January 24, 2002 Minutes

Mike Pickett & Billy Herndon: What is the Common Solutions Group? It is an invitation only group made up of about 25 university CIOs and one or two technical staff members from the schools. Topics include security, digital certificates, wireless authentication, Internet2, etc. There are groups that put together technical standards and have detailed workshops, then later on, the CIOs, and a limited number of attendees from each school meet and discuss policy issues.

There was a discussion on how to make electronic contacts. If you are requesting information from another university, who vouches for who? There needs to be an authentication authority at the university, what does it need to know? There are trust models, different schools have different requirements. There are 2 or 3 different models of trust/vouching - home (banks), work (employers) non-home, non-work and work. There are applications for certificates, such as the Veterans Affairs/Immigration Act, where they will use certificates when it related to foreign students. We need to make sure that universities can manage the complexities of these certificate models.

Wireless Security was another topic. In-building roaming, cross campus roaming, VPNs, Hardware such as authenticating routers may be useful.

Educause has been given responsibility for the .edu domain.

There was a half day session on portals. Stanford, Univ Delaware, and Univ Wisc. shared some of their experiences. Stanford uses an off the shelf package called Blue Martini. They ended up with not quite a portal tool, but a tool that could be configured to do what they wanted. It is more a CRM, e-commerce tool. They are integrating mail, and PeopleSoft with Blue Martini now.

UPortal is used by University of Delaware. Princeton is also using this. It is an open source, XML, collaborative product. There are 3 releases to date, 8 schools use it, 20 in progress of getting on board, and 24 evaluating it. It can integrate with WebCT, and Blackboard, and is an open source, so it is free within the community.

Univ of Wisc had a major integration project using another tool, but ran into some issues with trying to integrate mail. It was not stable, and with 40,000 students using it, it was a problem. It was a political nightmare trying to get PeopleSoft into the portal. They learned a lot of lessons and would do it again, just differently. Is anyone using SAP portal? No one was using it.

What resources does Duke need if they are to create a portal? Some schools had 8 people working on their projects, need collaborative group, possibly be able to swap code, etc. We really haven't researched it enough to know for sure.

What services would we want in a Portal, again, we haven't researched it completely, but most likely, student services, email, and some financial pieces.

Trying to target especially first years with a Duke Advantage program - if you buy a computer from Duke you are going to get a higher level of support, since it is becoming more and more difficult to provide support for everything and everyone. Looking to have a group of things that are supported and supported well. Also, the pricing would be more competitive and with it comes better service.

Ginny Cake & Jim Rigney: Would like to have students purchase their computers if they are buying new through the Duke computer store. Working to have accurate support for the users on campus, standard user vs power user. They have been working with the provost and CITIE steering committee to develop a marketing plan- concentrating on first years without computers.

Went over specifications that were formed from a group of people from other areas. It was brought up that there needs to be something that says this is what you need to at least have if you bring an older machine.

Trying to target especially first years with a Duke Advantage program - if you buy a computer from Duke you are going to get a higher level of support, since it is becoming more and more difficult to provide support for everything and everyone. Looking to have a group of things that are supported and supported well. Also, the pricing would be more competitive and with it comes better service.

It was mentioned that Mac and Linux users need to be accommodated as well. It was discussed that support for Linux needs to be geared up.

Going to put together the lower limits for the older machines, what we support, what we can't support. The low end recommendations need to be specified - if you bring your own machine, what is a reasonable minimum?