Sessions 2022

The WatITis conference is held as a hybrid event on December 7, 2022.  The in-person sessions will be held in the Science Teaching Complex (STC). Please note that the session schedules are currently tentative and may change without notice.

* indicates a 20 minute session

(R) indicates session will be recorded

Session 1 (10:15 - 11:05)

Speaker: Terry Labach

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Static application security testing (SAST) is the automated analysis of source and compiled code for elements that could lead to insecure execution of the code.

IST’s Information Security Services team (ISS) provides penetration testing services coupled with DAST (Dynamic application security testing) to evaluate web applications and services for security issues. However, some security problems may not be uncovered by looking at the application from the outside. By integrating internal security analysis of source code into the software development process, additional risks can be discovered and eliminated before deployment.

Terry Labach from the ISS team (and a former software developer himself) will provide an overview of SAST, including its strengths and weaknesses, and will describe how it complements other facets of application security testing. He will also discuss and demonstrate some of the SAST solutions that ISS has evaluated and recommends to campus developers.

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Speakers: Jason Greatrex, Michele Sguigna, Bradley Bennett

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
As knives are to chefs; critical tools to the trade; so too are hardware and software to us IT Professionals in our craft and vocation. In this session, learn how CEL Systems created processes that ensured CEL departmental staff hardware and software needs were met, maintained, and monitored with virtual and physical audits supporting institutional fiscal responsibility.

We will discuss our standard operating procedures (SOP) in applying best practices during our virtual and physical hardware audit process and some surprise findings during our software audit experiences. In addition, we will speak about our lessons learned along the way, we leveraged our Computing Inventory Management Systems (CIMS) throughout these processes, applying continuous improvements, and the importance of our “goods received in working order” procedure.

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Speaker: Daniel Allen

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
Computer Science Computing Facility has been developing a tool set for administration of "people" data such as room and desk assignments, expertise, roles, computing resources, and various other dynamic data. We built a React/Flask web application with a postgres back-end within the "odyssey" database, and are harnessing it to automate what we can.

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Speaker: Johanna Whitson

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
Knowledge Management allows us to work more efficiently, minimizes digital footprints, and creates more sustainable and resilient workplaces, but even though the value is widely recognized, very rarely do we feel like we are doing it well. In 2019 the UWaterloo Library started an initiative to take a more systematic approach to how we store the internal information we produce. Being experts in the field of information we started off being well positioned for this work... but a Pandemic, staffing, changing work norms, and technology shifts all worked together to keep us humble along the way. Join us in learning from our triumphs and struggles as we share the key underlying principles we discovered for bringing people together to build a repository that captures what we know about what we know.

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Speaker: Jordan Barnartt

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
The Library has implemented a department-wide password management policy focusing primarily on the use of the Bitwarden password management solution. I will describe the procedural and technical challenges we faced in implementing this solution. I will discuss the policy which we have implemented and the rationale behind our decisions, integration with Active Directory and ADFS, and custom scripts we have implemented to automate administrative tasks.

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Speaker: Israel Cefrin

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
When you join a new project, it usually requires that you deploy a local development environment. Even tools like Docker have a reasonable learning curve especially for junior members of a team.
Lando is a tool that eases the workload of starting to use Docker and allow devs to focus on coding rather than setting up LAMP stacks. Let's have a look at how Lando can help you to create fresh instances, or local copies of production websites, at light speed.

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Speakers: Tara Hillis, Nick Manning

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
The Mass Email Management (MEM) project was kicked off this year. It is a multi-year project to improve our mass email process and tools. The project, when complete, will provide improved information management, reporting, and coordination of mass emails to student and employees and stakeholders of the institution through the delivery of a common email management platform and service.

This talk will tell you more about the project and answer your questions about mass email at the University of Waterloo.

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Speakers: Jason Testart

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Jason Testart, the University's Director of Information Security Services, will provide an overview of the security happenings of 2022, how Waterloo has fared against this past year's threats, and will talk about what the security team is working on to keep things secure.

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Session 2 (11:15-Noon)

Speaker: Sergey Bobkin

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
More and more institutional data is stored in the Azure cloud. Our group primarily supports data stewards and end users in getting insights from this data in the Power BI service. However, we've also enabled other options to get data into system and user hands, with granular permissions, with live query capabilities, and with user consent; join to find out what we've built and what we've learned.

