Members present: Ed Anapol, Mike Baptiste, Pakis Bessias, John Board, Paul Conway, Dick Danner represented by Ken Hirsh, Angel Dronsfield, Brian Eder represented by Jeff Garner, Nevin Fouts, Tracy Futhey, Michael Gettes, Paul Harrod represented by Alfred Trozzo, David Jamieson-Drake represented by Bob Newlin, David Jarmul, Kyle Johnson, Roger Loyd, Melissa Mills, George Oberlander, Lynne O’Brien represented by Randy Riddle, Molly Tamarkin, Robert Wolpert

Guests present: Ginny Cake, OIT; Phil Lemmons, News Services; Chris Cramer, OIT; Bob Currier, OIT; Dan McCarriar, OIT; Fred Westbrook, OIT

Start: 4:13 PM

I. Review of minutes and announcements

Tracy announces portal pilot launch appears to have gone well. URL is www.dukepass.duke.edu. Information for the site can be found at www.duke.edu/web/studentportal.

II. Update on e-mail upgrade by Michael Gettes

Michael’s team is upgrading mailboxes to a new server. Plan was to process on consecutive weekends. Group found things were not moving as fast as they anticipated. The team thinks they can do some middle-of-the-night migrations. This is necessary because of the impact on the older hardware. Sucking off a lot of data from the old servers at 2MB per second does not move fast enough. Some issues they ran into: problems with internal date--Mac Mail App users were most affected by this. There were also routing issues with forwarded mail. As of 2 pm today the new machines were handling all the routing for the medical center as well as the university. All mail to medical center is being processed and scanned for viruses, tagged as junk mail, etc.

III. Final Report - Web Policy Committee by Ken Hirsh and committee

Changes to the interim report include suggestions as to what university should consider on domain names and how things could or should be listed in the domain name server. Troubling factor is that people are registering domain names with another service but pointing those names to sites on Duke servers. Appropriate publication of e-mail addresses on Web sites. Recommend coordination with university council and a designated easy-to-find Web site with policies. Use of departmental e-mail addresses and expectations of response times to mail sent to those addresses. Did not review this with university council’s office, the thought was Tracy’s or some other office would open a dialogue with university council about how to implement this.

George Oberlander is concerned about mechanism to notify people that new standards and other best practices are available.

David Jarmul wants to know the next step.

Tracy points out that the scope was limited and asks Ken if that approach reduced the value of the deliverable.

Ken says it helped them focus and was a good way to get started. Much has not been done, but it would have taken many months to cover more material.

Jeff Garner wants to see a Webmaster resource center where standards are published, code is published, logos are published, etc.

Molly Tamarkin says a meeting this week talked about Web standards and best practices for Web site implementation. Ken Mitchell of Office of Web Services convened the group.

Tracy would like an ITAC endorsement of the committees report. Group agrees and report is endorsed.

ResNet traffic report by Bob Currier, Chris Cramer

Biggest change since the last presentation of this material to ITAC, is that bandwidth caps were implemented to individual campuses. East was running 50 to 60 Mbps all the time. They have a 30 Mbps cap and traffic dropped to 25 to 30 Mbps.

Robert Wolpert asks if it is necessary to continue throttling back bandwidth.

Chris Cramer says yes because East campus continues to use a disproportionate share of bandwidth.

Bob says 18 students had been rate limited this semester. The network has been averaging 90MB/day compared to last years 120MB/day.

Kyle wants to know the breakdown of rate-limited students by year. Are the majority freshman?

Chris says they didn’t look that up, but will find out.

Tracy wants to know what we are hearing from students.

Chris says nothing and that is preferable. Program is so successful no one can complain.

Video conferencing exploration by Fred Westbrook

Document was sent out with more details. About 50 Duke folks attended the exploration meeting.

Focused on two classes of conferencing tools: h323 video conferencing tools and Web-based conferencing tools. OIT should work to provide support for both, based on the variety of need on campus.

