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ICC Meeting:

IFAS COMPUTER COORDINATORS (ICC)

APRIL 8th 2016 REGULAR MEETING


A meeting of the ICC was held on Friday, April 8th, 2016 in the UF/IFAS Communications Building. The meeting was chaired and called to order by Dennis Brown at about 10:00 am.

PRESENT: Twenty-five members participated.

Remote participants: Tom Barnash, Ben Beach, Wei Cao, Donna McCraw, Earl Sloan, Josh Gromoll, Brian Hurt, Al Ibanez, Joel Parlin, Phillip Lazenby, Chris Leopold, John Mecias, Marvin Newman, Angel Perez, Scott Owens, Santos Soler, John Wells, Wendy Williams, Spencer Young.

On-site participants:
Dennis Brown, Winnie Lante, Karen Porter, Tennille Herron, Dan Cromer, Raichel White.

STREAMING AUDIO: The audio will available here.

Recorded Video: Video will be available here.


NOTES:

Winnie Lante, Karen Porter and Dennis Brown should be commended for their food/drink accomodations.


Report from the chairman

Member news:Officially missed this at the last meeting, so let's welcome Kim Bandyk. She is located in Animal Sciences.

Recap since last meeting:

As per his usual procedure, Jimmy pointed folks to the notes of the last meeting, without going into any details.

Details about this meeting:

I've deleted a lot of the old anchors that were in the minutes due to lack of updates. I suggest searching the ICC site for information that you may be looking for.


Security: (previous discussion)

Update as needed.

Patching updates... (previous discussion)

Microsoft

March's Microsoft patches are still listed in the link. April has not been posted yet. Current risk assessments can be found here.

Adobe

Flash, Acrobat, Reader, Connect, along with several other Adobe products, have updates here. So far, no April updates have been released.

Java

Java updates were in March for Java 8U77. This JRE (version 8u77) will expire with the release of the next critical patch update scheduled for April 19, 2016. Java 8U77 for Mac was released on March 23, 2016 and is available here.

Apple

There have been several Apple updates, including a new system update, security updates and printer driver updates.

SAS

SAS University Edition recently had an update. Please visit this link.

Other

Updates as available...


Videoconferencing and WAN discussion

Videoconferencing topics (previous discussion)

Acano latest release is still update R1.8.27 from March 8th. This is their latest release. Updates and changes can be found in their change logs on the download page. There were some problems recently, related to the spaces (formerly cospaces). From Patrick Pettus:

"There is a problem with personal Spaces being duplicated in the Acano client resulting in bad invitation links. You can verify if your personal Space has this issue by clicking on the Spaces tab at the top of the client. If your name is listed twice you have this issue. One of the Spaces will have a working link, the other will not.

All other connection methods are working correctly. If you need to have someone join using WebRTC they can go to the WebRTC portal https://acano.uc.ufl.edu and enter the meeting number to join.

We are still looking into the cause and resolution for this issue. Again this is only affecting personal Spaces that are automatically created for users when they are imported from AD. User generated Spaces are unaffected."

Updates as available...


End-user Scheduling (previous discussion)

Updates as available...

Lync updates (previous discussion)

Skype for Business for Mac will be available in 2016. Until then, Lync for Mac 2011 is included with your Office 365 or Skype for Business Online plan for you to download and install. It works with Office 2016. For more information, click here.

Updates as available...

WAN (previous discussion)

Updates as available...


Wireless printers (previous discussion)

Any updates to this?

 


Policy


Content Management System (CMS) for UF: Entering preparation phase (previous discussion)

Unless something was announced and I missed it, Terminal 4, V8 has still not been implemented.

Updates as available.

Cloud Services (previous discussion)

Updates as available.

Backups/Server Drives (I'm leaving this here!)

I was asked to add this to the agenda. Some Department and REC IT people are wondering if there's official policy in regards to backups and what some IT people are doing for it. From my understanding, that's why we have server drives, but I'll let the discussion start amongst everyone. During the discussion, it was addressed that the server drives should be used because they are backed up multiple times during the day and can be access through VDI at any time. It was also stated that external hard drives should not be relied on nor should they be purchased using department funds.

Admin rights became a separate topic during this discussion and there was a split amongst the participants about how Admin rights should be dispersed. One side stated that Admin rights should only be granted based upon the situation of the user. An exmample Jimmy gave was field computers that needed to have software installed or updated while away from the IT person or users that are in lab that need to install specific software at a moment's notice. All of this would be LOCAL Admin rights. Others stated that it was too much to try and update every computer at the same time (such as Java updates) or to install the same software on multiple computers. Consensus is do what works for each individual situation but rememeber that ultimately, it comes down to the IT person's responsibility if something should go wrong with that computer.

Updates as available.

UF Exchange updates (previous discussion)

Updates as available.

Notes from last month's SIAC meeting

Notes from past meetings are available here. Last update was from October, 2015.

Last month's IT Directors Meeting Notes

You can now view the notes from each meeting at this link.

PrintSmart initiative (previous discussion)

Updated as needed...

New 'Trouble-Ticket' Entry Page for CNS (previous discussion)

Update as needed...

KACE (previous discussion)

This has gone the way of the Dodo bird.

Mac's: To Domain or Not to Domain(previous discussion)

For those that need instructions on Mac domain"ing" and server connections: https://wiki.it.ufl.edu/index.php?title=Apple_OS_X

 


Projects


Services Documentation: Is a Wiki the way? (previous discussion)

Would be really nice if more people could contribute to this.

Attention!Attention!Attention!Attention!Attention!

A wiki has been created at https://uflorida.sharepoint.com/sites/ifas/wiki/icc/Pages/Home.aspx. Everyone in the ICC distribution group should be able to add/edit.

Attention!Attention!Attention!Attention!Attention!

Operations


IFAS IT Updates (previous discussion)

Chris, Wayne, DeWayne, Santos or Dan updates?

DeWayne Eldon Hyatt put together a great presentation on SCCM Training. I strongly encourage everyone to watch the video. This is a vital tool to have and you will use it more then you think. You can find the link here.

New DHCP reservation site created (previous discussion)

Update as needed.

Creating guest GatorLink accounts: singly or in bulk (previous discussion)

Steve had left this on the agenda in case further discussion was deemed warranted. So Jimmy will leave it here.

Wayne's Power Tools (previous discussion)

Updates as available...

Public folder file deletion policies and procedures status (previous discussion)

Updates as available...

 


Other Topics


SAS depot updated

The SAS 9.4 installation depot (\\ad.ufl.edu\ifas\SOFTWARE\SAS\SAS9.4_32bit ) has been updated to permit installation on Windows 8.1 AND to allow installation on 32 bit Windows installs.

I believe SAS is still not compatible with Windows 10. Has anyone found anything different?

FAQs for new hires (should use https://uflorida.sharepoint.com/sites/ifas/wiki/icc/Pages/Home.aspx)

Updates as available...

Adobe licensing (previous discussion)

Updates as available...

Misc.

GatorBox (leaving this here)
Research Computing has launched GatorBox, an enhanced storage option for research. GatorBox features a dropbox-like interface provided by ownCloud software. The new interface offers a convenient and familiar interface as well as desktop and mobile clients, with simple file sync and share functionality. Please contact Research Computing for more information about GatorBox: info@hpc.ufl.edu.

Peer2Peer

Peer 2 Peer will be pushed to the Summer semesters. I will update as I get information.

 


That's All Folks!

The meeting was adjourned at 11:35 and the next meeting will take place May 13th. Go Gators!

Don't forget, winter is here...