Attending: Landen Bain, Mike Baptiste, Pakis Bessias, John Board, Dick Danner, Angel Dronsfield, Brian Eder, Nevin Fouts, Tracy Futhey, Ed Gomes, Patrick Halpin, Billy Herndon, Bob Newlin (for David Jamieson-Drake), David Jarmul, Roger Loyd, Hannah Arps (for Melissa Mills), George Oberlander, Lynne O'Brien, Mike Pickett, Rafael Rodriguez, Mike Russell, Molly Tamarkin, Clare Tufts, Fred Westbrook, Robert Wolpert, Steve Woody, John York

Guests: Ginny Cake, Rob Carter, Paul Conway, Rob Little, Kathy Pfeiffer

Call to Order: Meeting called to order 4:08 pm

I. Review of Minutes and Announcements:

Welcome to new members

Please send corrections to minutes to Mike

The new ITAC calendar was passed out, the dates are: Thursdays, 4:00-5:30 - Room 211 TelCom Building, September 5, September 26, October 10, October 24, November 07, November 21, December 05, December 19.

Congratulations were given to David Jarmul regarding the beginning of eduke http://www.eduke.duke.edu.

SISS-beginning of term Kathy Pfeiffer

Beginning of term went well, she believes, active registration period. Few trouble reports from HD, few to OIT people. Central and school offices say it was a smooth process all around. Bursar's office got out bills 2 weeks earlier than normal.

System improvements - under 500 not signed up for insurance compared to 2000 last year.
SISS reports that performance was good.

John Board - Heard no complaints, what happened with the problem with in the SSH router, it was stress tested and the problem did not reappear?

Rob Carter - We were not able to reproduce the problem, it appears that it doesn't happen purely due to load. Patches to load balancing router were applied to take care of capacity of the router.

II. Video Services Committee Interim Report Fred Westbrook/Mark Olson & Committee

Timeline: draft recommendations to be circulated for feedback at the end of September, final report due October 18, 2002.

The link to our video services survey for faculty and administrators (http://www.duke.edu/web/video/ITACvideo/webpoll.html) has been distributed to the members of ITAC to encourage review of the full results of the survey in advance of today's meeting. Of particular interest are the comments that help flesh out what the numbers indicate: a strong interest in video technologies but an even bigger need for education and training. Peer institution research is being mounted under the Research link at the same site. The following is intended to be an abstract/summary of the findings of the survey.

Summary of ITAC Video Services Survey

The ITAC Video Subcommittee distributed a survey across the campus of the university to faculty and administrators alike that yielded 102 respondents with 54 self identifying as administrator or with administrative responsibilities and 48 faculty.Some of the overarching trends or concerns that the individual numbers support include:

  • There is a strong desire for streaming technologies, and in training and use of these technologies; barriers to use these are well described in the comment sections.
  • Over 70% of the respondents reported little or no use of streaming or video conferencing technologies, yet there is a great gap between what they're doing and what they would do if these services were convenient and effective. Between 50 and 60% of respondents report a desire to do more in both streaming and videoconferencing.
  • Some 30% of the respondents report some production and distribution of video as part of their activities, yet some 85% or more would like to learn more about developing their video production capacity for distribution in a variety of formats.

John Board - How many did request for response go out to? It was up to ITAC members to distribute
It went out to Pratt staff

Pakis: Melissa sent it out to CLAC, but not sure about the faculty

John Board: Who received the survey wound up to be random

Fred Westbrook: It seems like someone in every area got survey, there was an equal split of faculty and staff

Robert Wolpert: What are the peer institutions doing?

Fred Westbrook: everyone different - we'll have a summary in the report

III. Event Calendar System - Update and Beta Demo Rob Little/David Jarmul

A beta version of the public events calendar was shown.

There has been an effort for a few months to try to consolidate many on-line calendars that exist on Duke's website, to pull together, specifically public events.This is built as solution for urgent problem. It does not have all the bells and whistles we would like, but we are doing this as an interim solution.They reached out to groups currently using calendar central, got a feel for what they like, what they don't like, etc. They reached out to groups not participating and asked what needs to be in new calendar for them to participate. There were three goals:

  • public interface
  • interim solution
  • Quick - Stop gap

In the future, hopefully we will look more widely at resource calendaring, this is not intended to be a full solution for that. Challenge is to get groups to roll areas under categories... Need to have small number of topics driven by categories/org.