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Speakers: Pam Fluttert, Tara Hillis

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
For a change to succeed, the IT project must consider change management to effectively support those impacted. In this session, our goal is to ensure you are more comfortable with the tools and techniques that are used for introducing change to impacted stakeholders in your projects. The content and activities are designed to provide you with an understanding of the intersection between change management and project management and how they complement each other, understand the critical roles for delivering change with your projects, and hopefully leave with an understanding of some of the tools available to you and ideas on how you could apply them to your own projects.

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Speakers: Karl Schuett, Lannois Carroll-Woolery

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Enrollment forecasting is a foundational Data Analytics challenge for higher education institutions worldwide. Good forecasts enable accurate and reliable institutional budgets, efficient management of resources, and supports the institution's Strategic Enrolment Management initiatives.

The University of Waterloo faces unique challenges for enrollment forecasting. We have North America’s most extensive co-op program and are open year-round, making it difficult for many out-of-the-box predictive tools to forecast student enrollment accurately.

Institutional Analysis and Planning developed a new undergraduate forecasting model that predicts student enrollment and allows for flexible reporting by various institutional stakeholders.

Learn more about IAP and our journey towards developing a Python-powered enrollment model that is flexible and scalable.

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Speaker: Ryan Goggin

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Creating automations and integrations between various platforms can be a lengthy process and can be hard to modify and maintain for a change in the workflow. By taking advantage of modern low/no code workflow platforms, we can speed up the development process and update the workflow easily. We will go over implementing several workflows in various workflow platforms. We will be exploring the following platforms: n8n, and Power Automate.

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Speaker: Edward Chrzanowski

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Rusting Away in Waterloo.
Searching for my lost pillar of Salt
Some people say that there is "C" to blame
But I know it is a recursive fault.
(paraphrasing Jimmy Buffet) - more technical relative lyrics are welcome.

An overview of Rust and why it plays a sustainable role in infrastructure projects. It combines the performance and resource efficiency of systems programming languages like C with the memory safety of languages like Java

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Session 3 (1:00-1:50)

Speaker: Stephen Markan, Lisa Tomalty, Diana Timmermans

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
This session will cover migrating R: (\\filed) to the cloud service offered by Microsoft via SharePoint Online storage (including MS Teams FILES storage) and the plan to reduce on-prem network drive storage by April 2023. While the project is primarily focused on Academic Support Units "departmental storage", this seminar will be of interest to anyone moving data from on-prem

The advantages of this migration are:

- Improved access/authentication (no VPN required)
- Anytime, anywhere access to files including the option to work offline and sync changes to the cloud when back online
- Improved collaboration : share, co-author, or collaborate on content with colleagues in real time
- Enhanced functionality (e.g. search); Versioning; Autosave features
- Improved data security (2FA required); Data is encrypted at rest and is stored in Canada;
- Cost savings and improved resource allocation due to reduced on-campus infrastructure

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Speaker: Connie van Oostveen

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
The IT Review process culminated in a report that was published in late 2019, with over 100 recommendations listed. In the spring term of 2022, work was begun to organize and bring some structure to the work of implementing the recommendations. The following September, the project was launched with a defined scope, theme co-leads assigned, and the identification of inflight and new projects and initiatives related to the recommendations within the themes. In this session, you will learn about the organization and structure of the IT Review, the scope of the work, timelines, what actions are being taken, where progress is being made and how you can get involved.

Connie van Oostveen is the Manager of the Project Management Office, and is currently the project manager for the IT Review. Connie has over 25 years of experience in IT, as a business analyst, portfolio and strategy manager and project manager, implementing large projects and initiatives for core business activities, as well as leading the development of an IST Strategic Plan (2017-2020). Connie has PMP and PMI-ACP certifications, a business analyst certificate and a BMath. With Nathan Lee, Connie leads the Project and Portfolio Community of Practice.

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Speaker: Charlotte Armstrong

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
WCMS 3 is beautiful, smart, and quite abrasive to many WCMS 2 users, meaning that it doesn’t attract much love. Unfortunately for the training and support team, house rules say that they can’t stop WCMS 2 courses until WCMS 3 is more popular, so strings are pulled to set the dour replacement up for a WatITis presentation. Soon WCMS 3 crosses paths with handsome new and improved features and functionality. Will WCMS 2 users let their guard down enough to fall for the effortlessly charming Charlotte, explaining the 10 things she loves about WCMS 3?
 

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Speaker: Kevin Paxman

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
A comedic send-up of the grim circumstances of WCMS 3’s Middle Ages as told through the story of King Arthur. When the mythical king of the Britons leads his knights on a quest for the Holy Grail of new WCMS 3 features, they face a wide array of options, including a persistent COPE Knight, a three-headed giant (conference, publication, and single page), a cadre of shrubbery-challenged requests, the perilous Castle COVID, a killer rabbit, and a handful of rude feedback.

