January 7, 2015

Date/Time
Wednesday, 01/07/2015
Location
Plummer Conference Room
Submitted By:
Rachel Juneau

IT STEERING COMMITTEE

Meeting began at 10:05 a.m. and adjourned at 10:50 a.m.

Attendees: Cruse Melvin, Steve Doblin, & Kevin Smith.

Guests: Shellie Richter, Srinivas Varadaraj, Hector Flores, David Pecora, & Tabitha Lowe.

Distribution of Minutes

   Wed., December 3, 2014: Minutes were distributed and approved as amended.

Monthly Status Report

   (Shellie Richter)

ACTIVE PROJECTS

  • Firewall and Edge Router replacement – 66% complete
    • All on-campus work is complete.
    • The firewall replacement at the disaster recovery site in San Marcos is scheduled to be completed by April 1, 2015.
    • An announcement to update VPN client will be sent out in early March. This update will improve security and support VPN on more computers.
  • Wireless Internet
    • Cabling was completed on January 30, 2015.
    • Deployment of new access points have been completed in the following buildings: Galloway, Education, Setzer Center, Library, Dining Hall, Cherry, Maes, Parker, Rec Center, and the Police Station. The remaining buildings are scheduled for full completion in March 2015.
    • A new sign-on process will be implemented within the Spring semester. Guests will be able to log in with a decreased level of service.
    • There was a recommendation to name the wireless network. Dr. Doblin suggested that IT speak with Dr. McNeil to involve students in naming the new network.
  • Blackboard / Banner Integration
    • Blackboard on-site was on site December 8 – 12, 2014.
    • Production Go-live is scheduled for January 14, 2015. It will update four times daily
  • ODS Oracle Database upgrade (to 11.4.1)
    • LU will have an ODS outage on January 7, 2015. There will be a five hour Banner outage on January 8, 2015.
    • The ODS application upgrade is being tested; the production upgrade is pending.
  • Active Directory Upgrade
    • A Statement of Work is under development with Dell.
    • The issuance of a Professional Services purchase order is anticipated by January 31, 2015.
  • Virtualization of Campus Labs
    • This project starts off with 100 current/synchronous users, and can be expanded as needed.
    • Equipment for the labs was ordered before the winter break for a virtualized cluster to support the Citrix implementation, some of which has already been received.
    • A Professional Services Statement of Work has been issued with a March 1, 2015, deadline for delivery of the production engineering lab.
    • Library labs will be transitioned to management under IT; the migration plan is under development by IT and the Library staff. The goal is to utilize the labs in the library to deliver applications running in the virtualized environment.
    • Upon suggestion by the committee, Ms. Parsons agreed to have IT conduct a presentation on Virtual Labs to the Academic Computing Committee this month. It will include research on how other universities approach needs for lab expansion.
  • CAS Upgrade and Shibboleth Implementation
    • The go-live date is scheduled for the week of January 12, 2015.
  • Security Camera System Replacement
    • Genetec has been chosen as the solution for cameras and for access control.
    • The Residence Halls will be priority #1, followed by the President’s house and data center.
    • Equipment was ordered before winter break, and the storage equipment has already arrived.
    • The timeline for spring implementation is under development.
  • Touchnet Marketplace
    • Marketplace offers a campus wide credit card processing system standard.
    • New rules effective October 2015 will prompt review of POS devices. This addresses encryption and liability for card fraud.
    • Remote implementation work will begin in February 2015. Issues regarding PCI compliance will be addressed as this project continues.
COMPLETED PROJECTS
    • SciQuest

 UPCOMING PROJECTS

  • Campus Expansion of Xtender Document Imaging
  • Housing System (Starez) Single Sign On – on hold
  • Microsoft O365 evaluation (email, collaboration, video conferencing)
  • Workflow

GENERAL

No outages to report

Academic Computing Committee

     (Larry Osborne)

The Academic Computing Committee did not meet in December 2014.

Other

  • Osborne asked Ms. Parsons how many new job positions were added in IT in 2014. Ms. Parsons said that she would pull together a comprehensive list if Dr. Osborne would like specifics. There are a number of jobs that have been posted but are not yet filled including a Technical Applications Manager, Project Manager, Document Imaging Analyst, and Network Analyst for the wireless project.
  • Osborne inquired if the university has processes or models in place to make changes in levels of technology needed, citing the wireless project as an example. Dr. Melvin noted that the current process is to identify the project and then gain consensus among the execs to act. There is appropriate infrastructure of communications in place to determine needs and problems. Ms. Parsons added that IT does planning for the upcoming year and completes a project pipeline report within IT to prioritize needs. This report has been presented to IT Steering Committee.

Next Meeting: February 4, 2015, at 10:00a.m. in the Plummer Conference Room #102.