ITAC minutes
October 18, 2007
Start: 4:04
Attendees: Parkis Bessias, John Board, Bill Cannon, Shailesh Chandrasekharan, Tammy Closs, Gene Galin, Ken Hirsh for Dick Danner, Kevin Smith for Nevin Fouts, Tracy Futhey, Michael Goodman, Jackie Gottlieb, Billy Herndon, Rick Hoyle, Edward Gomes for Deborah Jakubs, Bob Newlin for David Jamieson-Drake, Pranay Jinna, Alvin Lebeck, Julian Lombardi, Roger Loyd, Robert Nau, Dan Harden for Caroline Nisbet, Terrance Oas, George Oberlander, Lynne O’Brien, Rafael Rodriquez, Molly Tamarkin
Guests: Rob Carter of OIT, Kevin Davis of OIT, Mark McCahill of OIT, Klara Jelinkova of OIT, Kevin Miller of OIT, Bob Price of OIT
Announcements
Minutes of 10/4/07 ITAC Meeting
Minutes of the 10/04/07 meeting are available at http://oit.duke.edu/itac/minutes/2007/71004minutes.html
Security Month
Presented by Klara
October is security month. OIT instituted an outreach program and distributed 30,000 copies of a security brochure.
Klara Jelinkova would like to start an annual “October initiative”. This year the initiative is focused on authorization. Who should be authorized to use what applications? OIT would like to put more structure around the authorization program.
John Board remarked that the “beginning of semester” computer security issues have continued to go down over the years.
Klara confirmed that security problems continue to go down. This indicates that the outreach to students about security concerns have been successful.
Kevin Davis reported that SWAT handled 620 security cases this year.
Emergency Communications Update
Presented by Ginny Cake
The group is working on a dedicated email server that can get mass emails out in five minutes. The initial beta is scheduled to start in November and be completed by the end of the year.
Dave Jarmul is working on an offsite web site, which is due to be completed by the end of the month.
An e-notify enhancement to reach 100 top administrators is due to be completed by the end of the year.
The group is working with Eddie Hall for data and cellular coverage in residence halls.
Erin Grays is working with the Duke police on developing an outside siren system. The plan is to send out a RFI in two to three weeks.
University’s IT Strategic Plan Update:
Presented by Ginny Cake and Angel Wingate
There are three overarching categories, which were put together by various university communities.
Tracy Futhey asked that Angel or Ginny define the three primary goals as they made their way through their presentation.
Goal 1: Enrich the teaching, learning and research environment at Duke by providing faculty and students with information technology resources and services that are easy-to-use, well-matched to their needs, and contribute effectively to the achievement of Duke's institutional goals.
Molly Tamarkin has completed review of classroom standards.
Tracy asked Jim if he would be a good co-sponsor of item 1.1
Jim mentioned that he is already doing some work with the graduate school and Nichols and Bob Thompson and Larkin from engineering.
Angel asked Jim to provide a short synopsis of the project.
Item 1.2 The lead is Julian Lombardi. An example is the Mobile U partnership with Wake Forest University. Completed establishing the hosting of the CROQUET consortium at Duke.
Item 1.3 Created mobile classroom capture program. Audio capture only Lectopia. News & Communications lead on branding Duke content.
Item 1.5 Understanding the needs of original committee needs. Angel is looking for a sponsor for this section. Jim nominated two others. Julian Lombardi is listed as a co-sponsor on item 1.5
Item 1.6 Klara’s group has been working on upgrading storage, providing full back-up, improve WebFiles/AFS storage to accommodate video files.
Goal 2: Extend our effectiveness in our distributed environment by facilitating collaboration among departments and, in critical areas, between departments and the central technology infrastructure.
Item 2.1 Tech Expo took place on October 5 and was a big success. Working on trying to host regular face to face encounters within IT staff. Working on centralized orientation for IT staff in addition to current HR offering.
Susan Gerbeth-Jones was applauded for doing a good job as the head of this event.
John Board mentioned that there was a survey out and that the group was soliciting input for the next forum.
Susan Gerbeth-Jones mentioned that expanding the “Brown Bag” sessions is a good idea.
