ICC Meeting Minutes:

IFAS COMPUTER COORDINATORS
(ICC)

MINUTES OF JULY 11, 2002       REGULAR MEETING

A regular meeting of the ICC was held on Thursday, July 11th, 2002. The meeting was chaired and called to order by Steve Lasley, at 10:00 a.m. in the Fifield Conference Room, room 1304.

PRESENT: twelve members participated. Remote participants: Mike Armstrong, Kevin Hill. On-site participants: David Ayers, Dan Cromer, Dean Delker, Joe Hayden, Sherry Hays, Dwight Jesseman, Mike Kanofsky, Steve Lasley, John Sawyer, Mark Ross

ABSENT: Official membership list not yet available and thus absentees indeterminable.

MINUTES: No Minutes available from previous meeting for approval. (Audio record of meetings is available online at http://icc.ifas.ufl.edu/ICCMeetingAudio.htm.)

As Chris Leopold was absent, the Chairman solicited a volunteer to take minutes. Sherry Hays kindly volunteered; these are her minutes with minor modifications by the chair.)

Meeting was called to order and agendas were distributed by the chairman. (The agenda is available online at http://icc.ifas.ufl.edu/meetings.htm.)

Report From Chairman:

A summary of the July 9th ITPAC Committee meeting was presented.

• Dan Cromer brought up issue of every Faculty and Staff member being required to have a name@ifas.ufl.edu account as a matter of policy. He was in favor of allowing that this account could be a forwarding account, but not to an outside service such at AOL or Hotmail. ITPAC seemed to think this had already been done, but it was decided that it would be made official.
• Steve Lasley presented the ICC recommendations on NT4 migration. The recommendation passed with a minor modification: replace "an opt-in" with "a" at the end of the first recommendation section. IT was tasked with developing a timetable and budget. Joe Joyce thanked the ICC for bringing this issue to ITPAC and wanted to determine what units would have problems with this plan. He emphasized the need for all units to buy-in.
• Jane Luzar spoke on topic of video conferencing. UF is willing to provide funding for video conferencing upgrades at some of the IFAS academic centers. Apopka was specifically mentioned--they want to use it to reach remote pharmacy students. Joe Joyce wanted this pursued.
• Larry Halsey gave an update on DSL connectivity. His office has successfully converted from a 1/4 T1 to DSL. The initial cost was $500, but the monthly cost went down from $225 to about $100. The throughput was also improved. Josh Wilson, with some effort, determined the configuration issues to provide IFASDOM connectivity. A write-up on this will be prepared and sent to all the counties so that they are aware of this opportunity.
   
  NOTE: It has since been learned that it is Claude King of the IT/WAN group and not Josh that was involved in this setup. Claude has been setting up counties with Cisco 827s using router-to-router VPN to handle IFASDOM connectivity over DSL. This process is complicated by various carriers using up to 5 different protocols (PPPoA, PPPoE, and others).
   
• Dan Cromer asked that personal websites not be hosted on IFAS servers, but rather that people be directed to UF's Plaza webservice for such things. His motion passed unanimously.
• oe Joyce spoke on the status of the ERP project. SAP pulled out and it appears to him that PeopleSoft will be the winner--though he didn't want to be quoted. The number of modules has been cut. Financial, personnel and one other will definitely be done. Student records will not, unfortunately. Dean Luzar mentioned that this was a shame as that was very much needed. Joe Joyce expects the consortium to split soon--they are already arguing over where the first demo will be held.
• Jim Syvertsen gave a brief description of Lake Alfred's VoIP project. It is set to go this fall. He spoke of the convenience for travelers—taking their phone with them and making free calls back from any net connection. He also spoke of cost savings. No problems were mentioned.

Report From AD Subcommittee:

Sherry Hays covered the Active Directory proposal submitted to the ITPAC committee.

• Sherry reported that the ITPAC committee received the proposal unanimously and praised the ICC group as a whole on bringing the proposal to them.
• Discussion continued for the need for everyone in IFAS to support this policy. Also, Department Chairs need to be aware of cost for servers and upgrades to software as needed. It was suggested to draft a statement to support this migration with ITPAC endorsing the recommendations of the ICC and make the recommendation by memo from the VP stating that the cost be determined at a later date. Larry Halsey made a motion to pass the recommendation of ICC with the change for “opt-end” to “ICC and IT” to look at implementation plan with cost.
• The AD committee will meet within the next few weeks to start coming up with answers to the cost issue. Kevin mentioned that he would put together an agenda for the meeting and that we should definitely look into inviting people to attend that are participating in AD discussions at the UF level.
• Discussion was held concerning the questionnaire that is to be sent out to all IT personnel in IFAS. Dan Cromer said that since Joe Joyce will not send out the questionnaire, that he would send it out as soon as the web-based questionnaire was completed. It was decided that the questionnaire would be sent out to all ICC members and each department’s computer support person as well as the individual department heads
• Dan Cromer said that as of this date that all faculty should have an IFASDOM email account. The new email account will allow all users to drop the “mail” from their email address to: …@ifas.ufl.edu

Report(s) From IT/NS:

Tim Nance and Chris Leopold were absent.

Other Items

• There was discussion held concerning the WAN connections. Dan Cromer mentioned that he had asked that the emails coming through have a common subject line and to keep the message short. Mike K. said that IT does have an IT Sentry website that interested people can obtain information from.
• Mark Ross made the suggestion that any new information from IT, for department IT support personnel, should be written up and disseminated at the next UF IT orientation meeting.
• Steve Lasley reported that during the ITPAC meeting Joe Joyce was adamant about getting the department liaisons to update the directory on the web. He expressed the need for department heads to help.
• Steve Lasley asked that the IT department keep an updated forms page on their website. It was decided that if we see any changes that we would like made to submit them to Dan Cromer for addition to the IT website.
• SUS (software update services) was discussed – Mike Kanofsky stated that the IT department will host this function, but it will take up a lot of bandwidth. ICC members need to check out the ICC website for updates to this. Tim Nance will probably be the person taking this project over since most of the updates are security driven.
• Mike K. stated that he had the WebStats software up and running. He was pushing the historical data to the program and it would probably take a few days for the software to be up and running. All the information in the reports will be real time and be updated every 2 minutes. Mike will let us know where we can obtain the reports at a later date.

The meeting was adjourned by the Chairman.