ICC Notes from March 8, 2007 ITAC-NI Meeting:

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notes by Steve Lasley


The meeting was held, as usual, on the second Thursday of the month at 10 AM in room 219 of Dauer Hall. The meeting was run by ITAC-NI chairman, John Sabin. The two agenda items were an update on wallplate and conversion to VoIP (Tim Fitzpatrick and Russ Poole) and the review of 6 data security standards for IT workers (Kathy Bergsma).

Network Updates

Wallplate


Preparation for campus-wide wallplate implementation is proceeding as planned towards a July 1st starting date. CNS has been busy completing current work in progress for units moving to the wallplate prior (Fine Arts and Journalism being among those). Their current work also includes new construction (HR and the Hub) as well as life cycle refresh for those who have been on the wallplate for some time.

A third deployment team is being put together and will be ready and trained (formal and peer) by the end of the month.

A site survey has been completed for roughly 65 campus buildings. They counted ports on main switches and estimated overall network structure readiness. They did not investigate workgroup switches, however, and likely have grossly underestimated port counts and wiring remediation needs (speculation by Steve).

An end user survey is nearing final preparation. This survey will be web-based, and consideration of how to contact folks to take the survey ensued. Russ mentioned that this was meant to reach end users, but the questions were definitely of a technical nature. Tim wanted to send notification to the net-managers list, something which Steve feels is appropriate. Many thought we also needed to reach department chairs and those who would be footing the bill. (Note that remedial wiring will be at departmental expense and the details of what will be required there are still pending.) So far, this

The point of the survey, according to Russ Poole, is to modify the deployment schedule. They already have a proposed schedule based on the site survey they had done. It was also pointed out that this survey is also meant to be informative for the units--to alert them to what is being proposed.

Tim also noted that there will be a 20% price break on VoIP for those going to wallplate. He wants units to consider that into their choice. For those with aging phone systems, this may make the wallplate somewhat more palatable.

There was no mention on when and how units will opt in or out of this proposed centrally funded system, and there is still much work to do (in Steve's opinion) to provide good cost estimates which would allow units to make an educated decision on that.

Telecommunication fees


CNS is looking closely at removing inequities among telecommunications charges across those using Centrex (1 line for each phone), key systems (multiple phones per line), and VoIP (no lines). Key systems have got a huge cost break due to their use of line sharing. This is going to end by means of a surcharge to be applied at a 2-to-1 rate for those using key systems. (Note: this is still a deal, as lines are shared by key systems on more than a 2-to-1 line-to-phone ratio.) This is projected to increase revenue by $150K, and those monies will be used to remove the current $1/line infrastructure fee. This is expected to more fairly distribute the costs of supporting UF's telecommunications structure across the various platforms.

Additionally, the phone system maintenance program is going to be dropped and replaced by a pay-as-you-so system whereby repair costs will charged directly per incident. This means that older phone systems will likely become expensive to keep. Clearly there are a number of pressures being exerted which will push units to considering VoIP.

Review of Draft Security Standards for IT workers

Kathy Bergsma had provided us a link to these six drafts (at bottom of page). We discussed them rather cursorily. Few changes were offered, but there were some concerns raised by Marc Hoit as to how these might be usefully implemented. His concern was that we provide proper assistance for conforming with these.

Steve Lasley asked if any implementation cost estimates had been attempted and Kathy said that none had. Steve feels a cost benefit analysis should be done prior to implementation, but agrees that drafting guidelines and standards is a necessary first step to making any progress on these important issues. A support person from the Health Center mentioned that they are using PGP Whole Disk Encryption for domain-joined laptops and that it is quite costly as an enterprise solution ($100/seat). Vista's BitLocker may make that an affordable solution; currently, however, we have (or IFAS does at least) show-stopping problems with Vista with regards to login scripts.

Next Meeting

The next regular meeting is due to be April 12th.