Pat Halpin - What about the funded formal lecture series, is there a way to find a lecture series, and find those talks? Rob and David made note of this and will look into it.

Molly Tamarkin- categories - topics - don't seem clear Rob Little - they are still getting feedback on what it should be, and still more feedback needed

Tracy Futhey - Do you have a user group?

Rob Little - Has been meeting with groups, getting antidotal feedback

Robert Wolpert - this kind of service is only useful if it is current and useful, if they can give the information in forms convenient to them vs convenient to you How do they enter events?

Rob Little- It is browser based, there is an intuitive form with required forms

Robert Wolpert - it won't be used if there are required fields, you need to find out how they would enter events into calendar

Mike Baptiste - Very excited about phase 2 to get XML data into Meeting Maker, is there a set schedule for phase 2 of this project?

Tracy Futhey - At this point, it is not for sure that there will be a phase 2.

Angel Dronsfield - Who would be entering the data? Rob Little- trying to make as intuitive as possible, train the trainer, train point person

George Oberlander - is there any authentication required to enter events?

Rob Little - kerberos - NetID and password, to enter events

IV. Network and File Systems for student - Rob Carter

Three topics relating to disk storage and quotas

  1. Home directory quotas - right now - offering 10 megs for staff, 70 megs for students and faculty Is that too small? How big does it have to be?
  2. Storage for incoming mail messages and folders - 30 meg quota on mailbox Need to look at cost vs performance and usability
  3. Limit on size of mail messages that will pass through mail systems - Right now it is 10 megs

Questions to be asked:

What is the cost and how much are we willing to spend for storage space?

Disk space and home directory used also by people using AFS - not just Unix based, etc. This leads to increase in quota Home directories - right now, under 17% of quota is being used. Would people use more of their quota if they had a larger quota?

Wolpert - what fraction of people hit their limit?

Rob Carter: 8% are over 75% in their home directory 7.4% are over 75% of their mailquota

Mike Baptiste - He is way over on mailbox, he doesn't use file storage because it is too small, use file storage on his own independent server. The space is too small for multimedia for mapping Small quotas driving people on to their own systems, Is there any way to add disk space in AFS realm? It could be a service offered at a cost, they would buy it.. they would bring their own systems in

Molly Tamarkin - She is also interested - She would like to move disk space over to OIT A lot of people don't know how to use space - faculty and staff, don't know how to use it.. ftp/html, etc. We may want to help users to know how to use it UNC is moving more towards centralized storage.

Rob Carter - Disk space is cheap, however, backing up is tending to increase over time. Buy into centralized storage so that someone else worries about backups It costs 5-6 times as much to backup data as to buy megs of storage

Robert Wolpert - Email usage also depends on departmental policies

Brian Eder - Have we surveyed to see what limits are given out at other schools?

Rob Carter - we are in the middle with other schools

Mike Pickett - May be worthwhile to have an exploration meeting on email systems?

Pat Halpin - It would be good to do an exploration on true usage, at the department level - disk storage for individual users, etc

Nevin - Need to use IMAP for email - this is critical data He absolutely thinks that data management models are driven because tool set too complex, with new acct main page coming on-line, there will be more awareness It is a good point to clarify what is there and how to use it

Rob Carter - once you have your AFS set up, you don't have to worry about using ftp etc

Pat Halpin - people won't use AFS to get to couple megs vs using local servers where they have a lot more space for lots of data

An exploration topic should focus on storage solutions

V. Content management committee - vendor update and next steps Rob Little

Working on an RFP for the CMS system. The vendor selection status is confidential.

The committee will meet one more time, the RFP has been sent out to vendors with 2 week turn around, further reduction of vendors, there will be 2-3 vendors at that point. Would like to have a vendor fair. There will be detailed data from RFP, they will discuss implementation plans, the goal is to have a final recommendation at the end of November.

Brian Eder - will we see the RFP?

Ginny Cake - It is being reviewed by core subcommittee and technical if anyone interested, they can be included

Robert Wolpert - will we be able to talk to users of these systems?

Ginny Cake - part of RFP is that they have references

VI. Other Business