Speaker: Jason Gorrie & Kevin Scully, IST
IST recently completed an upgrade to their storage and virtualization infrastructure. In this talk, Jason Gorrie and Kevin Scully will provide the rationale for the upgrade, some specifics of the upgrade process and the ultimately present failure and recovery scenarios.
Speaker: Lannois Carroll-Woolery & Chris Voutsis, IST
Is user training, knowledge transfer, technical support or system documentation an area of interest to you or your team? Enterprise Systems administers a content management application, UPK, that can be used to record screen activity such as screen shots, mouse clicks and keystrokes. The recording can be edited to highlight important items, incorporate sound files and add supplementary information. Output formats include MP4, PPTX, HTML and PDF. Join us as we demo the tool and speak to achievements to date, and our plans for 2016.
Speaker: Courtney Matthews, Library
The University of Waterloo has a long history of innovation in the area of scholarly communication. Under the leadership of Christine Jewell, the Electronic Thesis Project launched Waterloo’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) repository in 1999. Since then over 8300 Electronic Theses and Dissertations have been deposited into UWSpace by University of Waterloo graduate students. While UWSpace has thrived on the ETD project and continues to grow daily, it is not a comprehensive IR as it does not collect, preserve, and disseminate the scholarly research output of Waterloo’s faculty and staff researchers. Over the last decade, the IR landscape in Canada, United States, and abroad has shifted focus primarily to the collection of published articles, conference proceedings, and presentations, white papers, undergraduate theses, and major research papers, and is rapidly expanding to include research data.
This presentation will further discuss the basis for the UWSpace expansion project. It will make the case for UWSpace as both a platform that enables researchers to share their scholarship openly and as a tool that assists researchers to achieve compliance with emerging federal funding agencies requirements. Points to be discussed include:
- Project Background and goals
- Phase I
- Tri-Agency Open Access Policy for Publications
- New functionality (demonstration)
- Phase II goals
To learn more visit uwspace.uwaterloo.ca and the UWSpace guide.
Speaker: Bob Hicks, IST
There are a lot of benefits from building and maintaining successful working relationships. In fact, it’s one of the most rewarding parts of a career. Building successful working relationships requires skills like communication and trust. It’s hard to fix a broken relationship, but it can be done in time.
A lot has changed in Bob’s IT career at the University, obviously in technology, but also in relationship building. We have gone from being centralized in IT, to decentralized, and now working on a federated approach that puts the focus back on building relationships. Bob will share his experiences, and also his conversations with others who have succeeded in relationship building on campus.
Speaker: Andrew McAlorum, IST
The WCMS team has had a busy year making a number of advances to the University web. In this session, Andrew will review what the team has been working on so far in 2015, including IT service management improvements, development projects and initiatives, as well as what’s new and coming in the WCMS.
Speaker: Will Lewis, IST
Do you purchase software from the IST Webstore, or support colleagues that do?
Join us this Friday for a demonstration of the IST Webstore, including a review of recently added software and tools for technical support staff.
Speaker: Isaac Morland, Computer Science (CSCF)
Isaac will show how easy it is to get started with PostgreSQL and use it for various data management tasks. He will start by installing a new copy of PostgreSQL, then import some data and show some examples of data processing made easy by the advanced features of PostgreSQL. Isaac will also discuss briefly the strategic value of using PostgreSQL, independent of its technical merits.
The second Student Portal Hackathon is coming! Register as an individual or with a group of friends and spend the day building cool, informative widgets for the student portal.
First hackathon? No problem! Visit the Student Portal website to learn more about the event schedule, how you can prepare for the day, and what happened at the first hackathon.
Speakers: Adam Savage, Library
Hyperconverged is a relatively new buzz word that has been lighting up the tech industry for the past couple of years. Adam Savage from the Library will discuss a brief history of shared storage and how Hyperconverged infrastructure is addressing the pitfalls of traditional 3-tier architecture within large virtual environments. He will also detail the Library’s deployment of Nutanix, the leading Hyperconverged vendor in the market.
Speakers: Steve Nickerson & Ed Chrzanowski, Computer Science and Herbert Balagtas, Arts
Herbert, Steve and Ed will discuss their conference highlights from the 2015 MacAdmins Conference at Penn State that took place this past June. This conference is the premier East Coast conference for anyone who deploys and manages Macs and iOS devices in an enterprise or educational environment.