Also discussed a need for some level of centralized call support and scheduling of resources, much the same way as audio conferencing.

Also discussed the need for backup devices to use if a system goes down.

Must be OIT conferencing solutions Web pages to let folks know who to call and how to set up a solution for their express needs.

Next steps:

  • Demonstrate products
  • Support for working video group
  • Funding for h323 communication management tools for the network should be available. Scale is yet to be determined. Backend infrastructure. Funding for Web-based conferencing services.

Conversation went well.

Fred has seen two tools that are currently available. Meritech Pro and Macromedia Breeze. Both are impressive systems.

Robert Wolpert asks if h323 will be a standard in 5 or 10 years or will it fade and be replaced? Where are we going?

Michael Gettes says SIP is the competition for 323 but there are not a lot of SIP implementations out there. The future is SIP. When will it be the standard… who knows? However, it is reasonable to invest in 323 because there are products that bridge 323 and SIP. The question is how much to invest.

Melissa wants to open up who could be the central person to manage video services. Scott Wells is an expert resource currently here at Duke.

Molly is frustrated because she wants the ideas to move ahead. She wants a data collection/coordinator person charged with moving us ahead as a group.

VI. Chandler, Mozilla, Nutch update by Michael Gettes

Chandler is an open source attempt at peer-to-peer personal information management. It is trying to do what exchange does without exchange. Chandler is built on Python and other things. Through discussions with higher education groups it was realized that integration into higher-ed groups was a good idea so Westwood, a version for higher ed, is being developed. The intent is that Westwood and Canoga, the non-higher ed, non-integrated version, will sync up in the future. The hope is that Canoga will be out some time this year and Westwood will be out middle to end of next year.

Another discussion was around calendaring standards.

At the January common solutions group, Chandler meeting was held at Berkley.

One session was about software engineering: extreme programming, offshore development, etc. Also learned about Mozilla platform. Mozilla is starting to be broken up into smaller parts: mail, calendaring, browsing, ldap, etc. It is very exciting because of the potential for add-ons, clients, etc.

Nevin wants to know if there is a way to get more information about the road map of where this is going.

Michael wants to open up a dialogue with the Mozilla foundation and tell them where Duke is and what we want to do. He thinks that would be mutually beneficial.

Mike Baptiste wants other universities to push for the same thing.

Molly asks about the calendaring aspect and Michael says there is not a lot of development going on with calendaring. It is there, but it is a personal calendar, not an enterprise/shared calendar.

Kyle asks if there are any thoughts for Duke to have an organized presence to help get some of these open source issues developed.

Tracy thinks that is a conversation we should have. The idea of trying to mobilize around open-source development is a good one to discuss.

Michael says next CLAC meeting will be about open source and it should be lively.

Nutch is an open source search engine. Melon foundation presented this to find if CSG members thought it was worthwhile. Is there a problem to be solved with this? Google has a strong brand in the search engine business.

VII. Other business

Robert wants input on topics for ITAC over the next several months.

Roger Lloyd would like a presentation on the library system change.

Paul Conway says there will probably be a follow up to archiving.

Kyle asks about public displays. And what is the strategy for wireless saturation? There are many places we don’t have it still.

Molly is interested in hearing more about the LDAP directory and expanding it, customizing it, how individual schools can use it.

Tracy adds that we need to do a better job of having our directory systems talk to each other better. When employees come and go the systems are not in sync.

Jeff Garner wants to know about when students become alumni, how to we authenticate them?

Mike Baptiste wants us to take a look at Webauth and whether it should be pushed out to the university. Pratt has used it with difficulty.

Ginny wants to know if any upgrades or changes are going to happen before the fall. Cluster upgrades, etc. Not just what OIT is doing but what other groups are doing. Things in one group may affect other groups.

Nevin is interested in new hardware devices. Perhaps group could share/demonstrate what they find.

Pakis would like to hear about SISS and gauge its success in eliminating departmental shadow systems.