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Speaker: Johanna Wandel, Aldo Caputo

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
In 2022, the Provost commissioned the development of a Digital Learning Strategy for the University of Waterloo. A description of the project is available at https://uwaterloo.ca/provost/digital-learning-strategy. This session will provide an overview of the project and progress to date, as well as the opportunity to comment on key findings.

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Speaker: Gregory Smith

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Greg will reflect on his experience as both the Director of DCA and the interim director of ERP in 2022. He will identify synergies between the two groups, areas of commonality, and exciting long-term projects that the groups are doing together. Greg will also have a focus on emerging areas of IT and how we can continue to push the Information Systems envelope to best serve the IT needs of the university.

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Session 4 (2:00-2:45)

Speaker: Mirko Vucicevich

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Rich Text is a royal pain to implement on the web, but a handful of modern libraries act as excellent painkillers. Enter TipTap (v2), a modern and headless editor for React, Vue, or even Vanilla-javascript web applications.

This talk will be broken into 3 parts:
- An overview of modern web rich text options, and why many are terrible
- A tiptap overview, followed by a highly technical live-code session implementing some common editor features that are hard to do in traditional editors
- A technical discussion of the capabilities implied by tiptap and prosemirror's schema definitions and how we can leverage them

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Speaker: Pam Fluttert, Dina Meunier

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
There are several initiatives underway to ensure the edtech ecosystem at Waterloo can meet the university's current and evolving needs for Teaching & Learning. These initiatives include the Evolving the edtech ecosystem, a project that involves implementation of an edtech hub (website) for support of edtech tools, an intake process for requesting new edtech, implementation of a governance model for edtech decisions and a support model to meet the needs of campus. Other initiatives include a review of Learn to ensure it is still meeting our needs, development of a Digital Learning Strategy, and classroom renewal activities to ensure our classes can meet the requirements of our post-pandemic teaching needs.

At this session you will learn about the various initiatives underway and the plans to address the evolving needs of our Teaching & Learning campus community.

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Speaker: James McCarthy

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Extended Reality (XR) is a catch-all term for various immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. WebXR is a group of standards that enable these immersive experiences on a wide range of hardware - not just head-mounted devices. Most modern web browsers have at least partial support for WebXR, which means you can create immersive experiences targeted at desktops, laptops, and mobile devices, using just some HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a bit of imagination. This session will show how to build simple experiences with the A-Frame library and a little bit of code. It will also demonstrate some existing, no-code solutions that provide immersive experiences and platforms that leverage WebXR technology, including those that may have particular use in the education sector. While most of us are anxious to get back to face-to-face interactions, the need to provide quality meeting, teaching, and learning experiences remotely is not going away, and we hope this session gives you the opportunity to learn about some technologies which can enable them.

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Speaker: Tim Farrell

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Thinking back to university processes and information technology as it existed in 1980… well, as Dorothy said, “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.” Armed with a newly minted English Literature degree I thought, “I will work at UW a year and see how it goes.” And it did go, and soon I was immersed in a culture of machinery, technology, programs, applications, and an infinite supply of acronyms… DCS, VM, CMS, IBM, PDP, DP, JCL, GML, ACO, PC, MS, DOS, WP, PL1, HTML, WWW, IST, NT4, IIS, Y2K, W2K, ADS, W95, AD, WSUS, SEP, OOS... In this talk I will look back on how a non-technical person survived the information technology world working both for central IT and twelve years in a faculty. I will share a few successes, my top three goof-ups, I mean ‘personal learning opportunities’ (there were plenty of these), I will announce the best computer application ever used at UW and a few other tricks I learned to survive in the world of information technology. Yes Dorothy, we are certainly not in Kansas anymore, nor 1980.

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Speaker: Koorus Bookan

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Over the last decade, and more recently during the COVID pandemic video content have shown to be invaluable and effective communication tool in teaching and learning environment such as higher education. Hybrid teaching and working are establishing themselves as a way of conducting our business.

In this new environment it is estimated the volume of video production will be in terabytes per week. These video content are valuable assets of uWaterloo that need to be managed to maximize their benefits. We need a comprehensive management tool that integrates with our systems such as MS Teams, Zoom, and LMS to provide a user centered design with a ubiquitous workflow for content creators and their target audience. An investigation is underway is underway which includes piloting potential tools….

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