Notes from March 21, 2002 ITPAC Meeting:

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• (from best recollection of Steve Lasley and John Sawyer)
  Please note: 4 of the last 5 items listed require your input!
  • A number of ITPAC (http://it.ifas.ufl.edu/itpac) seats are open (1 At Large, 1 At Large Faculty, 1 Student Representative, 1 Faculty Representative), but nothing definite was decided about filling them.
  • An ITPAC listserv will be instituted for communication among the committee.
  • Larry Halsey wishes to step down as Chairman. Jim Syvertsen of the Lake Alfred Citrus REC was drafted for the position of new Chairman. Dr. Syvertsen was not present, but was represented in the meeting by Mike Armstrong. Moral: go to meetings.
  • Work is in progress to move the county Internet connections to ADSL where available with reportedly considerable cost savings and better throughput. According to Dan Cromer, IT/NS's WAN crew, Jennifer Xu and Claude King, are hard at work on this. VPN connection to campus services will be part of this picture.
  • Internal Management Memorandum 6C1-1.50-1 describing the mission of ITPAC was reviewed and approved as is without amendment.
  • Dan Cromer, the IFAS Acting Director of IT, was asked to introduce himself and to describe the current organization of IFAS IT. Dan's background includes having retired from Director of Information Resources with the School Board of Alachua County. He was hired first as the Assistant Director mainly concerned with developing the Help Desk, then he became Acting Director. He described IFAS IT as being divided into four main groups: the Help Desk under Ben Beach, the LAN group under Chris Leopold (also including server support such as Exchange and IIS), the WAN group under Jennifer and Claude, and Software Systems under Pete Kearney. Software Systems itself is rather complicatedly arranged. It has two main groups: Business Systems and Academic Software (discussion on changing this latter name took place). Academic Software used to be entirely under Howard Beck, but now Dan has designated a main person for each of its four divisions: FAS ( http://pdec.ifas.ufl.edu/FAS2000/FAS2000page.htm) under Richard Lee, FAWN (http://fawn.ifas.ufl.edu/) under Andy King, DDIS (http://ddis.ifas.ufl.edu/) under Jiannong Xin, and EDIS (http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/) under Petraq Papajorgji. It was mentioned that IFAS has five district support staff that each cover many county offices: Josh Wilson, Dwight Jesseman, Valerie Carter, David Ayers and Francis Ferguson (I believe--someone please correct me if I am wrong) . These staff are greatly appreciated by those they serve. Tom Hintz is going to be in charge of training with Francis Ferguson of Orlando handling training in south Florida. It was requested that the organizational details be posted on the IT website. Dan addressed the poor state of the IT websites saying they are working on it and that the highest priority is the HelpDesk site at http://helpdesk.ifas.ufl.edu. The death of Jack Haldeman (http://www.sff.net/people/jack.haldeman/) was mentioned as a big set back for their web development efforts.
  • There are +MAJOR+ things brewing at the overall level of UF. SAMAS goes away in July of 2004 (UF is leaving the State system) and UF has joined a consortium of 4 universities (North Florida, FSU and one other) requesting bids for ERP software to oversee all aspects of university business. They will be looking at modules that include Human Resources, Finance, Payroll, Purchasing, Grant Management, Facitilities Operations and Work Orders, IT Structure (I believe documentation was mentioned), Overall University Management, and Student Management (the registrar). The goal is to have this uniform across UF, with data entry and reporting done at the unit level via a web interface. This means many current programs and offices will be replaced or eliminated, including TRIPS, Payables, etc. This project involves the purchase of approximately $20,000,000 of software. IFAS is concerned with seeing that the systems handle data top meet our needs. Fedro Zazueta is involved now at the UF level; his knowledge of IFAS's needs is encouraging. Note added 6/7/02: UF now has a ERP website
  • Motion passed on shutting down GNV email by Memorial Day! All people still using GNV to access e-mail must be moved to Exchange. GNV can be set to forward to their Exchange account. If a department maintains their own mail server, they still must have an account on the Exchange server. The account can be setup to forward to another account (e.g., @lal.ufl.edu or @animal.ufl.edu). The desired result of the policy is to make sending an e-mail through Outlook as transparent to the end-user as possible. (Perhaps Chris could fill-in the ICC on details of what work is being planned for the memorial day weekend?)
  • UF's new IT Security Policy and IT Security Procedures (http://www.it.ufl.edu/policies/security/) The new policies require IFAS to designate a Unit Information Security Manager (Unit ISM) who will be responsible for maintaining specific internal IT resource documentation, security policies and procedures, and business resumption plans. This IFAS level position will be held by Tim Nance. ICC members should become the local ISM's for their departments. To make this official and inform the various departmental chairmen of this arrangement, it was suggested that each ICC member have their respective chairmen draft a letter to Dan Cromer specifying them (i.e. the ICC member) as their departmental security manager.
  • Anonymous Public Shares This topic was revisted from a previous meeting. Supposedly, the policy is that they are not allowed at all. Where is it written? If not, then the ICC should draft a formal recommendation for ITPAC to make policy. These shares do not include PUBLIC folders shared that require domain authentication for access.
  • Password policy will be a topic at next ITPAC meeting. The ICC should draft something to present to ITPAC.
  • Having a single IFAS Domain was brought forward as a policy issue, but discussion was interrupted until next meeting. The ICC needs to hear from dissenters if their point of view is to be represented. Now is the time to speak up!
  • Unfinished business will be held over until the next meeting. Mention was made of this possibly being in April or May.