OXFORD UNIVERSITY IT USERS' GROUP

A meeting of the University IT Users' Group was held on Tuesday 29th April 2003. The following people attended the meeting:

1097 MINUTES OF THE PREVIOUS MEETING

The minutes of the meeting held on 14th January 2003 were accepted as correct.

1098 MATTERS ARISING

1098.1 Minute 1085 - Request for Representative from MIS to be Present at Future Meetings - Pete Biggs reported that he had contacted Margaret Taylor regarding having an MIS representative at future meetings to discuss ISIDORE & OSIRIS issues. The outcome of this was that Margaret agreed to send someone from MIS as a representative for the Unit. However, this representative would not necessarily be able to answer questions on all of the projects being run by MIS because the projects (and staff) were independent of each other. If there is anything specific that the Group needs to know about ISIDORE or OSIRIS then MIS will try to answer these queries as they arise.

1098.2 Minute 1086.1 - Time tabling of Commitments for Graduate Students in week 0 of Michaelmas - [Robert Taylor had sent a letter to Graduate Studies Admissions and EPSC to ask for a dedicated Colleges' induction day for graduate freshers but had not received a reply.]

1098.3 Minute 1086.3 Virus E-mails & Spam - David Rischmiller to look at the feasibility of OUCS offering a central directory for Sophos using the Enterprise Manager version.

Robin McCleery asked if there had been any progress with this. Paul Davis reported that he thought the investigations done by David Rischmiller had found problems with some types of clients but Paul would chase this up with David and report back to the Group. [ACTION Paul Davis]

[Paul Davis later reported back the following:- Further to our recent meeting I've received the following explanation of the current situation from James Partridge who is involved with the implementation.

"The situation with EM is as follows: Testing on our test network is done to all intents and purposes and I've found EM to be very good *once* it is setup and correctly configured. However, there has been a delay because of the fact that Sophos basically rely on a Windows domain model for their authentication. This doesn't cause a great problem if EM is being used within a single unit, but may cause more problems across multiple units.

We will go ahead and offer the service and see what areas in reality do cause problems. As far as implementation goes, I'm actually about to build our first EM server. I hope that'll be done in the early part of next week. Then in the first instance I'll be using it for a week or so to feed Sophos updates to the NSMS Sophos update service.

All being well, we can start to offer it for wider use immediately that initial live test period is over. Pressure of work and staff changes have meant this has unfortunately taken longer than initially expected."]

1099 CHAIRMAN'S REPORT

Pete Biggs reported on the following two items:

1099.1 Review of OUCS

A review of OUCS is taking place this summer and Pete will be meeting with the Review Group Panel on July 9th/10th. Representatives can raise their own issues with the Review Group or they can do it through the IT Users' Group and Pete will pass it on. Please make any representations to Pete before the start of July.

1099.2 ISIDORE

ISIDORE is the MIS project which will provide information on students throughout their time at the University. The system will be implemented in the same way as OSIRIS but MIS will try to get users involved at a much earlier stage. Ian McArthur from Physics will be representing the Departments in this implementation so please contact Ian (i.mcarthur1@physics.ox.ac.uk) if you have any views on ISIDORE.

1100 COMPUTING SERVICES REPORT

Paul Davis had produced a written report that was placed online with the agenda. Paul Davis added the following points:

1100.1 HFS Upgrade

The HFS will be upgraded using HEFCE and University funds, for completion by Easter 2004.

1100.2 Spam and anti-virus filtering

The necessary equipment for spam and anti-virus filtering has been received and the system will be checked before going live. Spam Assassin is being used to check the E-mail. Spam Assassin cannot be setup for individuals but changes can be passed on to the white list. All mail will be passed on to the user with a heading that details what Spam Assassin has found out about the message.

1100.3 10Gb Backbone upgrade

The implementation, which was planned to be carried out in summer/autumn 2003 has now been deferred until the summer of 2004. This is because the equipment required has come onto the market later than the original forecasts. Alan Gay commented that there was no urgency to carry out the upgrade this year: the original timetable had been planned around the availability of funding, rather than an immediate requirement for extra capacity, and now that it had been possible to defer the funding, the University would benefit from a more established product.

1100.4 Denial of service

The problems with AOL not recognising that mail originating from Oxford was in fact genuine have now been resolved.

1100.5 Briefing Papers

Some short briefing papers and guides [covering such things as Video Conferencing, Digital Video, Accessibility and the Web, Plagiarism and RSS News Feeds] are now available on the LTG web site at: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/reports/

Lawrie Phipps, Director of TechDIS, is doing a one day workshop on Accessibility Issues on 27th June, with regard to the SENDA (Special Education Needs and Disability Act) legislation and making web sites more accessible. Pete Biggs added that this is very important to all those who own web pages and it is crucial that it is heavily advertised to all concerned. [ACTION Paul Davis]

1100.6 OUCS Intermedia Service

The OUCS Intermedia disk conversion service has now ended, alternative commercial service providers have been listed on the web pages at: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/mediaconversion/

1100.7 Replacement for Ghost

The Altiris Deployment Solution software agreement has now been implemented and the media is available to purchase through the OUCS shop, payment details can be found at: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/shop/prices/index.xml?ID=body.1_div.5

1100.8 EZMLM Mailing Lists

Majordomo has now been replaced by the EZMLM mailing list service and most lists have now been converted. For those that still have lists that need converting, please contact OUCS (list-request@maillist.ox.ac.uk) before 16th May 2003.

1100.9 IT Literacy

The IT Literacy survey will be ready to go live very soon. [This is a year long study being run by OUCS to determine the IT Literacy levels of our students compared to other Universities.]

1100.10 Admin Staff Training

OUCS are running special training courses for Admin staff outside of term time. The courses will cover things like word processing and essential computer skills. Details can be found at: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/courses/detail.xsp?code=ABB

1100.11 OUCS News

There is a new OUCS newsletter that will be produced once a term and will give information on all of the latest developments from OUCS.

1101 LIBRARIES REPORT

David Price had produced a written report that was placed online with the agenda. David Price was not in attendance [for which he sent his apologies after the meeting]. There were no questions on the libraries report from the Group

1102 REPORTS FROM OTHER COMMITTEES AND GROUPS

1102.1 South East Region Computer Users' Committee

Peter was not in attendance and there was nothing to report.

1102.2 Network Advisory Group

The latest minutes for the Network Advisory Group can be found on the web at http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/oxford/network/nag/. There were no further comments.

1102.3 IT Support Staff Group

John Ireland had produced a written report that was placed online with the agenda. John added that the 8th IT Support Staff Conference is now confirmed for 26th June at Keble College. Registration will be £20 per head and it will open on 6th May, closing on 30th May. Full details will go up on the web site very soon. The main thrust of the conference this year will be ethics and the law, in particular the SENDA (Special Education Needs and Disability Act) legislation.

1103 ITEMS RAISED BY REPRESENTATIVES

There were no items raised by the representatives.

1104 ANY OTHER BUSINESS

There was no other business.

1105 DATES FOR NEXT MEETINGS

The next meeting of University IT Users' Group Representatives will be a joint meeting with the College's IT Group and is provisionally set for Tuesday 21st October 2003 at 2:15pm in the Martin Wood Lecture Theatre, Parks Road.