MINUTES
University Technology Committee
December 4, 2006
Members Present:
Lance Taylor, Chair
David Jaffee, Vice Chair
Scott Bennett
Peter Braza
Katharine Brown
Cathy Cavanaugh
Dale Clifford
Kathleen Cohen
Richard Crosby
Jace Hargis
Marsha Lupi
Lucy Trice
Barbara Tuck
Tom Van Schoor
Others Present:
Jeff Bowen
Steve Henin
Kathy Hughes
Joe Lynch
Bill McSherry
Deb Miller
John Sharp
Terry Smith
Larry Snedden
Fred Sudler
Tony Turrin
The University Technology Committee meeting was called to order at 10:00 a.m. in Bldg. 15
Room 1105 by Chairperson Taylor.
Announcements
Chairperson Taylor asked the group to please sign on the Attendance Sheet that was circulating.
Approval of Minutes - November 6, 2006
Taylor stated there were three (3) corrections made to the November UTC minutes. Kathy
Hughes informed the group these revisions were made to include statements by Katharine Brown
in Section 5, correct Jace Hargis statements attributed to Jay Coleman in Section 5 and add Terry
Smith comments to Section 6.
Dale Clifford asked for a revision in Section 4 with regard to activation fees for eInstruction
System clickers. She informed the group that users must pay for the first three (3) activations and
thereafter, all future activations will be free of charge.
Taylor asked if the members had any changes, additions or corrections to the Amended Minutes
from November 6, 2006. No further changes were noted and the Minutes were approved as
amended.
Report: Campus Technology Committee
Dale Clifford stated after much discussion, the Campus Technology Committee would like to
make a motion to the UTC. This motion is to recommend a location for a future central testing
center at UNF. The CTC recommended housing a central testing center with the current Office of
Academic Testing under Academic Affairs. This office is currently located in Building 2. The
recommendation would include having the Office of Academic Testing handle all the
administrative duties, securing additional space and providing additional proctors.
Kathy Cohen stated that she felt before proceeding with a recommendation that there is a need to
speak with Gordon Benson directly, who is head of the Office of Academic Testing. She
reminded the group that it is possible that Benson may have plans for future growth and space
use under his office.
Taylor stated that the motion to recommend this location should be amended. He stated the
recommendation should include instructions that the Vice Chair of the University Technology
Committee will have discussions with Benson and other appropriate parties. This would allow
them to voice concerns and alert them to this recommendation before forwarding to the
appropriate Provosts and Vice Presidents.
The amended motion to recommend the possible future central testing center location was
unanimously approved.
Report: GOT
Clifford reported that the CTC took the issue of who should be in charge of formulating and
dealing with applications by faculty to use the iPods in classes beginning next Fall to the Faculty
Association Executive Committee. Their ruling stated that the Faculty Enhancement Committee
was the appropriate committee to develop an application process. This application would be for
faculty to use for securing iPods for use in a class. The process could not happen in time for
Spring semester, but will be in place for the Fall.
Deb Miller updated the group on GOT pending issues:
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FIG iPod Project - is underway and data is being gathered from Fall students and
faculty who were involved in the project. The iPods will be used by a Common
Boundary course this spring.
Student Response System - The Office of General Counsel is reviewing the
standardization agreement for E-Instruction. Information Technology Services
and CIRT are working on the logistics for training and the setup in several
different locations for this system.
Model Technology Classroom Project - is proceeding as planned.
Apple iTunes U - steering committee has received a formal sponsorship from
Academic Affairs and will now be able to move forward with a request to ITS to
setup.
Steaming Capture Station - a portable pilot unit is currently being put together and
should be ready for use in the Spring semester.
Report: IT Security Action Team
Taylor informed the group that Jeff Durfee was attending a Leadership UNF Meeting and was
unable to attend.
No items were reported.
Update: Content Management System
Hughes informed the group that the ballpark pricing from a number of vendors came with a
range of $75,000.00 - $150,000.00. The pricing was presented to the Administrative Systems
Council. Institutional Advancement was asked to move forward to seek funding for the system.
Taylor stated the Administrative Systems Council believes it is a reasonable thing to do. The
issues though are that before a formal Invitation To Negotiate is sent out or something at that
level, funding needed to be found and a decision on it's priority needed to be addressed before
processing an ITN.
Hughes asked if this was something that was going to be addressed before the President's
Executive Council. Taylor asked if the presentation had been scheduled and Hughes stated that it
most likely had not. She said that the group that came up with the functional specs was supposed
to review all information and presentations before it went before the President's Executive
Council.
