Thu, 19th March 2009 1400–1600
Minutes of the HT09 ICTF Meeting
1. Welcome and Opening Remarks
Jeremy welcomed all and thanked Sarah for sorting out lunch and the venue. All agreed.
Jeremy thanked Tony for producing another ICTF Newsletter and encouraged ICTF members to contribute to the next newsletter. Would like to see some more technical articles about projects going on around the University.
Jeremy, Sarah and Tony have been working on improving costs of training courses.
Last PICT meeting was as usual. Main point is that money is short and there will be lots of competition for it. There is the opportunity for ICTF to raise items and bid for money at PICT and ICTF should take advantage of this for the benefit of ITSS around the University.
4. ICTF Steering Committee Report
Sarah used some slides to report about the steering group. Committee has been sitting in on meetings and representing ICTF.
Work ongoing on SIGS and Advisory Groups.
Ideas for future projects have been worked on. This enables bids to be made to PICT for money.
Cisco talk was arranged in Jan and we hope to run an IBM talk in TT09.
TT09 will be taken up with conference planning. ICTF folks asked to note good speakers and make them known to ICTF-SC.
Want to plan some more trips - Bletchley Park is in the pipeline.
SIGs and SAGs (but we don't call them that, do we!) still developing.
Thanked committee for working hard to make things happen and all IT Staff for contributing ideas.
6. Items from representatives on other bodies
Gerard reported. Sarah is the rep for ICTF. Pointed out item in ICTF newsletter about software licensing group (SLG). Gave public thanks to Richard for managing software funds so well. Group is now able to add some site licenses to the portfolio - Matlab, Refman and Sigma Plot will now be covered by central funding.
PDF Convertor will be covered by the group for the next three years.
Microsoft products are not part of the SLG's remit.
Criteria for decisions are many however usage is one of the most important. All ITSS encouraged to feed back to Richard Saxton how much of site licensed software they are using as this helps maximise value for money delivered by the SLG's decisions.
Harry Fearnley pointed out licenses being managed outside the SLG's scheme. Wondered if there was any expertise available to help in managing software deals funded by departments rather than the central money.
Humanities Division will be asked to provide a new rep for the SLG. In progress. Mike Fraser clarified.
Steven Young asked who deals with MS licenses. Jeremy said it was a work in progress and he would clarify.
Microsoft Premier support deal was being investigated with Nottingham Trent University.
7. Reports from Advisory Groups
There is a new migration and archive SIG.
Development group has been set up to consider how things will move forward after April 2010, the formal end of the project. Gerard is the ICTF rep. First item to consider is encryption. Harry made a comment about secure connections to Oxmails.
Tony reported for Jonathan. The main activity of the group is the “Conditions of Connection” document which is still work in progress. It was stressed that this is not intended as a document against which units will be judged (for disconnection), rather it is intended to be something against which units will be able to self-assess their connection. One-off funding has been obtained to cover a six month appointment to help units assess their compliance.
8. Reports from Special Interest Groups
*nix sig is up and running. 1 Seminar done, 4 to go.
Mobile sig had met and had talked about optimising web pages for phone browsers.
iPhone sofware development competition also mentioned - watch this space.
Members of mobile sig will be working with groupware to test implementation on mobile devices and develop documentation.
Meeting with Mark N and Syvlain P on 30th March
Next meeting 6th April. Maillist oucs-mobile@maillist.ox.ac.uk
Tony reported for Stuart. He highlighted the wireless roll-out, the Apple Mac teaching room (not to be called the pole-dancing room) and the iPod/iPhone application development competition.
Harry Fearnley queried the timescale for the arrival of the leaflet on OUCS Support for Research Projects. Answer to be inserted?
HR/Payroll system mentioned. Tender process not conclusive so still ongoing. A recommendation has just been forthcoming.
Student Systems programme. OxCORT has been fixed following performance issues seen last year. Performance in weeks 7/8 has been better this term than last. Work also ongoing on GSS for administrative reporting.
Web Single signon for Student Systems is being done working with OUCS and will be released in strands to new and existing students.
Financials system has had work approved on grant management functionality which should improve usability.
Financials patching is happening over the Easter vacation. Trials have been done .
Online Payment store system has an upgrade planned. Will bring compliance with new payment card standards, and support conferences and events better.
"Resolve" package is due for replacement and a product has been identified. It is going to be tested shortly.
Ahrum P asked for timescales for Resolve - Ian said at least 4-6 months. Maybe a year.
Question about financials updates. Is there similar coming for OSS? No - OSS have less demand for change.
Dave Price reported. SOLO is in 2nd term of service. Convinced it is the strategic way forward for library info service users. Will replace the OPAC in time. SOLO can take data from lots of different places and present them all to the user in a common search interface. Plan is to bring many other catalogues into SOLO e.g. special collections and so on. Will make searching much more powerful and comprehensive. Endnote is still an issue can can't yet push data to client (only web version). This is on the short-term agenda to fix. Remaining problem is that users still have to drop back to older systems to do things more than searching (e.g. reservations etc.)
OxLIP+ has now completely replaced OxLIP. Has been some resistance to change from subject search to title search, but a survey showed that the latter is now preferable.
Recent user survey had 5000 responses.
Long term aim is to subsume OxLIP into SOLO.
Oxford Research Archive (ORA) is becoming established as main repository. A series of events is planned to promote this and stimulate debate about scholarly publications. A blog is online about this.
Harry Fearnley asked if events around ORA were in Gazette. It has been confirmed that they will be advertised in the Gazette.
Tony introduced Rob Zachlod, our new technical wizard and commented on the event programme that was coming together for next term. In particular a full (2 weeks but compressed into two four day sections for us) Cisco course leading to CCNA qualification.
Harry Fearnley asked about department reviews – these are by invitation and each one is different depending on requirements.
Jeremy showed the ITS3 pages and the ICTF site with links to all useful items for ITSS including agendas, minutes etc.
15th July. Saïd Business School. ITSS encouraged to feed in to organising group with ideas and suggestions.