Item 2.2 Working on dealing with various groups about termination of data services with employee leaving.
Klara mentioned developing policy for retention from a security perspective.
Item 2.3 Ginny has been working on projects to meet and complete this objective. Jim mentioned that Richard Ridell is the point person on this section.
Item 2.4 Discussions going on with no projects in process
Item 2.5 Lots of activity. Would like input from outside OIT. Most of the activity is to be worked this quarter.
Item 2.6 Migration and consolidation of functions into a central group.
Goal 3: Provide an enabling technology infrastructure for ubiquitous and convenient access to computing and communications capabilities, facilitating the daily work of faculty, students and staff.
Item 3.1 Lots of work to enhance wired network. Working on refreshing network to bring Internet to the edge. Wired and copper networks being evaluated.
Item 3.2 1200 access points put up in East and West. Seeking to set up more redundancy.
Item 3.3 Combined approach to fund data and telephony. Billing by subscriber base is being examined.
Item 3.4 Redesign of Fitzpatrick West data center. Discussion about Arts & Science data center. Increasing faculty data space. Collaborative effort with Duke Health and Duke Medicine.
Item 3.5 Server and data virtualization has deployed.
Klara said that item 3.5 makes everything possible.
Angel Wingate said that Bob Johnson might say item 3.1 was more important.
John Board reaffirmed that the Duke IT Strategic Plan is a good plan. It is good to see that Duke IT committees are adhering to the process.
Ginny added that a lot of effort has been put into the process to date. Plan objectives should be updated and reprioritized as needs arise and change.
Angel concluded that they would issue summary reports to the Provost and Dr. Trask.
E-Print Update
Presented by Kevin Davis and Bob Price
Kevin Davis reported that ePrint has been compliant with goal #1. The quota model for students has been implemented.
ePrint is the most widely used service of undergrads. 97 percent of them use the ePrint service.
Key concept: print now, release on demand using DukeCard.
Pilot service in 2003; OIT transition in 2005. 118 Library & OIT ‘public’ release stations/direct printers, 26 campus photocopiers, 17 stations at other sites (NSEES, Med Ctr., etc.)
Product technical team meets monthly.
OIT manages print servers.
ePrint usage has increased annually. Significant printing levels led to implementation of “soft quota” this year.
The course pack is a foreign concept to today’s students. Anecdotal evidence shows that today’s students print info off PDFs and Blackboard.
Undergraduate printing is tracking lower this year - Current projection: Pages printed down 25%, sheets printed down 35%. OIT 55%, Library 45% of student printing
Ed Gomes mentioned the library’s numbers.
Shailesh Chandrasekharan asked why numbers were down.
Kevin responded that the numbers were down in large part due to the new “soft quota” and the default duplex printing mode.
Tracy asked what the aggregated cost was.
Kevin noted that it was about 1.1 to 1.3 cents per sheet. The annual cost for last year was about $325,000 to $375,000 for the OIT and Library printers.
95% of students printing needs are met with the current quota.
Tracy asked if the quotas were set by semester or by year.
Kevin responded that quotas are set by semester with rollover into the next academic year.
In 2006 OIT and the Library queues merged. This year the default setting is duplex printing. OIT offers Windows Vista client support.
Kevin mentioned that there is continued interest in using recycled paper. However, recycled paper costs about 25% to 300% more than regular paper.
There were service performance issues after Uniprint 7.2 upgrade this summer. There were problems at several campuses. Other peer institutions were experiencing problems. Intensive vendor support and analysis. Load reduction provided symptomatic relief
There was a hot fix on the 14th by the vendor. Fixed by the 20th and there have been no problems since. It appears to have been a “scripting” issue.
Interest in virtual server environment to improve failover times and support further deployment.
Julian has okayed offering limited service to campus customers.
John Board expressed a concern about the length of time to print in duplex mode and printer wear and tear.
Kevin reported no problems. HP printers have been refreshed in 2006.
Alvin Lebeck asked about departmental, faculty, staff and student printing over ePrint facilities.
Kevin is looking at enabling 25 photo copiers and would like to see more ePrint stations set up.
