UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS
INFORMATION RESOURCES COUNCIL
October 16, 2007
VOTING MEMBERS PRESENT: MAURICE LEATHERBURY (for PHILIP TURNER, CHAIR), PATRICK PLUSCHT, TIM CHRISTIAN, ELIZABETH HINKLE-TURNER, JOHN HOOPER, LOU ANN BRADLEY, PAUL HONS (for JUDITH ADKISON), ROBERT NIMOCKS, JON NELSON, CENGIZ CAPAN, BRUCE HUNTER, DONNA KEENER, GARY MATTHEWS, YUNFEI DU, NOREEN GOGGIN, FRANCES MAY, SCOTT WINDHAM, RAMU MUTHIAH, DON GROSE, UWE ROSSBACH, PHILIP BACZEWSKI, ZHENG XIANG, WILL SENN
NON-VOTING MEMBERS PRESENT: JOE ADAMO, MAURICE LEATHERBURY, SUE ELLEN RICHEY (Recording Secretary)
MEMBERS ABSENT: CENGIZ CAPAN, BRUCE HUNTER, DONNA KEENER, JUDITH ADKISON, SCOTT WINDHAM, RAMU MUTHIAH, SEAN-MIKEL FLOWERS, DON GROSE, JOHN PRICE, ABRAHAM JOHN, UWE ROSSBACH, PHILIP BACZEWSKI
GUESTS PRESENT: CHRISTY CRUTSINGER, CHARLOTTE RUSSELL, TROY JOHNSON, TOM MCELWEE, FRANCES MAY, JIM BYFORD
The minutes of the July 17, 2007 meeting were approved as distributed.with one correction:
"Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner reported for the Student Computing Planning Group that she, colleague Claudia Lynch (ACSUS), and several student representatives from the Helpdesk participated in over 50 student orientation events, culminating in the Mean Green Fling that was held on the Sunday evening before school started."
DCSMT met on September 21, 2007. Derick Larson of Kinetic Data Corporation provided an overview of Kinetic and their software products for the BMC Remedy ARS environment. The Kinetic Request product is slated to replace the functionality of custom incident submission pages programmed in perl on the current Remedy system. Philip Baczewski presented a demonstration of some of the functionality of the Kinetic
Service Request software and showed how it could inject incident tickets into the ITSM 7 helpdesk application. He also showed examples of the Kinetic calendar software which can display campus-wide outage tickets via a calendar format. Also at that meeting, John Hooper handed out a new organization chart showing organizational changes to the Administrative Information Systems group within CITC.
DCSMT again met on October 5. Philip Baczewski demonstrated the BMC Remedy ITSM 7 helpdesk application and announced the availability of a testing and validation system to all support areas who use the current Remedy 5 system. Information and resources about the new system can be found at http://itsm.unt.edu/ including access to the web-based console as well as documentation and configuration information. Also at that meeting, Joe Adamo queried the group regarding use of a Ghost client to push emergency notifications to selected workstations in distributed areas. Distributed
support managers expressed concerns regarding the security of workstations under such an arrangement, since the Ghost client provides total control over a subject workstation. DCSMT recommended a notification solution based on the enterprise Active Directory
implementation. DCSMT also reached consensus that similarly configured desktop computers from the Dell Optiplex 755 line could replace the currently recommended Optiplex 745 models, since the 745 line will soon no longer be sold by Dell.
DCSMT is next scheduled to meet on October 19.
Patrick Pluscht asked the Council to vote on his request to extend the deadline to April 30, 2008, for making a decision about a learning management system. He reiterated that because of issues regarding the current Vista platform, that had to be addressed immediately, they decided to upgrade to the new version of Vista now, but continue to look at other viable options. Patrick reported that 433 out of 1100 sections have been migrated already, and that the testing of Vista V.4.2 is going well. The Council voted unanimously to extend the deadline to April 30, 2008. Patrick also announced that UNT has signed the Apple iTunes contract and now will get Apple’s signature.
Lou Ann Bradley reported that the Communications Planning Group has not met; therefore, she had no report.
John Hooper reported for the EIS Planning Group that the Campus Solutions 8.9 upgrade is 5 to 6 weeks away from going live. At the present time they are doing some serious testing of the system. Critical load testing is being conducted, using all of the new versions of software along with the new SAN and other new hardware. John explained that the AIS group has taken over the responsibility for the SAN and there is a lot of activity in that area as well.
Tim Christian reported for the Standards & Policy Planning Group that the committee requests a vote on the two policies he presented at the September meeting. He distributed copies of the revised Computer Use Policy (Attachment #1) pointing out that there had been no changes to the document following the September meeting. The policy was approved as distributed.
Tim then distributed copies of the revised Electronic Mail Usage and Retention Policy (Attachment #2) which incorporated the changes suggested at the September meeting. Maurice Leatherbury stated that the revised policy is based on a template received from the State. The policy was approved as distributed.
Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner reported for the Student Computing Planning Group that she encouraged the President of the Student Government Association to appoint a representative to the IRC, but that she had nothing further to report.
Tim Christian asked for an update on the Emergency Notification project. Joe Adamo reported that he has been involved in the technical selection of a product and will be involved in the implementation and support of the product, but not in the establishment of a usage policy. The product selected is NTI Company’s Connect-Ed product. Access to the emergency notification system will be given only to: 1) UNT President, 2) Chief of Police, and 3) URCM. Tim also asked if Network Managers will be involved in a decision about what software would be used on desktop computers, and the reply from Joe was "No."
Joe Adamo further stated that information will appear on MyUNT.edu; there will be a banner that refers to Eagle Alert, and an effort is underway to update the EIS database with current cell phone and home phone numbers for all students, staff and faculty.
Tim asked for a definition of an emergency notification event. Joe replied that the system would be used to notify of a priority or urgent message concerning an impending disaster that is weather-related or otherwise considered an emergency. The decision as to what to use the system for will be made by the three persons who have access. When asked for a timeline for putting the system into effect, Joe stated that it would be mid-November at the latest.
Maurice Leatherbury reported on the progress of the Exchange Migration, stating that they have cleared one of the last big hurdles on backups. The backup servers talked to the exchange servers; and they plan to test backups this afternoon. One lingering issues is in sending a GroupWise schedule request to Outlook…Outlook automatically sends a rejection notice. There have been some problems with external mail addresses, primarily HSC. They are getting ready to roll Exchange out to more groups in CITC for testing, so progress is being made. It is hoped that Exchange can be rolled out to other CITC departments (whoever is ready), barring any big problems, within a month or so. GroupWise and Exchange will be operating at the same time for a while, until everyone is on Exchange.
Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner reported for the Distributed Computing Support Management Team that they met on August 17, 2007, at which time Maurice Leatherbury reported that the GroupWise to Exchange migration project is on indefinite hold while work is continuing to stabilize the hardware infrastructure and do extensive testing by the CITC Network Computing Services Staff. He related that the original three-month summer conversion schedule may have been too optimistic and that because chose to adopt Outlook/Exchange 2007, the specific knowledge of that new version was not readily available. Plans remain to drop most Novell products by August of 2008, but no firm date will be provided for the GroupWise to Exchange migration until CITC staff are confident that a reliable Exchange system can be provided to campus.
Philip Baczewski reported that progress had been made to provide Office 2007 in
CSS Classrooms along with Office 2003, with Office 2003 remaining the default application for opening documents. Jim Curry's CSS group has tested the configuration with the most commonly used classroom response systems and found no problems. DCSMT will reexamine this issue before the Spring semester to determine if it is still appropriate.
Steve Vocelka discussed the power outage that occurred on Sunday, 8/12/2007.
The GAB generator came on and supplied backup power, but shut itself down after a time because of over heating. UNT Facilities have developed plans to better exhaust the heat from the generator.
DCSMT next met on September 7. Mike Wright provided an overview of the new Adobe licensing plan and provided managers with a spreadsheet showing the
contents and prices of various bundles. The spreadsheet illustrated how buying bundles may be less expensive in the long run than licensing individual products from Adobe.
Philip Baczewski briefly summarized some organizational changes within the
CITC. Support for some infrastructure areas such as enterprise storage and enterprise backup will now be part of an EIS Infrastructure group within CITC Administrative Information Systems. Network Computing Services has been organized into an e-mail messaging group managed by Jason Myre and a directory and operating systems group managed by Craig Terrell. The organizational changes were made to better align services with CITC management responsibilities.
Craig Terrell provided a status report on the Microsoft Active Directory implementation for campus. Active Directory is ready for use and the plan is to delegate full control to distributed organizational units. One issue remaining to coordinate is the choice of software to control metering of software with concurrent execution limitations. Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner agreed to convene a group to determine a strategy for serving central applications while accommodating distributed needs for software metering. The next DCSMT meeting is scheduled for September 21.
Patrick Pluscht reported for the Learning Enhancement Planning Group. He noted that in order to address ongoing stability problems with Vista 3.0, they will begin an upgrade to Blackboard (formerly WebCT) Vista 4.2 during the Fall semester 2007. All courses will be offered, as planned, on Vista 3.0 for Fall 2007 with the exception of a few courses that have been volunteered by instructors to pilot the upgraded system version. The upgrade to Vista 4.2 does not mean that the learning management system evaluation project which began last spring has been abandoned or that Vista will be used indefinitely. Rather they are taking immediate action to resolve an existing problem while the LEPG continues its work to evaluate a recommended system that will best fit the UNT community’s needs in the future. Something else that happened this spring was that two of the other learning management systems they were looking at had new versions released, so more information had to be gathered on the new products. Early in Fall 2007 system administrators will copy the existing course database to the upgraded 4.2 server. Instructors will be given access to the upgraded server as soon as their course has been copied so they can prepare for the Spring 2008 semester. Although Vista 4.2 interface and tool functions are very similar to those in Vista 3.0, the Center is scheduling both on-line and face-to-face training for faculty this semester to assist with the transition. Patrick said that volunteers are needed for the pilot program in testing products and asked that Council members to let him know if they know of anyone who might be interested.
