Attending: Mike Baptiste, Pakis Bessias, Paul Conway, Brian Eder, Alberto Laverde (for Nevin Fouts), Tracy Futhey, Roger Loyd, Greg McCarthy, Jim Coble (for Lynne O'Brien), Mike Pickett, Molly Tamarkin, Brandon Taylor, Robert Wolpert, George Oberlander, Ed Anapol, John Board
Guests: Ginny Cake, Sue Jarrell, Jim Roberts, Stephen Sopp
Call to Order: Meeting called to order 4:05 pm
I. Review of Minutes and Announcements:
Welcome to all new members
SUR grant - Tracy Futhey
IBM has provided a SUR grant to Jeff Chase and Amin Vahdat from the research side, coupled with Owen Astrachan, Susan Rodger, and Richard Lucic from the education side. This grant will provide over 100 webservers for use in dynamically reconfigurable availability of web services, it will support for undergrad project work as well.
Firewall Solutions Forum - October 17 - Mike Pickett
We are beginning a series of "Solutions" meetings. The first will address best practices at Duke in the use of firewalls. Chris Cramer will host this forum and will have 2-3 other people joining him to speak about their firewall experiences. A note will be sent out to ITAC, CLIF and CLAC with details.
ADSL Process: Angel Dronsfield
An evaluation team of users convened to discuss remote access services for Duke, they met several times and also had email discussions. Dan McCarriar was the leader of this group. Feedback was received from probably 30-50 ADSL users Through feedback from the group, Dan McCarriar put together a requirement paper that was sent out to ITAC He is open to comments, suggestions until Monday 5 PM.
CMS - Robert Wolpert
CMS subcommittee is moving along Bids should be submitted in about a week
TelCom Customer Service - Tracy Futhey
Paula Loendorf is taking a position at University of New Mexico There will be an announcement soon of how OIT will deal with pieces that have been under Paula. Many of the functions of customer service of Telcom previously under Paula will move under Ginny Cake.
II. Update: Jim Roberts, Exec Vice Provost for Finance and Administration -New role, student services
Jim Roberts started taking on expanded responsibilities in July. He had been rooted in budget, this was a shift in work to student administrative services including SISS and PeopleSoft.
Why?
- There needed to be an executive owner for SISS and PeopleSoft - one person responsible
- Wanted to ensure close cooperation between OIT and the functional areas
- Leverage PeopleSoft
Jim Roberts has taken the management of SISS from Judith Ruderman. Bruce Cunningham had moved back to his duties as university registrar. Jim will be working most directly with Kathy Pfeiffer, he is also working with Tracy, Billy Herndon and Mike Pickett to strengthen the relationship with OIT. Some things Jim has been working on:
- Building a sense of collaboration with Tracy and OIT senior staff
- Building a strong executive relationship with PeopleSoft - priority attention to needs, favorable pricing, etc. He went to major PeopleSoft symposium and had good conversations with the people at PeopleSoft who are over education.
- PeopleSoft upgrade planning. Due to upgrade to 8.0 Examined from a variety of perspectives if, how, and when we should go with the upgrade Will probably try to accomplish the upgrade by end of May It went from a high level plan to an intermediate level plan and now they are taking that to a detailed project management plan in near future.
- Putting together a steering committee on student administrative services. Looking at how to provide first rate, seamless service to students There will be breakfast meetings at 7 am - invite speakers in to talk about best practices, etc. The notion is that we have not had a vision exercise since 1995, that exercise led to the vision to replace legacy systems and out of that process, choose PeopleSoft.
Jim want to revisit some of the things still to do. There is an opportunity created by the way technology has advanced and the flux in university space allocation, looking to provide unified one stop physical location If you have any comments about charge, etc. please send to Jim.
Molly Tamarkin: You probably will want to look at distance education as well.
John Board: What does Tufts do so well? What are they doing better than most?
Jim Roberts: They have one-stop shopping, you can go to one place and get everything...housing, dining, phone, etc.
John Board: When SISS rolled out, there was not a lot of local expertise and Duke was at the mercy of the vendor, it seemed like we threw hardware of problem, what is take on independence or reliance on PeopleSoft now?
Jim: Reliance will be episodic but consistent, we have done remarkably well in growing own team. Duke has one of the best teams that have stayed together.
John Board: It seems like there is expertise lacking in database problems, queries, reporting, etc
Jim Roberts: From the functional side, people are now wiser about what reports, etc. they need
Billy Herndon: We went through a phase and got tuned in with local and vendor support, the concern with an upgrade is how much will we have to go through again?
Robert Wolpert: Are we building SQL and oracle expertise?
Billy Herndon: We do have that, but have to take into account support, etc PeopleSoft is not just designed for oracle, it is more generic..The biggest change from the technology view is that it is all web based
George Oberlander: what is the anticipated timeline to reach a concrete vision and implementation for the one stop student system
Jim Roberts: There will be a report at end of year. Some things may be immediate things, but those that concern space, it may be 2-3 years away.