Speakers: Manfred Grisebach and Peter Schepers, IST
While we’re not ready for large-scale deployment, an introduction now would be advantageous.
This presentation will cover the preparation that is underway, as well as licensing and versioning. This will be followed by a live presentation that will highlight what’s new in Windows 10 and how the user experience could be different from previous versions.
Speakers: James McCarthy, Env; Nathan Vexler and Michael Tjendra, IST
In this session James, Nate and Michael will talk about the development of the new campus map. They will discuss how the project came to be, some of the tools and technologies used to manage the development of the application, and some of the new and upcoming features. Specifically they will talk about:
Speakers: Matt Verlis, IST
In this session, Matt will give us an overview of campus Wi-Fi including:
- How Wi-Fi works
- Past Project design and decisions/surveys
- Current design process
He will talk about challenges in installation and getting clients online.
Matt will also talk about operation and maintenance:
Speakers: Natasha Jennings, Heather Wey, Peggy Day and Shayne Dyck, Information Systems & Technology (IST); Donald Duff-McCracken, Bernie Rutter, MAD
In this seminar, staff from IST and Mapping, Analysis & Design will share highlights from conferences recently attended. Topics include Tech Leadership, Accessibility, Empowering U, ResNet and Canheit.
Student email services are moving to the Cloud -- but we need your feedback!
How do you use your @uwaterloo.ca student email account? What features and functionality would you like to have for your student email account? We want to hear more about your experience with your student email account and how it is or isn’t meeting your needs. We’ll also ask you about what kind of collaboration tools you’d like to have included with your student email account.
Speakers: Adam Savage, Library
In this seminar, Adam will give an overview of the Library VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) Project. He will talk about zero client management, image deployment, some difficulties of application virtualization and the hardware needed to run it all.
This seminar will be webcasted/recorded and questions can be asked during the webcast via the link on the page.
Speakers: Siobhan Stables and Laura Gordon, Marketing & Undergraduate Recruitment (MUR)
They are realists and entrepreneurs with super short attention spans, and they are starting to fill our classrooms. In this interactive presentation, you’ll learn how Gen Z differs from Millennials – and how to interact with this new generation.
Speakers: Mike Nowakowski (CEL)
Initially conceived in the early 2000's, the enterprise service bus (ESB) has become a ubiquitous part of enterprise application and systems integration. This introductory talk will explore the potential pitfalls of point-to-point integration, introduce the concept of an enterprise service bus and how it can help to implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) within a large enterprise environment.
Do you purchase software from the IST Webstore, or support colleagues that do?
Join us for a demonstration of the IST Webstore, including a review of recently added software and tools for technical support staff.
Questions or to RSVP: Please contact Sandy, laughlin@uwaterloo.ca or ext. 42014.
Speakers: OUCC Attendees
The Ontario Universities Computing Conference (OUCC) took place on May 2-5, 2015 at Trent University. This conference provides an opportunity for IT professionals from across Ontario to share ideas and collaborate on the issues facing universities today. The session streams included Leadership and Governance, Leveraging Data, Security, The Art of Renewal, Client Services, and Cloud.
Students, we need your feedback!
What is happening? Information Systems & Technology (IST) has embarked on a Service Catalogue renewal project, the purpose of which is to enhance the catalogue’s value for IT clients. In the next phase of this project a student focus group will be held to gather feedback and gain a better understanding as to how the IST Service Catalogue is used, and what information clients would expect or hope to see included in the catalogue.
Speakers: Kyle Scholz, CTE; Andrea Chappell, Tammy Marcinko, Erin Young and Marcel David, IST
IST’s instructional technologies group (ITMS) has a number of projects on the go or about to start. With 6 lined up for this 45 minute session, we decided to call this: “ITMS Speed (up)Dating”!
Speakers: Jay Athia and Jana Carson, Institutional Analysis & Planning (IAP)
Jay Athia and Jana Carson from IAP will showcase the website and dashboards produced to monitor progress towards the Strategic Plan outcomes.
Wondering How Your Central IT Department is Doing? Ask Your Clients!
Speaker: Bob Hicks, Director, Client Services, IST
Speakers: Mark Stewart and Nick Szyngiel, Center for Extended Learning (CEL)