ICTF Meeting

Trinity Term 2010 (No.10)
Thursday 8 July 2010
at 14:00
in the Isis Room at OUCS

Minutes

1. Welcome
• Jeremy Worth welcomed people to the first actual trinity term meeting, the previous ones having been combined with the summer ITSS conference.
• Jeremy asked people to let him know their views and thoughts on whether these meetings should continue to be held in 9th week or whether they should be held during term.
2. Minutes of Last Meeting
• There were no corrections.
3. Chairman's Report
• Jeremy (and Paul Jeffreys) reported from PICT on the finding cuts.
• Jeremy also reported on the changes to the IT regulations that came into effect on 18th June.
4. ICTF Steering Group Report
• Sarah lawson requested people not to moan about the bags, gifts, food at the conference.
• Sarah also made a plea for 'new blood' or even just new issues and ideas to come forward to the Steering Group
5. Items from representatives on other bodies
1. Colleges ICT Committee
• James Dore reported that the only item to report is the continuing University process of determining for which services Colleges should be charged, and how much these charges should be. All details are still under discussion, but are proceeding along the following lines:
1. charge to colleges likely to be between £7k to £15k
2. Exact breakdown of services still under discussion, e.g. which are core services (DNS? DHCP? Nexus? Frodo? HFS?) and which are optional.
3. How does one quantify and value the front-line support role provided by College IT staff? Should this have a bearing on the final payment?
4. Ideal timetable is to start 2011-12 academic year
2. Software Licensing
   • Tony Brett reported that there was nothing interesting to report. Groupwise is not being renewed. MS Campus and Endnote will be renewed.
6. Reports from Advisory Groups
1. Groupware
• There was no report.
2. Information Security
   • Jonathan Ashton reported:
   1. Since the last ICTF meeting 2 reports from the Advisory Group were presented to PICT.  The first reported on the findings of the 2009 ISBP exercise and was accompanied by a request for further funding.  Having been granted the funding the 2nd report outlined the plan for future work.  Both reports are available via https://talkshop.itss.ox.ac.uk/talkshop.
   2. The main points to note are that the money is being used to fund a post which will be held within OxCERT who are expanding their remit to include a wider Information Security role.  The post is currently being advertised internally (see http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/jobs/) and interested parties are invited to apply.  OxCERT have also added http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/network/security/ISBP/ to their website and the reports will also be made available there.  Any questions or comments should be directed to infosec@oucs.ox.ac.uk.
7. Reports from Special Interest Groups
1. Unix
• There ws no report
2. OxBridge Collaboration
   • Sarah Lawson reported that about 40 cambridge IT Staff would be attending our conference
8. Reports from Central Units
1. ODIT (Paul Jeffreys)
2. OUCS (Stuart Lee)
3. Libraries (Dave Price)
4. BSP (Ian Wild)
• Ian Wild summarised BSP's major development priorities for 2010/11 as agreed by the UAS IS Board. The priorities are: further progression of the new HR information system with completion due in 2011/12; completion of the initial rollout of the Development And Alumni Relations System (DARS); and commencement of development of a replacement for Resolve, the University's research costing, pricing, and approval tool. Additionally, in 2010/11 initial planning / preparation work will commence for upgrading or re-implementing Oracle Financials and for replacing OSS.
• Tom Anstey arequested that any Oracle replacment should not be browser version dependant. We have OxCERT asking for us to patch (or not to use IE) and the Oracle team demanding that only version X of IE may be used. We cannot have the most sensitive data (ie the University's finance machines) being most at risk of password logging and viruses.
  
5. ITS3 (Tony Brett)
9. ICTF Conference 2010
• It was reported that about 150 people would be staying around for the bowling.
10. Any Other Business
    1. Harry Fearnley reported that a review has been started of  facilities/entitlements that are available with a University Card, especially with reference to retired staff.
       Current facilities for retired staff are outlined at       http://www.ox.ac.uk/staff/working_at_oxford/you_oxford/retirement/
       but there is apparently some uncertainty about whether there is an entitlement to have a card in the first place.
    2. Harry Fearnley asked whether retired IT staff could continue to have an active involvement with ITSS/ICTF, in a way comparable to that of our academic colleagues?  Such contact could benefit not only the retired people, but also existing IT staff. Heproposed that this should include (paying fees, as now):
       1. Access to the ICTF conference, workshops, and seminars.
       2. Full access to the wiki, itss-a, and itss-d lists, though read-only would also be good.
       3. Joining ITSS social functions.

    (1) and (3) were broadly approved.  Tony Brett expressed concern about the work involved in implementing (2), while necessarily blocking other rights associated with ITSS membership. The Steering Committee indicated that they would explore this further.

    3. OSS outage
    • Michael Fraser passed on a request from Emma Potts, Head of Student Administration, that she would be happy to hear from ITSS whose units were affected by the recent Student Self-Service outage, and who wished to provide feedback on the communications process and contingency measures put in place. The Chair drily remarked that Facebook was currently a source of student feedback.
    4. Barbecue
    • This will be held on Friday 2 Sep at 64 Banbury Road, starting at about 6pm.
11. Date of Next Meeting (Week 9, Michaelmas Term 2010)