The next meeting of the Oxford University Colleges’ ICT
Committee will be held on Tuesday 16th October 2007 at 14.15 hours at The Isis
Lecture Room, OUCS,
A G E N D A
Joint meeting of the
Colleges’ ICT Committee and the Committee of College Librarians
1) Installation of New Library Management System and administrator rights for library staff
2) Management of library public PCs and incompatibility of Windows XP with OLIS and OxLIP, use of Sunray library workstations
3) Monitoring of internet usage in colleges
4) Mounting and general access to e-books
5) Other matters for co-ordination between IT and library staff
6) Any other business
7) Date of next meeting (Michaelmas Term 2008) – TBC
A G E N D A
Colleges’ ICT
Committee Meeting
1. Apologies for absence
2. Minutes of the meeting held on 1st May 2007
3. Matters Arising
7. Report from other committees and groups
7.1 IT Support Staff Group – http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/oxford/groups/itssg/meetings/2007-05-23/minutes.html
7.2 Software Licensing Group - Report
8. Items raised by representatives
9. Any Other Business
10. Date of Next Meeting:
Items (1)-(3) are important
for report whilst the remaining items arise from the last meeting of the
Information and Communications Technology Committee (ICTC) on the 7th
June 2007 (that being its last meeting since it was being disbanded under the
ICT Strategy Plan).
1)
Following a
proposal from Conference of Colleges and consultation by email on the CITG
mailing list, the new name of the CITG from Michaelmas
Term 2007 will be the Colleges' ICT Committee (CICTC). The website has
been updated to reflect this change although all papers from previous meetings
will remain archived under the former name.
2) Following a meeting of the University’s Planning and Resource Allocation Committee (PRAC) last term, the ICT strategic Plan was endorsed as a working document, which would be implemented under the authority of PRAC. PRAC also approved the creation of a new governance structure with a PRAC ICT Sub-Committee operating along the lines of the Buildings and Estates Sub-Committee to be chaired by the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Academic Services with effect from Michaelmas Term 2007 (subject only to necessary regulations being put in place).
3)
As a result of
the recommendations from the ICT Strategy Plan, the new ICTC is being disbanded
and the equivalent committee under the new planned ICT governance structure
will be the PRAC ICT Sub-Committee.
After discussions with the Conference of Colleges regarding college
representation on this sub-committee, by analogy to the present situation with
the ICTC, the Chair of Colleges’ ICT Committee will be one of the two nominated
Conference of Colleges representatives on the PRAC-ICT Sub-Committee (the other
being a College Bursar or Head of House)
4)
An
update was given on the ECE and the ICT Support Team, which reported that 500
staff in OULS have been migrated to Exchange, 900 PCs in Central Admin have
been replaced (at a considerable cost saving), Service Level Definitions have
been produced, the Altris Help Desk is now operating
in OULS and will be rolled out shortly to Central Admin and Estates, and the
Apple Desktop Support Service has been developed. There are eight projects to complete by the
target date of December 2008; two of these are dependent on additional funds
from Central Admin. Thereafter, it was
hoped that work could be started immediately on extending the ECE model to
provide a cost-recovery-based service available to the rest of the University.
5) OUCS reported that following approaches
from around a dozen departments, it had bought a closed site in Second Life,
which about 25 staff were currently experimenting on to test the usefulness of
Second Life as a pedagogical tool. The
present cost is minimal (£50 per month in total), although a public site, if
the University were to take that step, would be more expensive in terms of
content management, user support and training.
Help Centre Refurbishment
The Help Centre was
refurbished over the summer and will soon accommodate the OUCS Shop. The
refurbishment has been documented at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/internal/history/helpcentre-07.xml
Email Quotas
The upgrading of the Herald email servers, which took place over the
summer, is now complete. As a result, all users now have at least 1 GB of mail
quota. Those users who require a larger quota may make a case for up to a
maximum of 3 GB.
The upgrade, which includes both new server software and hardware, will help
ensure that Herald continues to provide a dependable email service for the
University.