Kevin reported that there are currently three ePrint enabled color printers.
Susan Gerbeth-Jones asked what queue time has been reduced to.
Kevin answered that the queue time had been reduced to eight hours, but that it would be increased to twelve hours.
Susan noted that the queue is long enough for someone to drive down to the Marine Lab to get their ePrint project.
Tracy added that queue time is the amount of time a project can be held.
Alvin Lebeck asked if there are other things that could be done to reduce the environmental impact.
John Board said that there is a “green house” and Duke is striving for more "green" computing.
Jim mentioned that there would be a campus wide initiative to explore more “green” options.
CSG Update
Presented by Klara and Mark
The Common Solution Group consists of 30 top institutions who meet about three times a year.
Klara reported that data management is an important issue. There is so much data that the question is how do we get a handle on that data.
75% of institutions have systems to classify data from low to high. Duke does not have a data classification process in place,
Access by risk level is Duke’s first priority.
Retention becomes important when we start talking about research data.
Only 40% of institutions have retention policies.
Data warehousing – what does it mean to you? The term means different things to different institutions. ERPs are common. Others warehouse “institutional data ”. Half of the institutions have policies about data access to the warehouse.
80% of the institutions were concerned about misrepresentation of data.
One third of institutions did have plans to host data research locally.
John Board asked if Duke was in the two thirds that did not have plans.
Klara said that Duke was in that two thirds.
There is more pressure on institutions to centralize data. UC Berkeley has started talking about centralized data storage.
There was a question about whether there was any discussion about how rapidly data needed to be restored.
Klara said that there was no discussion about rapid data restoration. However, there was discussion about metadata.
Mark addressed the issue of finding rich data. How do we find videos and sounds? Institutions are approaching the problem from different angles.
Virginia Tech is funding a model of scanning pictures into digital form for research and academic purposes. VT has scanned 20,000 to 25,000 images.
Georgetown is working on attaching metadata to rich media.
MIT is using Web 2.0 methods to access data.
UT Austin has 300,000 things in their repository.
University of Virginia is working with their library to develop a tool to manipulate rich data.
Mark did a presentation at the CSG about using ILLUMINATE.
Shibboleth was a common thread at the conference. Cross-institutional management is important. Institutions are working to be able to allow faculty to access data more easily.
Mark mentioned that there was not a lot of thought to tagging non-institutional items, i.e. YouTube.
Julian asked if there is a case where you save a mashup.
Mark said that we need the ability to “point” to outward items. There is no emphasis on individual social tagging.
Klara mentioned that there was a discussion about what “institutional data” is and what is not institutional data.
Tracy added that there was no interactive session about Google. Most questions were about keeping data in-house or outsourcing. Klara and her Princeton counterpart led a lively discussion at the CSG meeting.
John Board let everyone know that the next CSG meeting will be in January.
Personal Use of Duke Resources Discussion
Moderated by John Board
John started the discussion by pointing out that Duke’s point of view was clear about personal use of Duke resources.
He provided several examples – a set-up for private profit was a no, a set-up for a non-profit was a maybe, a set-up for an election campaign was a no, while a set-up for advocacy might be ok.
Rafael brought up the question of what is the financial cost and what is the risk and liability of allowing private use of university resources. Outside of these two issues, it’s like trying to push around a marshmallow.
David raised a question about roles. Who can do what?
Jim asked if this was a question about the web use.
Terrance asked how this inhibits interaction with students beyond the normal channels.
John pointed out an example of using an extensive part of a faculty member’s web site to discuss hobbies, which might allow for a closer connection with students.
John Board advocates entrepreneurial ventures – “Let’s just try this”.
John also mentioned students who might map IP addresses to Duke internal resources.
Jim asked about faculty consulting.
Shaileshh mentioned that using computers depends on the nature of the Duke resources used.
He asked if giving out one’s Duke Email address for personal contact is ok.
John Board said that Duke does allow this use of Duke Email addresses.
However, Tracy added that what happens with your personal email might come under scrutiny.
John Board finished off the meeting by promising to continue the conversation about the personal use of Duke resources in future ITAC meetings.
Adjournment: 5:32