1. Jeremy Worth welcomes everyone

2. Minutes of last meeting were accepted as accurate

3. Jeremy Worth deferred Chairman’s business to the rest of the agenda as it would be covered there.

4. Feedback on IT Strategy Consultation. Tony Brett Presented for Prof Anne Trefethen, CIO, a requirements gathering process resulting in a set of principles. IT Strategic Plan was approved by Council yesterday and recognized as ambitious. Will be available soon. New sections include Vision, Widening Engagement and Cybersecurity (this is now standalone reflecting the importance). Question was asked if any feedback was sought from colleges, Some was collected by the IT working Group and many colleges made their own, detailed submissions.

5. Student Systems Replacement Programme update David White, Nigel Brown and Mark Dyson presented a report on progress. David is managing interfaces, and showed the programme plan, Go-Live will be January 2015, Middleware BizTalk is being used. Biztalk does not easily provide sufficient security granularity for individual unit feeds so CUD v2 will fulfil that role. Mark spoke about the data available, Access is based on CUD users’ affiliation to colleges and departments.. HRIS and Card office and IT Services User Registration. There was a question of overlapping affiliations, regarding multi digit course codes or 2 letter staff codes. Mark (on secondment from LMH) asked for the email address of the questioner. Any queries please email ssp@admin.ox.ac.uk. A question about how significant the changes would be and the impact on bespoke college interfaces was considered. Nigel then spoke about methods of access and the RESTweb service offers optimal performance and future support. A question was asked (Christopher Hoskin) that if an sql push is required then are there any template calls? Ans: these are not under development. Mark made a request for Single point of contact for vendors, to reduce duplication of effort. A straw poll of vendor systems was made, e.g. BIG, ERM, Great plains. Ben Bridle requested examples (possible training) on how to optimally use the REST web service would be helpful. 15 colleges have signed up, please email the team for further information. David White showed the timeline for designing “off ramps” or how to get the data out of the system. Priority is given to systems that will become obsolete.

6. Digital Design: Redeveloping the University Website Suzi Ardley (Public Affairs Directorate) gave a presentation on the new university website. This is Drupal 7 configured by agency Torchbox. First redesign since 2007, incorporates responsive design (for mobile and devices) and a more contemporary look. Better integration with Movie and Audio files. Using Prince 2 methodology with a consultation process. 3 stages discovery, design and development. April 23rd is the GO live date. April 7th is the beta launch time for checking any links from other sites. Staff gateway go-live is 14th August, Personal testing was done. Stephen Sangar (web officer, public affairs) showed the NSMS hosting arrangement using many VM’s to provide resilience through redundancy. Security and penetration testing done, 40,000-65,000 users daily . Continual review process. Please email digicomms@admin.ox.ac.uk http://ox-production.torchboxapps.com

7. ITS3 Update Tony Brett gave a report on the activities. A question about WDE (Whole disk encryption ) ascertained the price of college licences. This was to be around £50 for 3 years (decrementally cheaper depending on the remaining months of support), perpetual in that the licence would still be able to be used after the end of its support period. See ITSS wiki for details of Gartner GTP (Gartner Technical Professionals) https://wiki.it.ox.ac.uk/itss/GartnerGTP

8. ICTF Steering Group report Sarah Lawson made an appeal for volunteer candidates for ICTF committee members and Chairman and Secretary, Jeremy Worth and Sarah are reaching the end of their six year terms so are standing down. A report of the committee’s activities, a call for any workshop desires and news of SIG’s forthcoming.

9. There were no reports from representatives on other bodies.

10. Reports from special interest and advisory groups. News of SIGs and College IT Committees splitting into Technical (IT Managers) and Academic (IT Fellows). No meeting arranged for HPC SIG yet.

11. Reports from Central Units. A IT Services Tony Brett presented on behalf of John Ireland as IT Services Senior Management Team was otherwise engaged for the day. B Bodleian Libraries no written report as request had been rather late. Link to follow

12. Project reports

A

TONE (The Oxford Network Evolution)

Henryk Glogowski gave some background on problems experienced by the Eduroam Service, due mainly to a great increase in peak loads, this due to multiple devices and large whole college campus wifi deployments. Managing expectations is stressed as important. Wifi has limitations especially on a creaking network infrastructure. Homogeneity of the users’ behaviours is also a problem with times of access synchronized through day. E.g. 11AM is noticed as a peak time. (return from lectures). There is also a GOWN project 2-3 year

B

Maillist Project Update

Dominic Hargreaves gave a report on the chosen system , Sympa: open source but actively maintained by French equivalent of Janet. Phased transfer of lists expected to be seamless over 6 weeks in the summer. No major features lost but a full text searchable archive gained. Question about automated population of lists , yes SOAP based , aspirations to auto-manage lists. Question about changes to the User interface? Updated documentation will be provided, Email address of lists will remain the same, list managers will have a new interface. Configuration in General will be mapped over.

C

Service Desk Consolidation

Jonathan Marks gives an update. A key requirement being that it is extendable to Colleges and Departments. Frontrange system has been chosen after negotiations. More visibility of Incident management and problem management. Christoper Hoskin asked about the timeframe for colleges to use, 2015 earliest.

D

The Digital Archive Project

Sarah Lawson presented a report on EAPP (Electronic Archiving Project). This uses the same technology as the publications archive. Contains Dark Storage that others cannot see important for Medsci. Digital Safe U is for University Departments, Digital Safe C is for colleges. End of April pilot. Bodleian to provide costing model.

13. AOB there was no other business

14. Date of next meeting, 9th week trinity term, Wednesday 25th June 13:00-16:00. Venue to be confirmed. Meeting finished just after 4pm