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IFAS COMPUTER COORDINATORS (ICC)FEBRUARY 12th 2016 REGULAR MEETINGA meeting of the ICC was held on Friday, February 12th, 2016 in the UF/IFAS Communications Building. The meeting was chaired and called to order by Jimmy Anuszewski at about 10:00 am. PRESENT: At least 30 members participated. 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 chairmanMember news: Luis Rivera will be leaving us after February 19th. He has been at the EREC for a couple of year and will be moving to a new work location closer to him. 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) Jimmy wanted to note that there have been a lot of fake emails over the past semester, some that look very real. There have also been some legit emails, such as one from the Career Resource Center (CRC) asking people to click on links that, when hovered over, showed hidden links. I verified with the sender and told them they should rethink their plans. Patching updates... (previous discussion) Microsoft January and February's Microsoft patches are listed in the link. Current risk assessments can be found here. Adobe Flash, Acrobat, Reader, Connect, along with several other Adobe products, have updates here. Java Java updates were in December for Java 8U74. 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 discussionVideoconferencing topics (previous discussion) Acano released update R1.8.21 January 16th. This is their latest. For those of you that do not know, IFAS has a license for Adobe Connect. Ron Thomas sent the following information to me in regards to using Connect. "There are two ways to conduct meetings in Adobe Connect. One is to have a Meeting Host license, which costs $150 per year. IFAS purchased 87 of these licenses and they have all been allocated to users. The Meeting Host license enables a user to schedule meetings at any time, but that person (the host) must be in the meeting or it will close five minutes after that host leaves. The other way is for me to make a user a Seminar Administrator. As such, the user can schedule meetings in one of two virtual Seminar Rooms that IFAS pays for, and which can handle up to 200 participants as opposed to 100 participants for the Meeting Host license. This does not cost us anything other than the amount we have already paid for the Seminar Rooms, but users must check the Seminar Calendar to see if the date and time of the meeting they wish to conduct is available in either of the two rooms. In both cases, I must make a person a user in the ufifas.adobeconnect.com account. Please let me know if you need more info." This may be useful for those of you that have faculty teaching distance education or something similar. Updates as available... End-user Scheduling (previous discussion) Updates as available... Lync updates (previous discussion) Updates as available... WAN (previous discussion) Updates as available... Wireless printers (previous discussion) Any updates to this?
PolicyContent Management System (CMS) for UF: Entering preparation phase (previous discussion) The wait is still on...still... "The main UF Website is now redesigned and is still in T4. The templates for T4 will be released in Spring, 2016 and the HTML/CSS markups will be released before that. If you would like to use the new template on your T4 website, please specify that BEFORE you migrate to T4." Jimmy left the above information in from the December meeting because that was the plan at the time. Since then, it has been deemed that the HTML/CSS will not be released, V8 is still not implemented and T4 templates are still in the works. For users within the ICC that maintain their department's websites and are using Wordpress, it is imperative that you keep your plugin's up to date. AND if you have inactive plugins that you are not planning on using, please delete those plugins. One.UF.edu is now officially the landing page instead of ISIS. This page allows users to sign up for classes, interact with PeopleSoft, see news, events, etc. 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) Santos has created a step-by-step guide for the PrintSmart install. You can find it....on the WIKI! And he's added to it! For those asking about Toner pickup, here is some information from Wendy Williams: If you find that you have ten or more USED toner cartridges that need to be recycled, please contact Recycling Department at 392-7396 to coordinate special pickup before August 3rd . IP addresses for if-srvv-print will be changing. The new IP is 10.36.24.16. Santos will explain what this means for everyone on campus that has Printsmart(this only affects campus printsmart installs). There was a long discussion in regards to how to roll out the changes. Chris Leopold suggested that we do a department by department approach so that we could filter out the old drivers, update out of date drivers, etc etc while Santos Soler suggest a quick roll out. There was discussion in regards to which would be better and some of the members present discussed benefits to either option. Jimmy Anuszewski had suggest to table the idea until ITSA could agree with each other but Dan Cromer suggest we handle the issue at the meeting, even though he provided no pro's and con's himself. The group (at least the few that were discussing the topic) agreed that Santos's idea was fine and that we could clean up the other problems after the fact. Santos has also updated the SMB Setup guide on the ICC Wiki. Printers that will need to be changed are listed here. Feel free to contact the PrintSmart team at purchasing@ufl.edu with any questions. 