Committee Meeting - January 22, 2015

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
January 27, 2015

Present: 

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

Regrets:

None

Agenda

7. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, February 5, 2015, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 111.]

Chair’s Remarks

• The second meeting for the ad hoc Committee on Technological Innovation was held on Monday, January 19^th.
  • Andrea Chappell and Aldo Caputo joined the meeting to discuss online education.
  • Jude Doble and Pavol Chvala also attended to demonstrate the Student Portal.
  • Next meeting is at the end of February.
• A mini town hall meeting was held on January 21^st on experiential learning (1 of the 8 themes of the strategic plan).

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the meeting held on January 8, 2015 were accepted as distributed with the following changes:

“Trevor Bain will lead the Email in the Cloud project”

Changed to:

"Trevor Bain will lead the Student Email in the Cloud project”

Removed extra word:

“Had a disk 100% failure of a disk array at the end of the day on December 23^rd”

TIS Infrastructure plans (Bruce Campbell)

Bruce Campbell discussed some of the upcoming plans for the Technology Integrated Services group this year.

• Upgrade of the campus VPN; needs to be updated to ensure continued support of the vendors.

• The campus Wi-Fi network has been recently updated but the wired network is 7-8 years old; will be starting a multi-year plan to upgrade that and will likely start with the routers.
  • Cisco was awarded the RFP for the routers in the East Campus buildings; will probably go with them again for the routers for the rest of campus.
• The PBX needs some maintenance; the cores are end-of-life this summer.
• Hoping to expand our deployment of Lync; looking for a department or faculty to do a controlled roll out as opposed to on a request by request basis in order to ensure that we can support it.
  • When we make the switch over to Lync will the charging model change?
    • The current charging model has nothing to do with the service provided; it is a flow through model. Changes may be coming to the charging model when the Activity Based Budget model is implemented.
  • Campbell will distribute a list of Lync supported devices.
  • Trevor Bain and Paul Dietrich will come to a future meeting (in March) to discuss Lync in more detail.
  • Satellite campuses with dedicated IT staff would be good candidates for Lync switchover.
  • How does it interact with location services for emergency 911 calls?
    • Currently it can locate you to where your desktop/office is; but if you answer a Lync call on your mobile device, it will think you are in your office.
    • We are working to improve the location tracking.

CTSC long term agenda & agenda template discussion

Dave Wallace discussed the changes to the UCIST meeting format and planned long term agenda; discussion followed about potentially implementing a similar format for CTSC meetings.

• Information only items can be distributed in advance via email and put as consent items on the agenda.
• CTSC will adapt the agenda topic template that UCIST currently uses to help focus topics for meetings.
  • Important that the template includes the impact on the end users.
• Members have agreed to submit ideas for long term agenda topics via email to be discussed amongst the group.

Roundtable Reporting

Math (Robyn Landers)

• SALT talk will be at Friday morning seminar next week (February 6th)

Environment (Marko Dumancic)

• Have been trying to get metrics from the new version of RT and have not been very successful so far; using Cognos.
  • Metrics from RT will be discussed at a future CTSC meeting.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

• A lot of work is being done on the Asset Management project; will be discussed in more detail at next CTSC meeting.

Science (Paul Miskovsy)

• The disk array that stopped working has now been fixed; most of the memory in it was defective.
  • We swapped it out with 16gb of memory we bought on Ebay and now it is working.  

Client Services, IST (Bob Hicks)

• The exam scanner has now been moved to EC2; exams can be dropped off at EC2 or the service desk in the DC library.

Instructional Technologies and Multimedia Services, IST (Andrea Chappell)

• Course Evaluation project: the team presented draft recommendations to Mario Coniglio before the Christmas break, including a recommendation to strike a project for software investigation, within involvement from all Faculties.
  • On hold until we hear back from Mark Seasons that it is a “go.”
• LEARN (D2L BrightSpace) will be upgrading to a continuous delivery model anticipated at the end of April.
  • Will report back to CTSC on how this affects LEARN.
• The Learning Environment Operations (LEO) group is discussing how to surface more metrics and measurements for the online environment, for reporting and planning.
• Projects in online learning tools: Peer evaluation (underway, led by Jan Wilwerth); response systems, beyond iClickers, for mobile and web delivery (about to start, led by Jan Willwerth, with Mark Morton of CTE); Video storage and delivery service (writing "project intake" form for new IST process, will share with CTSC).

IT Security (Jason Testart)

• Reexamining how compliant we are with PCI-DSS; Parking Services is looking at changing their infrastructure and at some point it would include accepting credit cards for payment.
  • The standard is constantly changing; there will be an awareness seminar happening (if you have an ecommerce site, you will have received an email about the seminar).
• Working on a PSIA and Risk Management policy, looking at how we manage IT risk.

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

• Arts had our first major test of SCCM with the installation (optional for 1 month, mandatory as of January 15) of Microsoft Office 2013 on staff and faculty workstations as well as lab computers.
  • Advance warning to people affected and reporting available through the SCCM console made it a positive experience with minimal need for urgent response to user or machine issues.

Computer Science (Bill Ince)

Triple Boot Macs

The Macs in our teaching labs will become triple boot (current, next, and special event partitions). That will provide fallback, easier testing, and special events involving software that doesn't play well with others.

  FileService

Netapp cost is non-trivial, so we're still debating future direction of build vs buy.

  Security

    Two-Factor

We're looking at Yubikey as a replacement for our aging CryptoCards.

    Networks

CS subnets are now behind the firewall, starting with default allow rules.  There was no problem (some thought there might be).

  Mail

We're moving some @cs mailing lists to @lists, only to be reminded that the list membership files were also used for some TWiki access control, so we can't get rid of all of that yet, which reduces the advantage of the move.

  Flood

    We still hope to be done this term. That would be 7 months of grief.

  Grad Admissions

We built a graduate admissions system some time ago. Along came GAP, which we were told to use. Some CS faculty were unhappy about that, and we were eventually told to resurrect our system.  There is now concern about the data that it has access to.

  Exam Management

We gave a tutorial to a new Registrar's Office staff member about the email message the CS examination management system sends each term (about exams for which it's handling the printing). The Registrar attended, and apparently is interested in the system.

  Budget

While preparing our 2015-2016 budget proposal we were told to separate costs for work that's not specific to CS (e.g. OAT).

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on February 5, 2015 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111