Oxford University ICT Forum

ICTF Termly Meeting. Michaelmas 2015

Meeting held on Tuesday 8th December at 2pm at Physical and Theoretical Chemistry, South Parks Road

Minutes

1. Welcome

Andrew Richards welcomed all present to the meeting. He introduced himself as the Chair and Lucila Cañás Bottos as the Vice-Chair. Andrew stressed that the ICTF is a community.

2. Research Software Developers Network (RSDN)

See http://rsdn.oerc.ox.ac.uk and presentation slides.
Jonathan Cooper (Computer Science) introduced this OERC-based, cross-divisional initiative that brings academic expertise together with research software expertise.
The group has monthly meetings (see web site above) with a hackathon planned for February.

3. Student Systems update

[Slides]
Elaine Aitken talked us through the schedule for graduate admissions. All data has been gpoing into SITS:eVision since September. UCAS data had, for the first time, been fed to SITS ready for the 2016 undergraduate admissions.
Scott Cridland-Smith showed the college involement with this - 13 colleges are currently on-board with some others still 'maybe's. He spoke about the Oxford College Members' Database and other SSP projects, specifically Financial Support & Funding and View Student.

4. 24x7 Service desk

Ian Teasdale said that Norman (part of Northumbria University) would be providing 24x7 telephone service from 23 December. Documentaion for ITSS (rather than end users) was currently being produced. It was noted that, for the initial service, Norman would not be able to issue Rescue Codes.

5. Minutes of Last Meeting

These were accepted as an accurate record.

6. Chair's report

Andrew urged everyone to go along to the IT Innovation and Technology exhibition on Thuesday. As last year, many people had been pre-registered as a reult of attendance at the summer conference.
Two dates should be noted for 2016 - a family-friendly post-Christmas Saturday lunchtime gathering for IT Staff at the University Club on 9 January and the summer conference on Friday 24 June at the Saïd Business School.

7. ITS3 report

Tony Brett reported that ITS3 were still a man down but that plans to get back to full strength were in hand. The IT Sevices shop is also half-a-man down, David Shakespeare now being full-time with the podcasting team. He thanked Amy Thomas whose time is split between ITS3 admin and the IT Services shop.
Tony noted that many events had been run over the summer period and through this term - Sarah's send-off; the ITSS BBQ; Powershell, MacOS courses; ITIL Foundation had been run twice; WDE training continued; The Web SIG had met, as had the IS SIG;there had been several lunch & learn events; the pre-year roundup; induction for new IT Staff and a Dridex meeting. Another induction session and "Computers, Privacy and the Law" were planned for the New Year but venues are needed to run more events -building work will leave space short at 13 Banbury Road.
SSL certficate requests and Copyright Infringement Reports continue to flow our way.
Finally, Tony gave the floor to Henryk Glogowski to report on today's DDoS attack on Janet.

8. Items from representatives on other bodies

a. Divisional Software Licensing Group: No report.

9. Reports from Special Interest & Advisory Groups

a. HPC SIG (Andrew Richards): Andrew informed the meeting that there would be an HPC-SIG meeting on Wednesday of next week.
b. Web SIG (Jim Leek): Jim reminded the meeting that the Web SIG would be meeting next Monday.
c. Information Security Update (Duncan Tooke): Duncan said the SIG had had a good meeting two weeks ago. He also announced that the new InfoSec site was now live although then launch was being done 'softly' with some material still being added or improved.
Question: Is there a link to the securioty awareness Training? Answer: Yes. It was suggested that people should re-do this training annually. It was also reported that 70% of those who 'fell for' the dridex malware had not done this training.

10. Reports from central Units

a. IT Services (John Ireland): John reported verbally to this Past-Present-Future slide.

11. Divisional reports

a. Colleges: Nothing to report.
b. Medical Sciences Division: Nothing to report.
c. Maths Physical and Life Sciences - no report: Information Security had dominated recent meetings.
d. Humanities: Nothing to report.
e. Social Sciences: Nothing to report.

12. Any Other Business

Andrew Dixon asked where there was need/desire for an ITIL SIG. Interest was shown, more news on this in due course ...

13. Date of Next Meeting:

TBA