Freshers’
Fair
The Freshers’ Fair very successful. The Freshers’
Survey of IT use, ownership and knowledge was done
mainly on line. Would the info gathered be useful to others? See http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/reports/freshers/ for information from previous years, and
the Thema project at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/thema/
50 Years of Computing at
50 Years of Computing at
New NSMS Services
NSMS has introduced two new
services, based around the virtualisation expertise that it has developed over
the last three years. The new services are VM for Rent and Virtual Infrastructure
Consultancy and Management. These services are described at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/nsms/services/
Instructions for using Certificates on IIS Web Servers
With thanks to Bridget Lewis and
Jeremy Rowntree, there are now instructions available
for using a JANET server certificate with your IIS web server at https://wiki.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itss/CertificateServiceIIS (ITSS only, on the Wiki)
Rescue Codes
ITSS may now generate rescue
codes or activation codes for people in their unit(s). The facility can be
accessed at https://register.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itss/rescue_account. It will create a rescue code if the
account is already activated or an activation code if it is not. The tool is
still in testing at the moment so please report any problems to
registration@oucs.ox.ac.uk
Mail Routings
ITSS now have the facility to
change mail routings for people affiliated to their unit and generic mail
routings for their unit(s). See links on the ITSS facilities page. The facility
can be accessed from https://register.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itss/index
OUCS Power Shutsown 11th August 2007
The 5-yearly Health and
Safety mandatory power inspection of the OUCS machine room took place on 11th
August. There were some glitches but otherwise it went well considering the
extent of the shut down.
There are nearly 27,000 facebook users in the
Breakfast at OUCS
"Breakfast at OUCS"
is organised by ITLP and
includes contributions from, and information on, the whole of OUCS. New members
of
Turn off rewriting to long form email
Long form addresses of the
form @foo.oxford.ac.uk will stop
working in 2009. Stop rewriting your mail to the long form now. Full details
are available at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/email/addresses/.
Software News
The Michaelmas
2007 edition of Software News has been published at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/sls/newsletters/newsm2007.xml.
Over the months since its inception, Oxford University
Research Archive (ORA) has been growing steadily (see http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk). It contains
digital items from across the University in a wide variety of disciplines.
Although originally having a remit to be used for ePrints
and digital theses, the range of items has broadened to include all types of
text-based research materials. In addition to ePrints
and eTheses, ORA contains
working papers, conference papers and reports. It is possible to deposit
additional types such as book chapters and other materials using a general online
deposit form. ORA contains a large number of
The University subscribes to EndNote and Refworks personal bibliographic software. With the release of EndNote Web, both can now be accessed freely, directly from a web browser without the need to obtain and install client software. Further details can be found at http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/eresources .
OULS has upgraded its OpenURL Resolver and A-Z title list of e-journals with the Ex Libris SFX system. We expect this to provide a high quality, modern service for users, and it should also provide a slick workflow for library staff which will minimize administration. It has a skin based on the attractive design commissioned by OULS for the VTLS Virtua OPAC, iPortal.
When the new website for OULS is released next month, OxLIP will no longer match it, so we have created a new skin for OxLIP to harmonize with SFX, and in future with iPortal. The changes to OxLIP are just cosmetic and should cause no difficulties for users. As an interface, it is functionally the same as it always has been and OULS is actively seeking a replacement with metasearch and other modern features.
Sarah Lawson
Licensing from OUCS
Minor reorganisation within OUCS means that 1.6FTE, an increase of 0.55, is now allocated to software licensing. Richard Saxton and Diane Mitchell are the two contacts. Plans for service improvements are in the SLD: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/internal/sld/licence.xml
SAS and SPSS
SAS is licensed until July 2008 and SPSS until November 2008, whilst SPSS licenses remain free of charge. SAS is now partly cost recovered. 37 SAS licences have been issued in addition to use in 4 departments who continue to pay full licence fees for SAS use on platforms other than Windows. SPSS version 16 is awaited - this will be the first version to work on the Intel-based Mac.
Maple
All new First Year Maths students have been licensed automatically for Maple use. The Maths Institute is sending discs to all college IT staff (who have maths students) to prevent students having to purchase individual copies of the media. The Maple licence ends in December 2007; we are seeking an extension to this licence.
Nvivo
Although there is now a site licence available via Eduserv Chest, there was insufficient interest shown in the recent consultation for us to be able to afford the fees - please keep the Software Licensing Group informed if your usage changes.
New software versions
There have been many new software versions released recently. These can all be obtained at the Computing Services Shop and full details will be published in the Michaelmas edition of Software News. Of note is the return of concurrent licensing for Adobe Acrobat 8 following Adobe’s disastrous attempt at e-licensing.
Endnote and Endnote
Web
Our agreement for the use of Endnote on University-owned machines has been extended to allow the use of Endnote Web.
Students who previously needed to purchase Endnote Full Version at a cost of £79.90 should be encouraged to see if Endnote Web, which is free of charge for their use, might satisfy their requirements. Visit www.myendnoteweb.com from a computer within the ox.ac.uk domain to sign up for an account.
Microsoft Office for
Students
Microsoft is selling Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 to
students in Higher Education for £38.95 until the end of April 2008. There are
also options to purchase media, to take a free trial or to purchase a year's
rental (at £12.95). For more information and detailed conditions see the www.theultimatesteal.co.uk
website.