III. Report from CSG- Mike Pickett, Tracy Futhey Look on website: www.stonesoup.org
First day: Nondisclosure meeting with Microsoft A lot of marketing hype. CSG is composed of 25 university CIOs and their lead technical people, those active in following or leading innovative or future technology issues
Topics discussed: authentication, authorization, web ISO standard, WebAuth follows Shibboleth - institutions vouching for users in giving out certificates of authentication, giving authority without exchange of private information
Authorization: kerberos, NetID roles to privileges, trying to automate. Federated digital rights management grant access to digital material
Research computing Yale: research.yale.edu
Storage Programming tools, collaboration tools, visualization tools
Grids: where they fit MIT - what they are doing and seeing in high energy physics reality of grids
Tracy: directory policy - interesting discussion Minnesota gives people pay advice electronically, they show home address, click and see a map. Information publicly available and even if you collect it in a way that it is really easy to get at, have to look at the way to get at it.
Detailed information on the meeting available on the website: http://www.stonesoup.org/(link is external)
IV. Site Licensing - Ginny Cake
Need to look at the manner in which we now look at volume discount licenses or site licenses. We would like to get feedback on how to structure site license in the future. The growth in academic licensing has not gone maybe as well as it could. The site license committee is chaired by Ed Gomes Stephen Sopp - coordinates the management of the site licenses.
There is a Site License committee New requests come in via the Web. In the Site license committee meeting, they talk about requests and whether they will serve large constituencies on campus, if so, the SL Coordinator contacts the company, more discussion takes place in the committee, look at budgeting. If it will not be serving a large part of the university, the committee will try to get departments that might be interested together with procurement.
A lot of companies are getting away from true site licenses. Some do licenses based on FTE or number of computers. SL Coordinator is working with Systems Administration to monitor software downloads and get accurate reporting.
Mike Baptiste: It seems sporadic, it would be nice to have a history of what has been reviewed, etc.
John board: There is a lack of confidence in the way system works. His department seems to get better deals on their own, which has colored judgment of faculty in their area. Duke has a lot more site license software than on the list - can it all be on one list? Look to coordinate with the bookstore Duke overall- manage overall.
Pat Halpin- There are cases where the way the committee is organized is fairly reactive. It needs to be more proactive.
Molly - a lot of confusion about what is site license versus what is volume discount, some think, if it is on the clusters we must be able to get it for free. Possibly, the site license page could be divided into volume discounts vs site licenses.
Brian Eder: It would help to clarify how decision process made, how it was decided for and against, volume purchasing. There are groups on campus who have large volume licensing on campus other than OIT
Claire Tufts: There are certain software packages that could really use in languages. The department does not have the budget, hard to get these, don't know steps. It would be nice to have information readily available as a faculty member what site licenses are out there and what the process is to get one.
Mike Baptiste: Would like to see metrics on what store is not currently licensed, like to see outside of campus wide licensing, interdepartmental or interschool purchases don't have time to deal with reps, etc.
Melissa Mills: Could use help with volume purchases, bulk orders, could we leverage that to get better relationships?
V. Exploration Meeting Overview - Mike Pickett
Portals: 45 people minutes are out on the website There is a lot of collaboration in content channels, having one place to go to get certain information common infrastructure where it makes sense What do next - putting together document to pilot
ECommerce: 180 people units use credit cards about 30 do eBusiness with credit cards If anyone violates MC or Visa - they can pull it from whole university not just e-business.There is a lot of interest in having guidelines, and shared infrastructure There needs to be a single place that you could point everyone - back-end keeping in touch with the group through a listserv
Document imaging: Capturing images transactional systems (SAP, PeopleSoft) Capture image and associate with data Indexing in metadata built in Reduce number of filing cabinets.
Lessons learned: Best to create own database and use key to go back to imaging system best practices shared infrastructure listserv
Pat Halpin: What are other Universities doing with eBusiness?
Mike Pickett: people building common cash register apps to lockup back end, Stanford has a lot of policy in place ,built applications so it is easy and people do not have to go out on their own
Mike Pickett: Need to look at strategies for data protection, encryption, etc
VI. Other business:
Clare Tufts: klez virus, no general announcements why is there silence on this?
Molly: there are so many viruses. Look at the virus webpage, it updates as new viruses come out
Mike: Klez is very old, seeing a lot more now because students came back there were a lot of announcements at first
Mike Pickett: could possibly periodically get Duke communications to put out articles. Perhaps we could include in the postmaster message a link to the OIT virus Web page or to information about the virus.
Tracy Futhey: When postmaster sends an alert - it sends it to the sender and the recipient - this came from a decision made by ITAC. It may be time to revisit the policy
Meeting Adjourned: 5:30 PM