Committee Meeting - September 4, 2014

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
September 8, 2014

Present:

Dave Wallace (Chair), Darren Bondy (secretary), Bruce Campbell, Andrea Chappell, Marko Dumancic, Bob Hicks, Bill Ince, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Sati Singh, Jason Testart

Guests:

Jim Johnston (for Robyn Landers), Stephen Sempson (for Erick Engelke)

Regrets:

Erick Engelke, Dawn Keenan, Dave Kibble, Robyn Landers, Terry Stewart

Agenda

7. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, September 18, 2014, at 1:30 p.m., in MC 2018A.]

Chair’s Remarks

• The Chair introduced and welcomed Sati Singh, Director of Enterprise Systems, to the committee. Singh will provide his vision for Enterprise Systems to this committee at a future meeting.
• The Fall term is just beginning and the Portal will continue to roll out in Environment. The roll out went well in the Spring term.
  • Will reach out to Pavol Chvala and Jude Doble to get statistics on usage of the Portal during Spring term and send out to committee.
• A planning meeting will be held on Monday, September 8 for the new ad hoc Committee on Technological Innovation.

Approval of the minutes of the meeting of August 21, 2014

The minutes of the meeting held on August 21, 2014 were accepted as distributed.

UCIST Update

Dave Wallace provided an update on the changes coming to UCIST this fall.

• The Terms of Reference (ToR) (will be linked in the WCMS) have been revised and is currently being fine-tuned.
  • The changes to the ToR will strengthen the advisory role the committee has.
  • The new Provost, Ian Orchard has approved the changes.
• In the fall UCIST meetings there will be an update/review on the IT Strategic plan.
  • There are lots of projects happening across campus in IT and a portfolio allows us to prioritize that.
• The committee needs to focus on the strategic level.
  • Other committees, especially CTSC, may be called upon to delve into more of the technological details.
• There have been changes made to membership for the fall; all faculty representatives on the committee will be members of their respective faculties. IST directors will no longer be on the committee but will be resources to the committee. Mario Coniglio, Chris Read and Peggy Jarvie will remain members of UCIST.
  • It was confirmed earlier this week that Ray Darling (appointed by Ian Orchard) will be on the committee now instead of Dennis Huber.
• A draft 6 month agenda has been created and will be reviewed at the first UCIST meeting; future planning allows it to remain strategic but it is also flexible to include additional items when necessary.

Campus Firewall (Bruce Campbell)

Bruce Campbell provided an update on the progress of the Campus Firewall project.

• 3 academic support buildings are behind the firewall; we are resuming migration of other academic support buildings.
  • Staff in IST have not really noticed any difference since being moved behind the firewall.
• All faculties are comfortable with migrating their respective areas by December 2014.
  • Engineering may take longer; Engineering Computing is ready but the rest of the departments are not.
• When each faculty is ready to migrate, contact Bruce Campbell and a meeting will be set up with Campbell, Steve Bourque and Mike Patterson to discuss the process and requirements.
• Math is ready to do the migration and will contact Campbell to begin this process.
  • Campbell will report back to the committee about how the Math migration went.
• Campbell will continue to provide updates on the progress at each CTSC meeting.

Roundtable Reporting

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

• eValuate: We went through the code written by our co-ops and re wrote it to better optimize the application.
  • It is easy to bring in additional faculties into the program; all of the information is pulled from OAT, all we need is the template of questions and what courses are to be included.

Environment (Marko Dumancic)

• A couple people have been interested in syncing their Microsoft Exchange calendars with their Google calendar.
  • There is not an easy solution to be able to sync them; it was suggested to speak with Will Lewis in IST who has experience with these issues.

Client Services, IST (Bob Hicks)

• The Service Level Agreements (SLAs) project is coming to a close; two more SLAs to do with Housing and the Library. A project closure report will be presented to UCIST and CTSC in October.
• Kris Olafson has left the University; as of now, Kevin Paxman is the technical lead for Drupal and Pavol is the lead for the Student Portal.
  • We are in the process of doing interviews and are hoping to have a replacement in the next 2-3 weeks.

Instructional Technologies & Multimedia Services (Andrea Chappell)

• Course Evaluation project: 3 subcommittees are Administration (online delivery solution and processes around that), Instrument (the question set), and Policy.
• LEARN is at 1500-1600 courses; more will be created from last minute requests.
• Productivity and Innovation Funding (PIF) project (Learning Outcomes Assessment, LOA) – reports will be run later in the fall based on data collected in two Masters of Public Health program courses.
• Classroom directions: Coming from the Academic Programming task force of the UW Strategic Plan, a committee is to be struck and spearheaded by Beth Jewkes.

Technology Integrated Services (Bruce Campbell)

• Sometime in the future, the University will have more data centres available. We would like to explore the possibility of using it as a campus resource. If anyone is planning on investing lots of money on their existing data centres or purchasing new ones, they may want to wait and consider this possibility.

Updates (various)

Email (Bruce Campbell)

No update

Active Directory (Bruce Campbell)

• Campbell will be meeting with Computer Science and Math regarding Active Directory and will report back to the committee with an update.

IT Governance (Andrea Chappell)

• See agenda item #3.

IT Security (Jason Testart)

• The RFI for Identity Management is complete and is being reviewed; will be able to provide an update at a future meeting.
• Proofpoint: Several accounts have been compromised in recent days and are being used to send out spam. Proofpoint has been aggressive in blacklisting us as a spam generator.
  • Most of the compromised accounts are alumni; some more recent ones have been staff.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on Thursday, September 18, 2014 at 1:30pm, in MC 2018A.