Oxford University ICT Forum

ICTF Termly Meeting. Hilary 2015

Meeting held on Friday 26th June at 2pm at the Geoffrey Thomas lecture theatre, Rewley House

Minutes

1. Welcome

The chair of the ICTF welcomed all present to the meeting.

2. Minutes of Last Meeting

These were confirmed as an accurate record.

3. Chair's steering group report

Sarah thanked all those in ICTF and ITS3 who had supported its work throughout the years, mentioning especially Elsa Smith, who retires at the end of June 2015 after 44 years of service to the University. Sarah reminded those present about the upcoming ICTF Conference on 7th July and urged people to make sure they meet sponsors. Sarah reported that this would be her last meeting as she was leaving the University for pastures new. She felt privileged to have been chair of a committee that promotes such positive collaboration in the world of IT.

4. Project Reports

a. Student Systems Update (Scott Cridland-Smith): Scott presented an update but sadly had technical problems with Prezi. SITS for colleges is going ahead as part of SSP. David White and Mark Dyson of IT Services will be taking the lead on this. 15 colleges are currently interested and 11 are considering taking part. Crispin Muncaster is the Business Analyst on the project. The key issues are Access, Permission, Performance, Usability and Academic details of the service.
b. Data Centres and Eduroam update (Henryk Glogowski): USDC expansion is scheduled for March 2016. Another datacentre is due to be constructed at Harwell and it will take a modular form. Each pod will contain 50 x 19” racks. The procing structure will be the same as for the current USDC and the facility will be secure. Eduroam will provided at the site along with some office/desk space for permanent and visiting workers.
c. Chorus and C3E Update (Lyn Waddington): Lyn presented an update. Chorus was about to enter pilot following successful completion of UAT. Current areas being worked on were how to communicate with stakeholders, documentation for users, and training. Chorus has purchased some laptops and set them up at Hythe Bridge Street with Unifty for testing and demo purposes.; C3E is an evaluation project to look at the feasilbilty of moving Nexus Email into the cloud. There is an ongoing consultancy with a company (not college!) called Trinity about using OneDrive business/personal.

5. ITS3 Report and ICTF Steering Committee Elections nominations (Tony Brett)

Tony gave a report and announced that the ICTF Steering Committee elections were contested so that was to be a ballot at ICTF Conference on 7th July.

6. Items from representatives on other bodies

a. Divisional Software Licensing Group - note Matlab TAH: The Matlab TAH has been renewed for 2015-6. Costs will be recovered from Divisions and Colleges.

7. Reports from Special Interest & Advisory Groups

a. HPC SIG (Andy Richards): There had been a national HPC meeting in Oxford.
b. Web SIG (Jim Leek) Meeting on 31st July: To meet on 31st July and Torchbox would be presenting.
c. Drupal SIG (Colin Connolly): No report.
d. Digital Media User Group SIG (Stephen Eyre) meeting today!: No report.
e. Information Security Update (Jon Ashton): There had been a well-attended meeting on 7th May with 60 people present. James Smith has been appointed as Chief Information Security Office (CISO) to start in August. There will be ongoing security review and vulnerability scanning within the University. Post of Secuirty Architect and Risk Compliance Officer will be recruited in the coming months.

8. Reports from central Units

a. IT Services (John Ireland): John mentioned the interested in cloud services and the existence of the IT Services Cloud Services Legal Issues working group. Work was ongoing on modernising the IT Services web hosting offer and that would be provided via Drupal. There is a need to upgrade from JRE 1.6 to JRE 1.8 to continue to support some Oracle products. A project is running to ensure this happens smoothly and ITS3 will be overseeing ITSS communications about it.
b. Bodleian Libraries (BDLSS Newsletter) Andrew Bonnie to attend for questions: Andrew invited Ashley Woltering to talk about VIPR which would provide new shared infrastructure for virtual servers and storage. Sun-ray terminals would cease to work at the end of July but libraries and ITSS have been made aware of alternatives.

9. Divisional reports

a. Colleges verbal update from Simon Mortimore: The Colleges IT Strategy Committee has a new chair, Dame Lynne Brindley, Master of Pembroke. Dame Lynne was previous Chief Executive of the British Library.
b. MSD: A report was given, main item is the proposal for the Information Governance Office and its approval by the MSD board. The Haiku web service had enjoyed good uptake and there was general agreement that there was a need for greater communication and collaboration between MSD IT Services and Central IT Services.
c. MPLS - no report
d. Humanities: Andy Davies reported about the upcoming Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), and the Research Software Developers Network
e. Social Sciences - no report

10. Any Other Business

None

11. Date of Next Meeting:

Tuesday 8th December 2015, venue TBC