Minutes of the DCC meeting, June 8, 2011
There is also an audio recording of the meeting.
There are openings for Chris Grossi’s working group on the standard image, as well as on the DCC Steering committee.
Regarding the Steering committee, Pat mentioned the benefit of being able to bring your department’s concerns to the attention of the committee. Don Rogers, having served on the Steering Committee for 3 years, noted the benefits of being at the intersection of the CIS/DCC communications, inside access to be able to give input to CIS, and the fact that things in IT at Brown are changing recently and it’s a great time to get involved. The time commitment is not significant.
Stephanie Obodda talked about the Google satisfaction survey results.
Eleven hundred people responded to the survey. See the website for summary charts with annotations: http://www.brown.edu/cis/GoogleApps/survey/
(note you can mouse over the elements in the graphs to see more annotations)
Stephanie also noted that some labs have recently been integrated as regular features: nested labels and superstars. She showed how to set up multiple inboxes, and demonstrated quicklinks as a way to save common searches. These are both labs at this point.
There is a Google Users Forum for Teaching and Learning run by ITG. It’s largely for faculty, as it’s about teaching. See their website: https://sites.google.com/a/brown.edu/googleuserforumtlr/
Chris Grossi had announcements and updates including a presentation. See the slides at: http://www.brown.edu/cis/support/dcc/dccpresentations/
Announcements:
1. New MatLab licensing. See Morning Mail 6/9/2011.
New way to get it: register and create your account at mathworks [http://www.mathworks.com/], download directly. Good for all Brown community members, including undergrads. It’s now the preferred way for this software distribution. One download at a time. Working on a way to have a package for lab distribution.
2. Cluster rollout in process now. It’s mostly built for September.
3. Orientation: cards and Ethernet cables to be given out to all incoming students again. This needed for IPTV
4. Cloudpath.brown.edu will be THE way to get onto Brown Secure. The project is done except for documentation.
5. Google deprecating support for all browsers (note esp. IE7) that are two versions old. So they will support the most recent two versions of all browsers.
6. Standard Image working group’s first meeting will be Tues 6/14.
7. Will deprecate Acrobat version 8. Key Server notice tells that it will be going away soon.
The RFP Process.
Chris talked about how decisions are being made. The working group includes Mary Willis, Ray Stewart, Cliff Hirschman, Michael Romauld, Rick Rubinstein and several CIS-ers.
Three primary vendors solicited for contract proposal: Lenovo/IBM, HP and Dell; they subsequently each gave a presentation to the group and send prototypes of desktop and laptop. The models were evaluated by the group and by folks on the IT leadership group. The scoring was done by pre-set criteria.
Final and best offers are now being solicited. Dell is slightly ahead at the moment on overall scoring and pricing. Continuing Dell would also save an estimated $150K on the cost of making a switch, so it’s looking likely that we’ll go this route, but we await those final and best offers. This would be for 1-2 years before another re-evaluation.
Novell to Windows migration.
We are about 75% through the migration. Still trying to be pretty much done by end June (except for XFER folders). If you were a delegate before, you will still be.
You can get automated quota reporting. There are effectively no more Novell print queues. The XFER folders still print to the last one and as XFER folders get migrated, this will eventually be able to be shut down.
It’s good to uninstall Novell once your department has migrated; you will otherwise see performance issues.
Scott Martin announced Win7 training available seats.
