Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
DCC Meeting Notes September 12th, 2012
The audio for this meeting can be found here:
http://www.brown.edu/cis/support/dcc/audio/audioarchive/DCC%20mtg%209-12-12.mp3
Pat Kinghorn – Updates
We have two new members on the DCC Steering Committee! Kristen Soule has decided to return to the DCC Steering Committee after taking some time off. Our other new member is Jesse Coutu.
David Sherry: Security Updates
Laptop Encryption updates – only 46 out of 1000 licenses of Symantec Endpoint Encryption have been used. ISG will be drafting a list of people and departments that they would like to see encrypting their laptops for the best interest of the University. CIS will also be providing Mozy licenses with the encryption software to allow users of encrypted devices to back up their data to the cloud – The Mozy license will allow for unlimited backups.
PCI DSS assessment – Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard – Brown has to be compliant. Higher Ed focused company came in to evaluate Brown and its 52 credit card merchant accounts. Brown is not PCI compliant, and will be rolling out 30 day, 60 day, 90 day, 180 day, and 365 day goals to make sure Brown is PCI Compliant in the future. Although this is not federal law, this standard comes from 5 largest CC companies. They have the authority to fine us if we are not compliant, or not allow us to use their cards.
Cloud Based Data Storage – Dropbox.com is inherently insecure and is for commercial use, not enterprise use. Brown is looking into emerging technologies such as internet 2, Net+, box.net, google drive as approved cloud based data storage solutions
Laptop Loaner program – 6 Dells and 4 Macs have been purchased and they are located at Service and Repair. The Systems are unencrypted, and intended for traveling Faculty that do not want to take their own devices with them. The machines are scanned and wiped after being returned.
Protecting Brown Information Class – This class will not be schedule anymore. It will be on-demand, and the online presentation is available.
New twitter accounts – CISO@Brown and ISG@Brown – Will be publicized during October which is National Cyber Security Awareness Month. Prizes to win for those who follow!
Two step Google authentication is now an opt-in service – This provides an extra layer of Google authentication for individuals who would like to opt in.
Scott Thacher – Community Technology Consortium overview
Scott is the IT Director for the Division of Campus Life and Student Services and Chair of the Community Technology Consortium
CTC – A new group that has been created as an advisory group to Mike Pickett on Big Picture IT strategies, architectures and methods.
This group meets once per month, and serves several purpose, including the vetting of and soliciting feedback from the Brown community about big IT projects that will be affecting the community in a big way. They serve to take community feedback on things that the community wants, that are not currently provided by CIS including but not limited to, Storage Infrastructure, Virtual Infrastructure, andprivate cloud for Brown use, to name a few examples. Membership includes high level members of Brown’s IT community.
Chris Grossi – CIS announcements
CIS recently completed a contract with Qualtrics. More information about this powerful survey tool coming soon
Back to school weekend went very smoothly. The helpdesk had 340 walk-ins in a week.
Some returning students are running into issues with MAC OS 10.6 machines running cloudpath. Deleting the old certificate and installing the new one should resolve the problem.
SAS 9.3.4 is available on software.brown.edu. It is now Unkeyed.
The windows team has brought up a 2nd print server. Any print queue migrations will be transparent. (Except for some MAC users, who may have to change the print queue name.)
Brown has a new Dell Inside Service Representative – Luis Diaz.
He can be contacted at Luis_Diaz@dell.com
800-576-6038 Ext# 513-9343
Changes to the Dell Premier page have been made, the 7010’s, 6330, and 6430 are up there without image. The XPS 13 should also be available on this page shortly.
A new standard image will be uploaded to the deploy server.
Steve Mckay – Software Services updates
The C-Farm server has been upgraded. Mathematica, Matlab, ArcGis licensing is all tied to this server.
Software.brown.edu has been moved to a new VM. This will allow the packaging of programs like SAS to be put into one large file, rather than multiple smaller files.
There is demand for Creative Suite 6. Now that Keyserver is running version 7, Creative Suite 6 can now be packaged.
SAS is now available unkeyed. SPSS will soon be available without needing to connect to License Manager to run.
Matlab – more toolboxes are being added to the license manager
Software.brown.edu will be updated in the future as part of CIS’s web re-design
Matlab 20212B is available – This will be packaged through lab use only.
Nvivo 10 – Being packaged soon.