The Learning Enhancement Planning Group requests that they be given an extension from August 31, 2007 to April 30, 2008 to make a decision on either keeping Vista or switching to a new system. A vote on this request will be taken at the October IRC meeting. Cengiz Capan asked that if Vista 4.2 turns out to be a stable product, would the committee consider keeping it, rather than switching to a new system? Patrick replied that it is the hope of everyone involved that no switch would have to be made. It is believed that after using 4.2 for a semester, they will have a lot of answers about that.
Dr. Turner noted that enrollment in distance learning courses exceeded 50,000 this Fall semester.
Lou Ann Bradley announced that the Communications Planning Group has not met since July and therefore she had no report.
John Hooper reported for the EIS Planning Group that the upgrade of the Learning Solutions module to 8.9, which includes HR, Payroll, and Contributor Relations, has been going very well. They will test the HR part with a complete semester’s activities in October; they also plan to do load testing in late October, and expect to be ready to go live with the upgrade in November. John announced that CITC has done some reorganization of its staff to consolidate some resources and functions. Dorothy Flores will head up Finance and Administration; resources in CITC working on portal will be together so that they can go forward with portal development more quickly. The infrastructure team increased in size, and tools and applications staff were rearranged into one organization under Robert Jones. There are new organization charts on the CITC website for anyone interested in seeing the details of the reorganization. John announced that they are planning for an upgrade to the Financial system November 2008. In response to a question from Robert Nimocks, John said they have not scheduled an upgrade to Version 9.0 yet.
Cengiz Capan asked about the issue of security in using the DARS system for advising. Troy Johnson said that he would look into the issues Cengiz alluded to.
In further discussion about the upgrade of the Learning Solutions module, Troy Johnson stated that meetings have been held with groups in the testing phase and it was found that there are security issues to be expected (not security breeches – just access issues). He explained that it is difficult to check every access point of every person so he just asked that everyone warn staff about the possibilities. In addition, Troy stated that the search mechanism is a positive addition to the new system, and there will be some user-friendly attributes that will help. Training in the use of the upgraded system will be held in late October.
Patrick Pluscht asked if the upgraded system will provide students with course information and the fees associated with them. Troy said he would get the details on that for Patrick, and added that after the upgrade is completed, they will have the time to address some of the projects that have been on hold.
Tim Christian reported for the Standards & Policy Planning Group by introducing a revised Computer Use Policy, which was previously reviewed by the IRC in May. The committee deleted many sections that are covered by other existing policies (see Attachment 1). Discussion will be held on this policy at the next IRC meeting. Tim also distributed a revised Email Usage & Retention Policy (see Attachment 2), explaining that the policy was initiated by Maurice Leatherbury in an attempt to deal with retention issues relating to email. IRC members were encouraged to send Tim any comments or suggestions regarding these two policies prior to the October meeting, at which time there will be a discussion and vote on both.
Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner reported for the Student Computing Planning Group that she and several student representatives held over 50 student orientation events this summer, culminating in the Mean Green Fling that was held on the Sunday evening before school started. They are finishing up a pod cast based on presentations that were given and when it is final, she will share the url with IRC members. The Planning Group will continue to work on ways to get more information out to students effectively. In addition, Elizabeth has asked the Help Desk to track the types of questions and issues they get called about, to see if orientation sessions have a positive effect, and actually cut down on the number of calls to the Help Desk.
Maurice Leatherbury made a presentation regarding the Migration to Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, and distributed notes from his Power Point presentation. (see Attachment 3). Due to the complexity of the migration and the problems encountered, Maurice did not want to set a date for the completion of the migration. Discussion followed, which included questions about the life expectancy of the Compellent back-up system drives, labor costs, and other associated software projects. Cengiz Capan expressed his disappointment in the way the project was planned and carried out, stressing that the distributed areas should have been consulted, as well as used in the actual migration effort, rather than outside consultants. It was noted that additional training for network managers will be needed, closer to the actual time the migration is completed.
Maurice stated that CITC is trying to get an Imaging system funded from University reserves, to replace the current system which does not interface with PeopleSoft. The new system will provide access to files by faculty and students who travel to anyplace in the world.
Joe Adamo reported that they have had an RFP out for an emergency notification system, and are now moving forward to acquire the product that looks the best for enabling immediate communication to all types of media in an emergency situation.
There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 3:30 pm.There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 2:45 pm.