Action Item: Osprey Net Acceptable Use Policy
Hughes stated that the Osprey Net Acceptable Use Policy is virtually identical to the one the
committee reviewed at the February and March 2006 meetings. She would like to now move
forward with the policy which references the Network Acceptable Use Policy (already
recommended by the UTC) as a package. She reminded the group that this policy was reviewed
and approved by student representatives, Housing etc.
Taylor stated that if there were no questions or concerns he would like to allow the group to
forward the policy through the appropriate channels.
No changes were noted and the motion to adopt the recommendation of this policy was
unanimously approved as submitted.
Info Item: Banner Response Time
Bill McSherry provided a handout on the Banner Response Time addressing the issues that the
University encountered with the Banner 7.0 roll-out this past month in regard to problems with
student registration last week.
McSherry stated that there were some unique issues to the Banner roll-out. One being that with
Spring term registration, all students are placed in one pool for the duration of a week and
register at the same time. The registration coupled with the normal day-to-day business of the
university demands on the Banner system caused outages on various computers. The registration
time-frame also allowed students to make changes after initially registering so in turn this placed
even more users on the system at one time.
McSherry also stated that Banner 7 takes up more resources than the previous version and the
Banner Implementation Team were not informed of this and did not have documentation to that
affect.
The following resolutions were proposed:
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Enrollment Services agreed to the need to break appointments down by 15 minute
intervals / hour as USF currently utilizes.
Registration needs to be provided for a full five (5) days (Monday - Friday) rather
than the four (4) days currently provided for Spring Term registration.
An upgrade in hardware needs to be installed in order to handle the additional
usage by advisors checking the CAP program. This program checks pre-requisites
or course equivalents which is something that USF does not do and this requires
UNF looking at additional hardware.
Taylor stated that there is a two prong approach. One being an upgrade of our current physical
capabilities and the second (2nd) having Enrollments Services and SRC look at spreading out
registration appointments. McSherry stated this is correct and they are looking at putting these
resolutions in place before the Advance Term Registration and Summer term. He said the reality
is that we will not be able to test this until the next Spring Term registration.
Taylor asked if we are working with our Central Florida Regional Data Center host to possibly
expedite an upgrade to the hardware. McSherry stated that he was meeting with that group and is
hopeful that because they are on the same fiscal year as UNF, they can start this upgrade as soon
as possible or close to 7/1/07.
McSherry also mentioned there were issues with the J'Initiator program that runs the Banner
system. The problems were not uniform and very sporadic and seemed to be related to the users'
degree of Banner activity. Also, there is no documentation these J-Initiator issues. The issues
included corrupt file notices and computer crashes. J-Initiator had to be re-installed and a new
version was recommended by SCT and tested. This version was deployed by the ITS Networking
Team this morning after the CFRDC made necessary configuration changes over the weekend.
All UNF users will have the new version coming up this morning automatically on their
computers.
Info Item: AOL Blacklist
Hughes stated that there was an issue involving the blacklisting of UNF's email servers. A
student's computer in a residence hall sent out thousands of spam messages over the
Thanksgiving holiday. Comcast, AOL and other providers blocked UNF email servers as a
result. The student's network access was blocked as soon as they were identified as the source,
which prevented additional spam email traffic from being sent. Most providers were cooperative
in removing UNF from their blacklists the same day this occurred, although AOL continued to
throttle UNF's email traffic to only a handful of messages being allowed every couple of hours.
The AOL email queues were supposed to be caught up by Saturday with all original queued
messages from UNF sent (not deleted). Hughes believes the problem is now cleared up. IT
Security is currently looking at the student's computer to determine the source of the email spam.
Deb Miller asked what safeguards we have in place to protect our network. Lance Taylor stated
that we have safeguards in place to make sure students have current virus protections, but these
are not always foolproof. He stated that more than likely she was probably compromised in some
way on her client and we do not have reason to believe it was in any way malicious on the
student's part. Hughes stated that any changes would need to be made after our major student
email conversion scheduled for January 20th, 2007. We should be able to put additional controls
in place to notice unusual spikes of emails going out. Unfortunately, Hughes stated, we didn't
realize what happened until it was too late over the holiday weekend. So there was a delay.
Meeting Schedule
Taylor proposed moving the monthly UTC meetings beginning in January 2007 to the second
(2nd) Monday of each month. He informed the committee that due to his commitments with the
FLR Board meetings, he would miss several UTC meetings in the upcoming year. No member
opposed and Taylor stated he would send out a new schedule when the room reservations were
completed for the semester.
The meeting was adjourned at 10:35 a.m.