DCC Meeting Notes – 14 March 2010
An audio recording of this meeting is available here.
Announcements – Chris Grossi
We’re down to two weeks left for the Symantec Antivirus license. CIS is tracking and running reports of machines that are still contacting the SAV server. ISG has sent reminders to departments that have many remaining SAV clients. We need to get full migration completed by the end of March to both ensure active and current client security, and to be in compliance with our licensing agreements and protect Brown from a license audit and penalties.
CIS has been working with SAS to extend licensing across campus, they are close to being ready to un-key SAS licensing. Standalone SAS will be available to departments before the end of the semester. Anyone using a keyed installation of SAS will need to uninstall their preior version and reinstall the new unkeyed version. Students are included in the licensing and can install SAS on their own computers.
By the end of this patch cycle, Windows machines managed in the CIS SCCM system will have their Microsoft updates managed by SCCM.
As part of Brown’s Dell contract, Dell will be running a Recycling Day on Friday 20 April (Earth Day weekend) to allow Brown-owned and personal equipment to be dropped off for recycling. Details are still being worked out, look for more information from CIS soon.
Qualtrics Online Survey Platform
Representatives of Qualtrics, a commercial service offering very high-quality hosted online survey building, deployment, and reporting, presented their platform. Their core features are:
- Sophisticated surveys made simple (built by a PhD survey researcher)
- 86 question types
- Advanced logic available
- Provides University control. delegated administration
- FERPA. IRB, PHI, HIPAA compliance – SSAE 16 Certified
- University owns the data
- Collaboration available with other researchers in the world even if they don’t have Qualtrics at their institution
- Extensive training and documentation both in using the service and in general research survey design
If you have any questions about the features and benefits of Qualtrics, feel free to contact Ryan Jackson, their representative, at ryanj@qualtrics.com.
CIS is looking for feedback to see who else in the University would be interested. Send your feedback to Stephanie_Obodda@brown.edu. If you have direct feedback regarding the usefulness of Qualtrics to your department, you can also complete the CIS survey that is collecting departmental interest in the platfom.
Doug Wilkinson – CIS Network Technology Group (NTG)
NTG is comprised of:
- Network Security
- Network Engineering
- Network Operations
Any network tickets should be assigned to the Network Operations group, they triage and reassign as needed.
CommOps remains unchanged, still handle dead ports, tap requests, etc.
Projects update:
- Internet Border to OSHEAN – upgrading infrastructure to prepare for a future migration from redundant 1G to redundant 10g
- 5400 firewall decommission, reaching out to departments who are behind these obsolete devices
- NSZ moves
- PBX and SIP upgrade, now complete. SIP features and phones are in testing and will be deployed in new projects in the near future.
Doug’s slide deck is available here.
DCC Meeting Notes — Wednesday, February 8, 2012
DCC Meeting on April 13
The April DCC meeting will be held on this Wednesday (the 13th) at 12 noon in the Petteruti Lounge, Faunce House.
On tap: Jeff Clark, Assistant Director Classroom IT and Computer Repair and Service. Jeff will run through the gamut of services offered by both S&R and Media Services.
- What is considered “supported” hardware at Brown (hardware models, age, type of repair)
- Costs for unsupported hardware services
- Typical turnaround times for services
- Warranty services
- Contacts for additional information
- Other services (media services, pawprints, computer clusters, etc).
- WebEx
Chris Grossi, Assistant Director Desktop Support Services and Steve McKay, Manager Software Distribution
Chris and Steve will present an overview of Software Services. Who’s part of the team? What do they do? Who are our contacts when we need help or have questions?
Chris will also talk about the current software portfolio. What’s included, how are decisions made, who makes the decisions, how can the IT community have input into decision making?
Bring your observations and questions.
DCC Meeting Notes – 09 February 2011
Update: CIS has released a detailed Morning Mail message with a full summary of the changes in Adobe licensing.
Petteruti Lounge, Faunce House
Audio recording of the meeting available.
ANNOUNCEMENTS – Chris Grossi, CIS
Adobe CS5 installers have been released on February 7 on the CIS Software site (Windows & Mac). Due to new license agreements, CS5 cannot be downloaded by students. Faculty and staff will be able to run CS5 off-campus using the Brown VPN.
VPN and campus residential networks will no longer support running CS4 after February 25. If any faculty or staff want to run the CS suite via VPN after this date, they must upgrade to CS5.
