.
• When the TIS team begins the restructuring process, Steven will report back to the committee.

Student cell phone numbers (Erick Engelke)

Erick Engelke has begun investigating the use of student cell phones as a way to notify them about locked accounts.

• An issue with using their cell numbers in this way is that they are unreliable as time goes on.
  • Over time, especially after first year, the database will become outdated.
  • It could still be valuable for first year students who had their accounts locked after falling for a phishing scam. 
• Another issue is that some students pay per text message received.
• Portal has the ability for push notifications; students could get informed in this way (the buy in for the app has increased significantly).
  • Almost all first year students use the application.
  • Andrew McAlorum will further investigate the use of push notifications in Portal to notify students if their account is locked.
• Multifactor authentication is a better long term solution; the intention is to prevent their accounts from being phished in the first place.
• IST will also look to improve the awareness of the IST Service Desks for students to go to for help when their accounts are locked.
  • Looking into including a brochure/pamphlet in the orientation packages that incoming students receive.

Other Business

Subdomain request

• High profile researcher in Computer Science would like to create a subdomain of rcs.uwaterloo.ca.
  • This request does not comply with the guidelines that were presented, and agreed upon, by CTSC members at the December 22, 2016 meeting.
  • All faculties have their own subdomain, and they can create something such as name.cs.uwaterloo.ca.

Using purchased software off campus

• This issue was brought to UCIST last week; some people have experienced issues being able to use software that was purchased/installed on their managed laptops while being off campus (but still connected to an eduroam network).
  • Will Lewis is working with Matt Verlis and the workstations team to determine a solution and will report back.

Lynda.com

• eCampus Ontario has purchased a province-wide license for Lynda.com.
• The university currently has a license for staff/faculty/grad students.
• A formal announcement will be made by eCampus Ontario soon.

Roundtable Reporting

Client Services, IST (Andrew McAlorum)

• As part of AODA compliance we are doing an environmental scan of all uwaterloo.ca sites.
  • Will bring back results to this committee.
• Working on two big initiatives right now in Client Services; finalizing the new strategic plan website as well as the IST annual report.
• Officially launched WatVote; new online voting tool within the WCMS.
  • There was a Daily Bulletin article announcing its launch on October 30^th.

Arts (Keith McGowan)

• Have been in talks with other faculties regarding possible charge back model for afterhours support in rented out labs.
• Greg Parks will begin a secondment in Arts Computing this coming Monday.

Instructional Technologies and Media Services (Andrea Chappell)

• Got back the preliminary responses on the Teaching and Learning Spaces survey (21% response rate).
  • Will bring this topic back to a future meeting to more thoroughly discuss results.
• Also conducted an online learning survey that had 350 responses.
  • Will report back on these results as well.
• The LEARN group will be going to the IT Advisory Board to answer questions and get feedback from students on the learning environment.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

• Receiving complaints from faculty about losing email. Other faculties have had similar issues.
  • Anyone concerned that they have lost email should submit an RT so that IST can determine if the emails have been delivered. Often times missing emails are due to user error but the Proofpoint system has also quarantined legitimate emails at times.

Technology Integrated Services, IST (Steven Bourque)

• The new ISP was turned on yesterday; seems to be running fine so far.
• Gained access to the admin side of WebX today; still determining what we will be using it for.

Information and Integration Management (Colin Bell)  

• There have been lots of discussions regarding collaboration tools recently; will work to bring those together and determine the best way to proceed.

Applied Health Sciences (Trevor Bain)

• Some people are experiencing issues with the iOS 11 update and using the native email application.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on November 23, 2017 at 1:30pm, in EC2 1021.