ICC Meeting:

IFAS COMPUTER COORDINATORS
(ICC)

NOTES FROM April 10th 2015 REGULAR MEETING

A meeting of the ICC was held on Friday, April 10th, 2015 in the UF/IFAS Communications Building. The meeting was chaired and called to order by Dennis Brown at about 10:01 am.

PRESENT: At least 31 members participated.

Remote participants: Dan Cromer, Francis Ferguson, Angelo Daniels, Tom Barnash, Wayne Hyde, John Wells, Joel Parlin, Kevin Hill, Angel Perez, John Macias, Kamin Miller, David Bauldtree, Scott Owens, Wei Cao, Steve Lasley, Dennis Brown, Rachel White.

On-site participants: Jimmy Anuszewski, Karen Porter, Winnie Lante, Santos Soler, Tennille Herron, James Canter, Wendy Williams.

STREAMING AUDIO: Might be available here.

Recorded Video: Here. (You can record a video conference at any time by dialing 7864327@video.ufl.edu)

NOTES:

Agendas are back on for now!

Dennis Brown should be commended for his food/drink accomodations. Thank you, Dennis.

Report from the chairman

Member news: None Noted.

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)

The university’s licenses for McAfee anti-virus is expiring in four months. UF’s replacement for this expiring functionality is UF Endpoint Management (UFEM). If not started already, university IT staff should be planning their UFEM deployment strategy to replace McAfee. UF’s license with McAfee will expire in September, 2015.
All copies of McAfee software must be removed by September 20, 2015.

From UF IT:
"UF Endpoint Management (UFEM) is UF’s New Solution! UFIT provides endpoint management services for all UF endpoints via UFEM (it.ufl.edu/ufem). Since UFEM went live last fall, there has been strong, early adoption by numerous colleges and units of the university. UFEM replaces the functionality of McAfee for anti-malware. In the time period since the service has been in production, more than 14,000 endpoints (e.g., servers, desktop PCs, laptops and tablets) are already connected to UFEM. The ability to manage all aspects of Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux endpoints from a single console is a big plus for workstation managers and IT directors. UFEM is FREE to all colleges and units of the university, including DSOs. Training is mandatory before service access (via security roles) is granted. For more information please visit the UFEM site: http://www.it.ufl.edu/ufem"

Patching updates... (previous discussion)

Microsoft

The April's Microsoft patches included numerous bulletins of varying importance, covering several unique CVEs in the usual suspects. Current risk assessments can be found here.

Outlook for iOS and Android still has not met criteria (as of this day) to allow it to be used on UF Exchange system.

Native mail apps for Androids and iPhones are still ok to use.

Adobe

There were some Adobe Flash updates here (including Flash and Flash Player).

Java

Java updates were on April 14 and Java 7 reached end of life on April of 2015. Next critical patch update for Java 8 will be July 14, 2015.

Apple

There have been several Apple updates, including OS X updates (Security) and iOS 8.2 (for Apple Watch integration).

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 released update R1.6 in April.

Seems the common agreement in regards to which Video Conference interface to use is Lync for all UF networked video participants while those off of the UF Network should use Acano.

Updates as available...

End-user Scheduling (previous discussion)

Updates as available...

Lync updates (previous discussion)

Updates as available...

WAN (previous discussion)

Wireless printers (previous discussion)

Updates as available...

Policy

Cloud Services (previous discussion)

Gator Webmail is set for termination on March of 2015. Please make sure your students are aware of this. Wendy Williams will speak more on this during her IT Directors Meeting Notes.

UF Exchange updates (previous discussion)

We are still waiting for the completion of the upgrade to the new Exchange system. Mac and OWA still haven't reached full potential in regards to public folders, etc.

Outlook Version 15 (part of the 365 package) for Mac was released and offers nothing but a GUI change, to match the Windows equivalent. There is still no Global Address support, public calendar support is still subpar and I've encountered bugs, such as lack of mail checking or updating and having to restart Outlook. There's still a lack of common features, such as the ability to click on "To" for selecting who you're emailing and the inability to use the public folder contacts.

Notes from last month's SIAC meeting

Notes from past meetings are available here.

Last month's IT Directors Meeting Notes

Wendy Williams and/or Dan Cromer may be able to give us an update on the latest in the IT Director's World?

PrintSmart initiative (previous discussion)

Let me give you my personal experience with this....sit back...again.

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!

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

Nothing has changed. Still encountering SSL issues.

The Gulf Coast Research and Education Center has gone live with Terminal 4. While the site hasn't changed much visually, it's a start. It's responsive, though the photos don't seem to adjust as well when viewed on a phone(slide images are cropping instead of resizing). And there's also a major issue when it's viewed in IE11 (while in compatibility mode). Again, this is just the start, and the web team should be given props for getting the Terminal 4 site to this point.

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

Brian Cash gave a presentation to Dan Cromer and I and explained how different teams of IT people can be grouped. Dan and I discussed some of the different ways this can be implemented within IFAS and its departments. The agreement that everyone agreed on, after lengthy discussion and confusion, is that the IFAS Department IT person would be considered first tier, IFAS Help would be second tier and then surrounding IT personnel (eg - those in the same building or area) would be third tier.

KACE (previous discussion)

February's KACE report is available here. This could be the end of KACE reporting.

Projects

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

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

Operations

IFAS IT Updates (previous discussion)

Chris Leopold is on vacation!

Wayne Hyde will provide updates. Such as: we are migrating to IFAS SCCM to get off of ePO immediately; migration to UFEM CPM (core protection module aka antivirus) will be later. However, we'll use SCCM to push the UFEM agent

New DHCP reservation site created (previous discussion)

You are reminded that Santos Soler has created a new DHCP reservation site which you may use to request reservations.

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.

FAQs for new hires (should use http://my.ifas.ufl.edu/wiki/icc/)

Updates as available...

Adobe licensing (previous discussion)

Updates as available...

Misc.

Macintosh Group Seminar? (from last meeting)

There was discussion in the meeting about having some type of Mac guidance. Jimmy agreed and said he wouldn't mind having group meetings where Mac use can be discussed and things such as Active Directory, Office, Network Binding, mapping drives and other things can be discussed and taught. He also noted that UF does officially support Macs and the help desk provides support, as well as an official Apple repair shop in the Reitz Union. He offered his help if people want to email him questions. He urged people to NOT discourage users from buying Macs if they are needed. Also, Macs are in the surplus area and can be used for learning purposes.

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: Coming Soon!

Peer2Peer can be viewed at this link.

Wendy Williams can give us an update on the upcoming April 9th Peer-2-Peer session.

The meeting was adjourned at 11:40 and the next meeting will take place May 8th. Dennis will be chair for the meeting, as I will be in Ireland, for 3 weeks, on vacation!

Don't forget, the men's Basketball team takes on Kentucky at 1pm, #2 Baseball takes on Tennessee this weekend, #1 Softball takes on #2 LSU, #2 Gymnastics is home tonight, #5 Lacrosse is at Maryland and Tennis, Golf and Track are all battling this weekend!

Last, but not least, I'd like to thank Steve for all that he's done for us. From all of us at the ICC, we wish you the best in retirement. If you get too bored, you always have a chair waiting for you at the head of the table.