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 A popular point of discussion is whether Mac computers should be joined to the list or not. According to IFAS Policy: "All IFAS-managed computers and network user accounts will be configured as members of the University of Florida Active Directory (UFAD). Organizational Unit (OU) design will be implemented as approved by the IFAS Computer Coordinators (ICC). Computers in stand-alone applications with no connection to the UF/IFAS computer network are exempt from this requirement." The problem stems from the paragraph before this: "The Office of Information Technology is only equipped to provide full support for computers using a current Microsoft™ Windows operating system. IFAS faculty and staff are strongly discouraged from purchasing computers using alternate operating systems for compatibility reasons, and do so with the understanding that they are personally responsible for network access and interoperability. " There's technically no support for Macs within IFAS. My .02 is that it's pointless for a Mac that has a single user to be joined because there are no benefits. No policy can be deployed, no updates can be pushed. During the conversation, Jimmy Anuszewski argued that since we do not officially support non-Windows machines, we could potentially be told that we cannot modify a faculty or staff member's Mac if it needs to be joined to the domain. Dan Cromer argued that the two policies did not have anything to do with each other. DeWayne Hyatt and Chris Leopold both stated that ITSA does not have the man power to take on anymore support and that if such a thing is needed, a full time employee (FTE) would need to be added. Both added that if Mac or other OS support is needed, Big Fix would have to be applied also, so a FTE would have to have knowledge of that. Dennis Brown and Jimmy Anuszewski agreed to write a proposed change to the IFAS IT Policy and submit it to the list for changes and/or approval.
ProjectsServices Documentation: Is a Wiki the way? (previous discussion) Would be really nice if more people could contribute to this.  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. OperationsIFAS IT Updates (previous discussion) Something that probably should have been discussed a long time ago but has never been brought up is the use of the local username/password of Mradmin. Most of us use this default for logging in to computers that may be off the network but there's never been a standard as far as passwords go. Dan Cromer stated that he did not want anyone to have a local admin account but that idea isn't ideal, considering there are many times situations when a computer is not able to be logged into using a Gatorlinkn and a local admin account is needed. Dan moved to table this discussion. Jimmy will be bringing this topic back up at the March meeting and will also discuss it on the ICC list. 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. Video servers retiring! 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 TopicsSAS 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. 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) Peer2Peer IMM (Internal Management Memoranda) Email Policy There have been some updates to the UF Email Policy. I have included the email that Dan Cromer had forwarded to the ICC List. "Faculty and staff have been required to comply with Florida Public Records Retention laws as long as they have been in existence. The laws themselves were designed for paper records, but have been expanded to include electronic records in all forms of storage. What has happened is a change in the UF Exchange email system, along with some explicit language about email in the new policy, which just became effective February 5, 2016. Whereas, until recently, messages in the Inbox and Sent Items folders were automatically deleted after 365 days, a recent configuration change increased the retention period to three years, which is the required retention period for general administrative correspondence. This automatic deletion after 365 days caused people to lose things they didn’t realize would be lost. The generally accepted interpretation of the law says that public record items may be deleted when they no longer retain administrative value. So if you believe messages no longer have any administrative value, they can be deleted immediately. Unless you delete something in the Inbox or Sent Items folder, it will remain there for three years. This also means that, if you want to keep a message for more than three years, it has to be moved to another folder, out of Inbox or Sent Items (and can’t be a sub-folder of either one). This is the best practice, since your folders can be organized by topic and messages will be retained indefinitely, though it does require manual action to delete things that are no longer needed.
That's All Folks! The meeting was adjourned at 12:00 and the next meeting will take place March 11th. Until then, we have the defending National Champions in Gator Gymnastics (#1) and Softball (#1), along with Gator Basketball (both men's and women's) and Gator Baseball (preseason #1!) all going on!!! Get out and support them all! Go Gators! Oh...don't forget, Sunday, February 14th at 9pm...
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