Information Technology Committee Meeting

October 6, 2000 – 9:30 – 10:30 AM

Members Present: Don Combs, Layton Cottrill, Sarah Denman, Jan Fox, Karen McComas, Allen Taylor, Herb Tesser, Gary Weis, Barbara Winters.

Mintues: The minutes were approved with the following correction. Under updates last paragraph to read. Marshall will be the first institution for the West Virginia Forum on Technology and Innovation and is the first in a series that will be conducted around the state, as we see how to change economy by using technology.

Updates: Steve Case, chairman and CIO of America Online, will speak at Marshall University on October 23. Case will join Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-Wva, and Marshall President Dan Angel for a discussion of the changes affecting the economy and how West Virginia can be competitive in the 21^st Century. Rockefeller has been actively pursuing new monies to be brought into the state. We are number 48 of the 50 states. The event at Marshall is the first in a series that will be conducted around the state. These will be directed to Higher Education and the business community. Take our businesses that are here and make sure that they are not hurt. Get them on their feet first, as well as attracting new business. The program begins at 9:30 a.m. in the Joan C. Edwards Performing Arts Center. More information on the forum is available on line at www.wvforum.org If you cannot physically be at the form there will be real time at your desktop.

All the celebrity series have been video taped and being digitized.

Empowerment Zone group just had their first meeting of the year and the topic was the new economy. Seems that everyone is on the same bandwagon. I will get electronic format of the technology issue with the City of Huntington out to you. John Wallace has completed his report, which is an assessment of the technology on the research park. We will get maybe 10 people from the Marshall community to review the plan and make recommendations to President Angel.

EDUCAUSE Conference next week which includes all areas of the technical world. I will be meeting a lot of vendors. The one time you can do it all at one time. Meeting with Microsoft as well as others to address our issues and problems.

Vote Electronic Scholarship Policy: A procedural issue. Where it goes beyond this is up to this committee. After some discussion it was suggested that we table until our next meeting.

Microsoft License Update:

Allen Taylor updated the committee on the principals behind the Microsoft Campus Agreement. The Faculty/Staff Campus Agreement has been funded for FY2000/2001 by Library/Computing Fees and by grant money from the School of Medicine. This allows us to distribute to all university owned computers and to faculty/staff personally owned computers the latest in a wide list of popular Microsoft software for the next year. The cost of this contract is about $75,000 per year. The cost of upgrading all campus computers to just Microsoft Office 2000 would be $175,000 per year and the value of the other software included in the Campus Agreement would be nearly $500,000.

The Library/Computing portion was funded this year based on a $60 per PC per year cost that was built into the Life Cycle model for client software for the 550 machines supported by Computing Services in the UCF Sites. These machines are available for the entire campus community and this forms the basis of using Library/Computing funds. For FY2001-2002 funding will need to be identified to renew the Campus Agreement for the machines outside of the UCF Sites. If central funding is not identified then one approach would be to ask for a $60 workstation client software fee from each spending unit for each PC that they operate. Spending units have always provided for the cost of licensing software on their computers. The Microsoft Agreement and the central purchase of many popular applications to be shared by the campus community will greatly reduce the university's overall cost of acquiring this software.

Handouts were provided detailing the Microsoft Campus Agreement, a list of software proposed to be included in the $60 workstation client software fee, and the Life Cycle Model for UCF Sites currently funding from Library/Computing Fees. A short digital video was shown detailing the reasons the University of Indiana developed and deployed what is now the Microsoft Campus Agreement. The state of Ohio, Texas, Indiana and many others have deployed the Microsoft Campus Agreement to all of their Higher Education Institutions with great success.

A discussion was presented for funding and implementing the Student Option for the Microsoft Campus Agreement for the Academic year beginning in August of 2001. The cost of doing this would be about $19 per student plus the cost of any media distributed to students (about $10). The institution must pay for all students at the university or all students in a strictly defined program where we have at least 100 faculty. The state of Ohio has built the $19 cost into fees and then charges student $10 for the distribution. Both Purchasing and Computing Service have been getting letters from students wanting to know why we are not doing this like Ohio University.

Our next meeting will be Friday, October 20^th in Drinko Confernece Room 426.