Committee Meeting - April 17, 2014

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
April 25, 2014

Present:

Dave Wallace (Chair), Darren Bondy (secretary), Bruce Campbell, Andrea Chappell, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engelke, Bob Hicks, Bill Ince, Dawn Keenan, Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Terry Stewart, Jason Testart

Regrets: Dave Kibble

Agenda

6. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, May 1, 2014, at 1:30 p.m., in MC 2018A.]

Chair’s Remarks

• Good discussion at UCIST last week regarding the Asset Management project. We are looking into doing a pilot with the project team.  We need to close the RFP and confirm the next steps. More to come on this at a future meeting
• In June, the University will have a mockup of what the new multi-year budget model will look like. Some changes could come to it once the mockup is reviewed. This new multi-year budget model may have ramifications for IT on campus and we will keep you informed as we learn more.
• Ray Darling, the new Registrar will be coming to UCIST at the next meeting to talk about the Scheduling, Timetabling, and Examination Project (STEP). He is interested in meeting different groups on campus.
  • The Chair asked if this would be of interest to this committee; consensus was that they would be interested to have Darling come to a future meeting.
• Dave Kibble attended last week’s UCIST meeting to talk about the IST Annual Plan; will have that presentation come to CTSC at a future meeting.

Approval of the minutes of the meeting of April 3, 2014

The minutes of the meeting held on April 3, 2014 were accepted with the following changes:

“Following the eValuate presentation to the Dean’s Council, AHS is now looking to get involved and start using eValuate.”

Change to:

“AHS is looking into running a pilot of eValuate in the Fall term.”

“We have two remaining XP machines.”

Change to:

“AHS will have two machines on XP after April 8 – both are required to run XP.  They will be put on the private subnet and locked down.”

Add to the Computer Science roundtable update:

“IST has inquired about the availability of a CS Mac lab for use by SEW courses.”

“There is a perceived need to convert the Online Academic Tools (OAT) system to a High Availability architecture, with involvement of CSCF, MFCF and IST.”

Campus Firewall Update (Bruce Campbell)

Campbell discussed with the committee and solicited feedback about how to handle exemptions to the firewall for the respective faculties and departments.

There are two proposed ideas about how to handle exemptions to the firewall:

• To group servers and workstations into separate, dedicated subnets; this is easier and requires less work to be done to the firewall itself.
• Leave all hosts where they are, and have host specific firewall rules; this is more difficult to do, but is easier for faculties that don’t want to use subnets.

Comments & discussion

• Some groups will definitely need exemptions in the firewall.
• Some faculties have agreed that it was a good idea to make the change (if they have not already) to the subnet model.
• How would firewall rule changes be communicated?
  • Would it be preferred to submit an RT or should we have an online tool to change the rules in real time?
    • Engineering currently has a tool that can do this type of thing, will need to investigate this option further.
• Campbell will report back to the committee at a future meeting for an update.

Roundtable Reporting

Math (Robyn Landers)

• Asked a follow-up question regarding the performance issues with the Financial Online Reporting Environment (FORE) and if there were any proposed solutions to this issue.
  • Dave Kibble will provide a follow-up to the group about this question at the next meeting.

Environment (Marko Dumancic)

• Student Portal Pilot is ready to begin.
  • We had our first meeting with the students that will be part of the pilot.
  • It has been a while since the Portal team has been to CTSC, will schedule them for an upcoming meeting.

Applied Health Sciences (Terry Stewart)

• Met with the auditors yesterday and we were given an evidence request list; putting together everything on the list for them by May 1, and they will have a draft done up shortly thereafter.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

• Still working on the firewall tool for Campbell.
• Will be meeting with the audit committee in the next few weeks.

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

• Digital signage project is being launched; we have made some programming changes to our displays and overall it is going well so far.
  • We will be collaborating with Engineering to continue to improve our digital signage.
• After first full faculty evaluation in eValuate, we got a 50% return rate.
• We accidentally sent survey notifications to students who had dropped the class. We need to filter the queries to account for students who have withdrawn from classes.

Instructional Technologies and Multimedia Services (Andrea Chappell)

• The Portal team would like to be able to pull information from LEARN; Chappell has been working with Kris Olafson on this.
  • There is some concern about what the impact on LEARN might be; lots of information being pulled from it. We have asked that someone from D2L (an expert on API) sit down with us to talk about the potential impact. Will update the committee when we know more.
• Still working on configuring the Analytic Insights package that is part of the D2L Productivity Innovation Fund (PIF).

Computer Science (CS) (Bill Ince)

• The Graduate Studies office has a large Filemaker database that contains lots of confidential information.
  • Will be exporting a small amount of non-confidential data so others can use it.
• Not very pleased with the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS); we continue to have issues with printing on Linux machines.
  • There are enough problems with printing that it is tempting to purchase personal printers for each faculty member.
• The Examination Management system will be finished this summer; this will provide improvements in printing exams.
• Planning to have our Inventory system integrated with InfoBlox by the end of the summer.
• Working on layout/design plans for the teaching labs in CS. There does not seem to be a standard of how these should be done.
  • Engelke suggested to speak to Dave Walsh regarding layouts/designs of labs. 

Technology Integrated Services (TIS) (Bruce Campbell)

• Joe Allen has accepted the manager of finance systems position; currently manager of telecommunications. His current role will not be filled and that group will be amalgamated into two other groups.

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

• Working with Retail Services to move our student printing over to them.
• We are working on re-writing the Online Faculty Application System (OFAS) with Kris Olafson; it is being converted into a Drupal module.
  • Most of the summer will be spent implementing the many rules and exceptions.
  • Will provide a demonstration at the end of the summer to CTSC.
  • We are happy to work with others that are interested in this.

Client Services – IST (Bob Hicks)

• Will be bringing the Service Level Agreement (SLA) template we have done up for Math to UCIST on May 9^th; will bring it to this committee after.

Updates (various)

Email (Bruce Campbell)

No update

Active Directory (Bruce Campbell)

No update

IT Strategic Plan (Dave Kibble)

No update

IT Governance (Andrea Chappell)

No update

IT Security (Jason Testart)

• Heartbleed bug: the systems on campus that were vulnerable were patched pretty quickly.
  • Very few vulnerable systems remain.
  • The institutions response to the issue was very good.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on Thursday, May 1, 2014 at 1:30pm, in MC 2018A.