UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS
INFORMATION RESOURCES COUNCIL
June 21, 2005
VOTING MEMBERS PRESENT: PHILIP TURNER, ELIZABETH HINKLE-TURNER, COY HOGGARD (for JONEEL HARRIS), PAUL HONS (for JUDITH ADKISON), JIANGPING CHEN (for GUILLERMO OYARCE), WIL CLARK (for JOHN PRICE), BRENDA RITZ (for PATRICK PLUSCHT), BRUCE HUNTER, LOU ANN BRADLEY, RAY BANKS, CENGIZ CAPAN, RAMU MUTHIAH, JIM CURRY, CRAIG BERRY (for MAX KAZEMZADEH), JOHN BERRA (for DON GROSE), CHUCK FULLER, ABRAHAM JOHN
NON-VOTING MEMBERS PRESENT: MAURICE LEATHERBURY, PHILIP BACZEWSKI, JOE ADAMO, SUE ELLEN RICHEY (Recording Secretary)
MEMBERS ABSENT: ROBERT NIMOCKS, MARGARET AMBUEHL, CHRISTY CRUTSINGER, SANDRA TERRELL, JON NELSON, KENN MOFFITT, KATHY SWIGGER, DOUG MAINS, BOBBY CARTER
GUESTS: CHARLOTTE RUSSELL, TOM MCELWEE, UWE ROSSBACH
The minutes of the May 17, 2005 meeting were approved as distributed.
The Chair reported that there has been no Information Resources Steering Committee meeting since the last IRC meeting.
Philip Baczewski reported for the DCSMT, that at their June 3 meeting, Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner demonstrated the new CBT Documentation website - http://www.unt.edu/cbt and announced that Groupwise 6.5 training is available on CD-ROMs that can be picked up at the Helpdesk. Blair Copeland brought up for discussion a need to reduce broadcast traffic to improve throughput. He will be looking into turning off NetBIOS over Ethernet (NetBEUI) support for all subnets except those requiring that feature, and making other changes to improve throughput. In addition, Jason Gutierrez reported that he has requested up-to-date numbers of Macintosh computers from the different areas to be included in Apple AMP (Apple Maintenance Program) support contract. This new support agreement will replace the current TAP (Technology Assurance Program) contract which provides access to the current Mac OS X operating system for existing campus Macintoshes. Also, Maurice Leatherbury reported on LEARN, the Texas fiber optic network that now has 33 member institutions. LEARN was given $7.5 million to build a network. In about two weeks the first segment between Houston and College Station will be lit up. The next segment will be from Dallas to College Station, and then Austin. Committees are discussing ways to use the system and alternative funding models are being discussed.
At the June 17th DCSMT meeting, Bill Niederstadt and John Perrotto of Dell, inc. discussed the recent printer promotion they had with the campus. There were a few service problems but a new procedure for rapid response has been set up that will, hopefully, take care of the situation.
Maurice Leatherbury distributed a CITC organizational chart and explained the changes that have been made since he became the Assoc. VP for Computing in January of this year (see Attachment 1). Maurice introduced the four new Directors: Philip Baczewski, Director of Academic Computing & User Services; Joe Adamo, Director of Communications Services; Charlotte Russell, Director of Administration & Compliance; and Tom McElwee, Director of Enterprise Systems Technical Services.
Brenda Ritz reported for the Learning Enhancement Planning Group that the group has met twice to view demonstrations of two different clicker technologies. Brenda distributed a report from Ohio State University on Classroom Response Systems (CRS) technologies (see Attachment 2). The report will be distributed electronically to all IRC members.
Lou Ann Bradley reported for the Communications Planning Group that they met last week primarily to re-write the group’s charge. She distributed the proposed revision to the members for review (see Attachment 3). Lou Ann explained that since the group’s former charge has really been accomplished, they want to continue to be productive so they would like to establish a new purpose for their group. In addition, the planning group needs some new members; therefore, after a new charge is approved by the IRC, they would like to work on getting some new appointees to work on the committee. Discussion followed regarding new telephony technologies such as IP phones, PC plug-in phones and the issues involved in implementing new telephony technologies at UNT. The new charge will be considered for adoption at the July IRC meeting.
Coy Hoggard reported for the EIS Planning Group that they are presently heavily involved in dealing with registrations and other student-related issues. They have concluded what is now known as the 2 week 1 session (formerly known as May-mester) as well as the traditional spring semester with successful registrations and grade reports for both. This summer they will be dealing with running a number of individual sessions within the 2 summer terms and also registering for the fall semester, including twice / week freshman orientation sessions throughout the summer. Coy explained that a program flaw in the system caused a large number of students’ registrations to be incorrectly deleted. This affected 5,900+ students and 14,000+ individual enrollments. The flaw was corrected and members of the Student Records support team were able to restore the deleted enrollments the same day. Lou Ann Bradley pointed out that although the basic data may have been restored the same day, that some ancillary functions were affected and the consequences of this problem are still being felt by the Library and perhaps other areas as well. Coy reported that the CITC continues to purchase additional equipment to increase capacity and improve service. A significant amount of capacity has been added to the HDS (Hitachi Data Systems) SAN (Storage Area Network) that is located on the 5th floor of the GAB and are scheduled to install a second HDS SAN in the CITC computer room at the UNT Research Park. This will move UNT closer to having redundant systems which will allow for quicker recovery in the event of outages in either of these two computer rooms. They also plan to install two faster application servers in time to be of benefit for the heaviest part of the fall 2005 registration. This move will increase the total capacity of the app servers by approximately 30% and will allow for better workload balancing across the application servers. In addition, Coy reported that the Cypress software product that was purchased for distribution and on-line viewing of reports is being implemented and they are now using it to distribute telephone bills and payroll detail reports. They anticipate being able to use it to deliver accounting statements shortly. Coy also reported that in response to student complaints, work is underway to provide an Adobe PDF file containing course listings with correct course prefixes to assist students in registering for classes. This is something of a stop-gap measure until a better solution can be developed. Plans are being developed for upgrading the PeopleSoft applications software to later versions. Since PeopleSoft / Oracle has announced that support for version 8.4 of the Finance System (the version we currently use), it is likely that the Financial System will be upgraded first, with the Learning Solutions upgrade following closely. Users will be involved in detailed planning before plans and dates are solidified.
Uwe Rossbeck, of College of Engineering, asked if there was backup power at the Research Park in case of power failure, and asked how long the backup power would last. Maurice stated that he has asked Facilities for backup power for all computing rooms. Currently the backup power that they have would last only 2-3 hours. Coy added that they are working to establish a redundant system on the main campus so that production could continue if power to one system was lost, even though the production might be in a degraded mode for a time. Maurice stated that the database servers are not at present replicated; and one of his goals for the upcoming year is to set up a failover system for the database servers.
There was no report from the Standards & Policy Planning Group.
Elizabeth Hinkle Turner reported for the Student Computing Planning Group that the group has not met recently, but that she is involved in Freshman orientation, which is going well. She stated that she has been trying throughout the year to keep students informed of special computer and software deals that the UNT Bookstore has made with Dell, Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple. The Bookstore has Dell computers on site with wireless cards installed so that students can try them out. Elizabeth said that ResNet is coming out with a flyer and cd to help students.
There being no further business, the meeting adjourned at 2:50 p.m.