ITAC Meeting Minutes October 9, 2014

I.        Announcements

Guest Students:

  • Jake – Graduate School
  • Minoj – Junior studying Computer Science & Biology

II.      Agenda Items

4:05 - 5:30 – Response to Students presentation from Spring 2014

What it is: The ITAC Student Representatives were asked to speak on April 24th to give feedback on the state of IT from the students’ perspectives.

Why it’s relevant: The ITAC Student Representatives touched on several key areas including, network, ACES, Sakai, ePrint and DukeCard. Today, service owners will present their responses and action items to the concerns raised by the student body.

  • Kathy Bader and Brenda Franks - ACES Interaction HUB Update
    • Nothing can be done about the Back button due to application design constraints.  However, the new SISS Hub will provide significant advancements in regards to navigability.   While the latest version does not provide a complete overhaul, it does offer better access, especially assisting with users having multiple roles across the University. The HUB has now been purchased and OIT has come a long way with installation for our purview.  A student focus group will be created this fall to begin blue sky-ing what students desire from the product and see what other schools have done (NC State and UNC.

 Questions and Comments:

 What is the Hub and what functionality does it add?  The HUB is a portal and provides a front end to ACES and will allow us to achieve role-based entry.  It will allow users to treat pages and functionality like portlets and build favorites into the system.

What things from other institutions did not work well?  UNC hasn’t used the product to its potential and only used it as an entry skim.  Ohio State’s issues were related to the back-end technology, in particular integrating with existing technology. 

Will the graphic calendar and other Duke-specific features be available in the newest release?  Yes.  This installation is not an application overhaul, but provides a front-end and combined with some tool and background programming upgrades will enhance existing pages and make page collections easier to navigate. 

  • Richard Biever - Improved communications for major incidents like Heartbleed / Multifactor update and how to better inform students of this service
    • Heartbleed – We focused first on Duke’s exposure and then how to addresses it.  Our Shibboleth infrastructure was not at risk because we were one release behind Heartbleed-vulnerable version.  Since we did not see issues in the authentication logs, we did not recommend an institution-wide password change implementation.  This approach was fairly consistent throughout the higher education community.  We distributed a lot of communication both through Duke Today, the IT Security Website, mail lists and IT Alerts, Twitter Feeds, RSS Feeds, etc.  We typically use Duke Today as our primary channel for getting the word out, but are always looking for better ways to communicate.  We want to be careful how we use multiple forms of communication as to not overload recipients.  If there is a better place for urgent information students should see, please tell us:  Multi-factor – We currently have 6,800 people across campus using it, mostly faculty and staff.  We targeted faculty and staff since they were most targeted.  Students who are doing research with people are enrolling as well.  The feature is available to students.  Feedback – If you save passwords in the browser, specifically with Chrome.  We are testing a workaround for it and will communicate it once completed.  The recent bash environment variable exploit:  It has been a non-issue for Duke.  We’ve done scanning across Campus, and as soon as the definitions were available for the Intrusion Protection Devices.

 Questions and Comments:

 A suggestion for communicating this information is directly on the sign-in page. Another suggestion would be Facebook.  Setting up a few student contacts through Student Government.  We thought about using FixMyCampus as another avenue and using GPSC.

Feedback – If you save passwords in the browser, specifically with Chrome.  We are testing a workaround for it and will communicate it once completed.  The recent bash environment variable exploit:  It has been a non-issue for Duke.  We’ve done scanning across Campus, and as soon as the definitions were available for the Intrusion Protection Devices.

Is there any kind of reward/incentive for white-hat hackers?  We hire student workers in the Security Office.

  •  Evan Levine - MatLab / Teer / ePrint
    • Sakai – When you logout of Sakai,
    • ePrint – A request to make 3D printers available in ePrint.  The software we use is incompatible with 3D Printers.  However, …. (RECORDING)  The idea is to have a central place to send items, along with a nother concern of how materials will be billed. 
    • Teer has become a gateway to MatLab – Teer machines are often slow:  Close to 97% of the logins on the machines are remote, which is most likely why they are slow.  We are discussing another option to.  We are looking at more tuned machines for MatLab.
    • Guest Login: DukeGuest is gone.  We have created local guest accounts and/or a shared netids in special instances.  The sponsored accounts is a much better option.

 Questions and Comments:

What has ePrint looked like from the functional end?  We haven’t had many complaints at all.  We’ve been stable this year and have managed to create a test/dev environment that will allow us to push out more features across campus and hopefully to DKU.    

In terms of detecting down printers, is there something that measures throughput on printers?  The printers are already good at letting us know when something needs addressing.  We monitor page outputs for metrics purposes, but nothing actively.

  • Richard Outten and Michael Faber - Duke Streamer – Energy Monitor website
    • API service for the data from the sensors in the Smart House.  The data has been used to track down issues with the HVAC system.  Is there a website with pointers to the available sources? Documentation for the energy project is not available, but should be in the next few weeks.  The CoLab developer site has available information for students.  What other public sources of data you want access to? Can students Opt-in for their DukeCard information to be linked so students do not need an OIT device to check in for events.
    • A suggestion page would also be helpful:  We have a site called Blue Sky
    • Opt-in with a specific app: What’s your opinion of sharing with a specific app versus anything the general public, or allow APIs to query the information on a one-time basis. 
    • Request for reviews of classes or teachers to be made API accessible? Where students view this information is still on a website.
  •  Shawn Miller - Sakai – Recent Improvements with logging out of the application
  • Debbie DeYulia and Bart Lawyer - Duke Card Update
  • Adding chips to cards and contactless: We are close to updating our system to make it possible to integrate future technologies.  Which NFC (Near Field Communication) technology do we go with?  There are 3 or 4 universities that are using the technology.  There has been some talk of splitting the financial and security functions that are currently used
  • Debbie DeYulia and Charley Kneifel - Ofice365 and Calendar functionality
    • ICS Stream function into the calendar.duke.edu is now available.  The calendar should live update at the top.  Office 365 calendars will import single events from calendar to duke.edu and will create an overlay of multiple events.
  • Debbie DeYulia and Joseph Lopez - Network Updates and improvements
    • There is no timeout limit for Wi-Fi. However, new IP Addresses are issued daily if one was hard-coded. 
    • Was HACK DUKE a custom setup
    • Is there a convenient way for students to contact OIT for those types of requests?  Contact the OIT Service Desk
  • John Andreala - Cell Infrastructure Updates
    • We have approximately 60 buildings on campus in the queue for go-live.  All the residence halls will be completed in November.  Edens Quad, Mitchell and
    • Making students aware of when their area will be activated will be a great way to get buy-in.
    • How will e911 calls be routed?  Still through the City of Durham’s sectors.
    • What kind of information can we pass to students who are still having trouble with service in the areas where in-system coverage is currently available.
    • Is there a commitment for maintaining the carriers as technology changes.  Contractually, carriers will ensure the service
    • How we get the word to students – We have some process to communicate when the service is activated and provide a hotline source to contact OIT for feedback.
    • How is Box integration on campus going?  We are at higher usage than Cornell.  We have not gotten a lot of complaints across the University nor the Health System.
    • What is the top problem area of late?  Cell service was the number one problem.  Solutions communication to problems.