A meeting of the Colleges' ICT Committee was held at 2.15 pm on Tuesday 20th October 2010 at OUCS. Dr Jo Ashbourn, the Chair of the Colleges' ICT Committee, chaired the meeting and the following members were present:
Following OUTN plans for upgrading the University telecoms system to VOIP and the presentation of these plans to the Domestic Bursars' Committee (DBC) and college IT Officers, the CITOF were approached by Excel with details of a commercial alternative. Simon Thomson and James Dore presented a VoIP report (PDF) detailing the problems that would be caused by the University Telecoms programme and the background behind the commercial alternative, as well as offering a technical and financial comparison between the two options. It was stressed that this should be considered to be an exploratory exercise and a starting point for future discussion. (The VoIP presentation in PDF format)
A number of questions were raised about VOIP in general – problems exist with emergency calls and some card-payment technologies for example.
The report will be passed on to the DBC and also to OUTN. The authors undertook to discuss the issue further with OUTN and report back to the CICTC in Hilary Term 2011.
Ben Bridle reported back from the small group which had been set up to investigate the potential contributions of colleges to future funding of OUCS which is currently running at an annual funding shortfall of £350,000 per annum. To date OUCS has been funded by contributions from Divisions based on a per-head basic sum but there has been no equivalent contribution from the colleges. The group looked at a number of possible options, including a complete pay-per-use system which was discarded as being overly complicated, before making two proposals:
Total colleges' contribution towards OUCS would be £298,516 (equivalent to £7,021 per College/Hall) which would allow colleges access to all OUCS services except for the HFS, Training, the Helpdesk and WebLearn. These excluded services would be charged (at a rate to be decided) on a pay-per-use basis.
Total colleges' contribution towards OUCS would be £367,394 (equivalent to £8,768 per College/Hall) which would allow colleges access to all OUCS services as per the current arrangement.
(Note: these charges would apply to College-only staff – students and staff with departmental affiliations are considered to be covered by the existing funding arrangements through the Divisions. The actual breakdown of the distribution of contributions would be decided by the Conference of Colleges. No indication has been given yet as to how future increases in contributions would be managed or distributed.)
The meeting decided to recommend the second option above as being the simplest and best-value choice to the Estates Bursars' Committee.
Jo Ashbourn reported that she had contacted college IT officers over the summer to update the CICTC mailing list with changes in IT staff and IT Fellows, so the current list is now up to date for this academic year.
The annual Oxbridge Colleges' IT Conference organised by Cambridge will be held on Friday 3rd December at Chelsea Football Club in London. Further details will be circulated shortly.
