Attending: Pakis Bessias, John Board, Kevin Cheung (for Ben Allen), Nevin Fouts, Pete Goswick, Patrick Halpin, Donna Hewitt, David Jamieson-Drake, Ken Knoerr,Betty Leydon, Roger Loyd, Melissa Mills, Caroline Nisbet, John Oates, George Oberlander, Lynne O'Brien, Mike Pickett, Mike Russell, Alfred Trozzo (for Paul Harrod), Robert Wolpert.
Guests: Billy Herndon, Kyle Johnson
Call to Order: 4:00pm
Review of Minutes and Announcements:
- Minutes were approved for 4/20/2000
- Mike Pickett announced that the latest EDUCAUSE Quarterly issue included an article on IT Broadbanding at Duke. Broadbanding has been completed at MCIS/OIT and is now being piloted in selected schools and departments. (For a copy of the article see <http://www.educause.edu/pub/eq/eqm00/eqm001.html>(link is external))
He mentioned that MCIS and OIT have added filters to the acpub and Notes email systems that impede the ILOVEYOU virus/worm's ability to transverse Duke's mail system.
Mike also announced a new impending agreement between Duke and ALLTEL for cellular service available to employees and students. A request for proposals was sent out to all major vendors and ALLTEL offered the best deal of digital service with analog backup. Three levels of service will be offered:
A one-year contract will not be required for students and most of "hidden charges" have been avoided. Time over the normal monthly service level will cost $.12 per minute. The local calling area includes NC, SC, Va. Beach, Savannah, and Augusta. There is no long distance charge for calls originating in those locations. Long Distance calls originating from outside the local calling area will cost $.49 per minute(no long distance handling fees, but there will beroaming charges). Discounted phones and accessories will be available. A Nokia phone with a Duke blue faceplate will be available for purchase. To obtain these prices, Duke's Office of InformationTechnology will handle the billing. An announcement will be made when the billing system has been set up and service can be made available.
- Level 1 -- Provides 100 minutes/month @ $16.95 for employees/Departments and $17.95 for students
- Level 2 -- Provides 300 minutes/month @ $29.95 for employees/Departments and $34.95 for students
- Level 3 -- Provides 1200 minutes/month @ $94.95 for Departments only
- David Jamieson-Drake announced that all SISS (Student Information Services and Systems) modules are now live and that the SISS Project Team has been dissolved.
The ongoing SISS department will continue their support of the PeopleSoft applications.
Electronic Mass Communications Discussion
Ken Knoerr distributed and presented the main points of the latest version of the EMC policy. He and his fellow subcommittee members (Caroline Nisbet, George Oberlander and Alan Halachmi) solicited input from students, the University Registrar and others in drafting the policy.
Ken explained the two main types of EMC's, intra and inter-departmental. The proposed policy places no restrictions on the former but does prohibit inter-departmental EMC's that: are of commercial or political nature, are junk email or spam,or inform groups of people about scheduled events.
The policy suggests and encourages alternative means of communication for surveys and questionnaires, such as using the web rather than email. Special permission by the Duke Student Government is recommended for sending EMC's to student lists obtained from the Registrar's office.
Enforcement of the EMC policy will be achieved through user education, which will be the responsibility of a future "EMC office." A web site is proposed for posting the EMC policy and regulations along with a tutorial of appropriate use of electronic mass communications.
In the very brief discussion that followed, Melissa Mills suggested that "undergraduates" be added in the list of examples of appropriate departmental majordomos under the "Guiding Principles" section.
Mike Pickett thanked the subcommittee for doing a great job and the rest of the ITAC members present nodded in agreement.
The subcommittee will put on the final touches on the draft and then Ken will forward the policy to Betty.
IVY+ CIO Meeting Update
Betty Leydon reported on the recent CIO IVY+ meeting that she attended. There were a lot of interesting topics covered at the meeting and she mentioned the main issues for each school.
Yale is in the process of bidding for Centrex phone service until their own in-house voice/data infrastructure is in place. Their Oracle Financials system - which they installed with the help of KPMG, is live. In addition, they had to add staff to both their central Administrative Systems as well as their distributed IT groups. Under the provost's faculty computing initiative, seed money is provided ($1200/year/Faculty member.) Also, instructional support personnel are provided out to the schools and departments. They are phasing out their computer store. Lastly, Yale has blocked Napster to protect students from copyright law violations.
Chicago has created a Procurement Center for IT that will handle any purchases above $25K. Their Broadbanding effort is modeled after Duke. They have come to the conclusion that Single Sign On may be unattainable. They are very excited about their newly built Multimedia Computer Cluster, which is comprised of 115 computers at a cost of $2 million dollars.
Princeton now has IMAP available throughout their campus. Their PeopleSoft Financials system is live and they are now working on HR and student systems. They had to extend the project by two more years and increase their budget accordingly. There is thought about discontinuing vBNS because it is underutilized due to lack of applications. They have created the Princeton Courseware Facility for developing courseware. They have wireless networking available in five different locations on campus. They have signed an agreement with AKAMAI (so has Chicago) for caching Web traffic.
Brown was approached by General Education Network to develop electronic courses. So far, they have created one Biology course that was very expensive. They have not signed an agreement yet. They are planning to be out of the modem pool business by early 2001.
Dartmouth is looking for a Librarian. They went through re-accreditation and Information Technology was a focus area. They have alumni that come to campus, talk and write letters to the University President about technology. They have Oracle for Human Resources.
At that point, there was no more time left, so Betty said that she would continue the report at a subsequent meeting. She then thanked Alan Halachmi, Kevin Cheung and Robert Wolpert for their contributions to ITAC for this academic year and presented them with gifts.
Immediately following the meeting everyone went to the yearly "thank you" reception, which was held in the Rare Book Room of Perkins Library.