Committee Meeting - August 21, 2014

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
August 27, 2014

Present:

Jason Testart (acting chair), Darren Bondy (secretary), Andrea Chappell, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engelke, Bob Hicks, Bill Ince, Dawn Keenan, Dave Kibble, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Terry Stewart

Guests:

Lisa Tomalty, Shawn Winnington-Ball

Regrets:

Dave Wallace (Chair), Bruce Campbell, Robyn Landers,

Agenda

7. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, September 4, 2014, at 1:30 p.m., in MC 2018A.]

Request Tracker Articles knowledge base demonstration (Lisa Tomalty, Shawn Winnington-Ball)

Lisa Tomalty and Shawn Winnington-Ball presented a demonstration of the Request Tracker Articles knowledge base. Topics included:

• Features
• Structure
• Set up
• Demonstration
• Possible uses – short term
• Long term knowledge management
• Planned RT4 “Article” work
• Timeline

View the full presentation on the Request Tracker Articles knowledge base.

Comments and discussion

• Will co-op students and grad students that we employ have access to these articles?
  • It is up to each group to decide that. We can set it up for whoever needs access to it.
  • If we know that certain articles are available to the public or all of campus, then we should not use information that is sensitive.
• All edits and activity are logged in the system so we can track who is making changes to them.
• There is the capability to upload multiple images; however they are not uploaded in line with the text of the article, but in a separate spot.
• Articles are accessible via Request Tracker (RT) and require you to login.
• Interest amongst the group to have the potential to have a class that allows for access without login requirements.
• We believe it just searches the subject line, but will investigate further and report back.
• We can set it up however we want to too.
• Will investigate further and report back.
• We don’t want just anybody being able to delete a ticket because it is our way of tracking things.
• When you use the search feature, does it search the entire article or just the subject line?
• Currently on campus, everyone uses various methods/techniques for knowledge management, making it difficult to know where to look. If everyone used the same technique we would all know where to find what we need.
• The IT Best Practices project is finishing up soon and will report back to this committee.
• This search is available to anybody?
• Those who do not have access to certain things, will they be able to see the items they do not have access too?
• Searches and articles can be deleted; we will need to look into who has the authentication to delete tickets.
• The current topics list is quite long; we will look into possibly refining this list.
• A sub group from the IT Best Practices group is looking into knowledge management in general; this would be a good place to start the discussion about how to best organize our internal documentation.

Chair’s Remarks (Jason Testart for Dave Wallace)

• At the last meeting, Dave Wallace mentioned a new Board of Governors ad hoc committee on Technological Innovation. A planning meeting will take place within the next two weeks, and the first meeting is expected to take place within 6 weeks after that.
  • View the Terms of Reference (PDF) for the committee.
• There is a new Risk Management Policy being drafted by the Secretariat’s office; it is in the very early stages right now, but should provide some guidance in this area, more details will follow in the future.

Approval of the minutes of the meeting of July 24, 2014

The minutes of the meeting held on July 24, 2014 were accepted as distributed.

Professional Development Advisory Group (PDAG) update (Bob Hicks)

• The PDAG group met this past month and have put together the list of Friday Morning Seminars for September and October.
  • Seminars will be webcast and recorded so they can be watched remotely at your convenience.
  • We will be trying something new this term where you can ask questions while viewing the webcast remotely.
• Hicks and Sandy Laughlin are preparing a proposal for Dave Wallace to bring to the Provost Ian Orchard requesting that the University purchase a university wide license for Lynda.com.
• The license would cover faculty, staff and grad students and would cost about $35,000; this price was negotiated by CUCCIO with Lynda.com.
  • To include undergraduate students in the license, the cost would be significantly higher ($106,000).
• We currently have about 23 licenses that we administer via the CHIP for a 2 week period.
• Members of the CTSC committee unanimously support this initiative.

Roundtable Reporting

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

The eValuate course evaluation project ran smoothly for the Spring term; we are sitting on the results at the moment.

• Lots of work being done to it still, including work on the administration side; lots being done on polishing the tools in the system.

Environment (Marko Dumancic)

• Actively getting prepared for the start of the Fall term.

Computer Science (Bill Ince)

• It would be helpful to have some education on fire suppression for Machine rooms/data centres.
  • There are different kinds of sprinkler heads that react to different temperatures and rooms are required to be signed off by an engineer to ensure they are up to code.
• Our NetApp extended warranty is now expired and they want $40,000/year for maintenance.

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

• Arts Computing will be moving to a space that was vacated by Alumni Affairs in the PAS building.

Client Services, IST (Bob Hicks)

• Kris Olafson has resigned as of September; he has done a terrific job for us at the University and we wish him well on his new endeavors.

Instructional Technologies & Multimedia Services (Andrea Chappell)

• The Course Evaluation project continues; we have been meeting once a month.
  • 3 sub-groups are forming: Instrument (the questions), Policy (data sharing and use) and Administration (including online delivery of evaluations).
• Tammy Marcinko is the newest member of ITMS and we are glad to have her on board.
• The Learning Outcomes PIF continues into the fall; Management of Public Health is running a pilot this fall.  

Library (Carl Nagel)

• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): We are moving all of our public workstations over to VDI.
  • A proof of concept study was done in July and we have run lots of tests so we are analyzing those details now.
  • The proposal is going to the Library Executive committee next week.
  • Nagel will discuss with Jason Testart regarding security when they move closer to moving the staff workstations over as well.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

Progressing well on our audit; started with 41 questions and now it is down to approximately 13.

Applied Health Sciences (Terry Stewart)

• Our account rep for IST was a co-op student and we have now decided to do a trial run of having a full time IST staff member as our representative.
• We had an issue in this past week with the website called OneClass.
  • A professor’s notes were posted on the site by a student. When investigated directly with OneClass it was removed fairly quickly.

IT Security, Jason Testart

• We have the responses to the RFI for our Identity Management project. Due to vacations around this time of year we have yet to review the responses but will be doing so soon.

Updates (various)

Due to time constraints there were no updates.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on Thursday, September 4, 2014 at 1:30pm, in MC 2018A.