Office 2010 for Windows and Office 2011 for Mac are now available for installation. These versions are not compatible with Brown’s licensed version of EndNote X3. Users of EndNote X3 should not upgrade Office at this time.
CIS is piloting Cloudpath, a web-hosted solution to easily configure Brown-Secure wifi access on Mac OS X/iOS/WinXP/Vista/Win7/Android devices. Testing is ongoing at the moment, Android devices in particular are not yet working as expected with this service. Cloudpath hopefully will move into production soon; more information to come.
Some early migrations from Novell department file services to the new Windows file services have begun, including Public Safety and CIS. Departments using Novell services will be contacted to schedule migration times.
SPSS19 will be released this month. CIS encourages all SPSS users to upgrade as early as possible, particularly users of SPSS 16 which may need to be removed from Brown’s license servers by June 2011.
Dell should have the new Brown-specific Windows 7 disk image soon to offer on new PC purchases of standard models.
Matlab is being utilized very heavily this semester. It is up against the limit of the 295 licenses that Brown currently holds. This is being analyzed to find the best way to manage availability.
ADDITIONAL ANNOUNCEMENTS – Pat Kinghorn, CIS, DCC Liaison
The Computer Store has a deal with Apple through March 20. Through this time, if we can aggregate purchases of Apple hardware in batches of 30 pieces or more, we will get a 4% discount. Contact Pat or the Computer Store if you are interested.
PRESENTATION – Mike Pickett, CIO
Mike presented on a variety of topics, with emphasis on the updated IT Strategic Plan, the recent governance audit, and a newly-forming IT Leaders Council. Slide decks available. This group will help make/influence IT decisions and ensure that central and departmental IT efforts are coordinated where useful. More information is available in the slide deck. Mike has asked the DCC community to provide a representative to this group. Interested individuals should contact Pat Kinghorn by Friday February 25.
DCC Meeting Notes – 08 December 2010
Rhode Island Hall
ANNOUNCEMENTS – Chris Grossi, CIS
Marc Doughty in CIS Software Services completed the setup of all USB keys intended for automated Windows 7 installations that were provided by DCCs at the previous meeting; these have been returned by campus mail. Please provide any feedback while using them to Software_Services@brown.edu.
The Novell-to-Windows File Services migration project is rolling towards implementation, more information will be presented in January. For now, it will be useful for those departments using Novell-hosted files to ‘clean house’ within their files where possible; a smaller amount of data will make for simpler migration.
The Google Transition project is winding down and has been very successful. The recent migration from Brown’s internal MX to Google’s went smoothly. There are still a few legacy Proofpoint digests popping up here and there; this is thought to be due to spammers caching Brown’s former MX, where Proofpoint is still operating for now.
The Google Apps Steering Committee will soon be re-tooled to serve as an ongoing advisory/governance group to direct the adoption and support of the many Google Apps services that are becoming available, such as Picasa, Google Earth, and others. If you are interested in serving on this body, please contact Geoffrey_Greene@brown.edu.
Office 2010 for Windows and Office 2011 for Mac will be released formally in the early Spring semester, most likely in February. If you need access the the installers for these applications before that time, please contact Software_Services@brown.edu.
Adobe Licensing is in a state of transition as CIS has recently learned that the existing Brown license does not allow students to run Brown-licensed Adobe commercial software such as Acrobat Pro and CS4 on personally-owned computers. CIS is very aware of the importance of these products to students and others at Brown, and are doing everything they can to work out the best solution to bring Brown’s use of these products into compliance with the licensing agreement, and preserve access where possible. Many details still remain to be worked out, but as early as Spring 2011 students may need to run these applications from a commercial student license, which is more affordable than full commercial prices, but still is not free. Students are and will continue to be able to run Adobe products on Brown-owned computers in computing labs and clusters. CIS will send additional communications to the community throughout December and January.
Dell representatives presented their roadmap of the Latitude and Optiplex model lines, as well as some information about their consumer tablets and other devices.
Our new Dell outside sales representative is:
And our Dell Technical Contact is:
Snow Leopard and Parallels 4.0
One more thing to think about for those considering an update to OS X.6. This morning the Parallels Company announced that the most current version of Parallels Desktop 4.0 is fully compatible with Snow Leopard. However, older versions (2.5 and 3.0) of Parallels Desktop for Mac are NOT compatible with OS X.6.
