Marshall University

Information Technology Council
Meeting Minutes

11/11/05

Present: Arnold Miller, Allen Taylor, Donna Spindel, Jingping Zhang, Yanzhi Wu, Frances Hensley, Gary Anderson, Tom Hankins, Karen McComas, Herb Karlet, Michael Misiti

Review of Minutes: Approved

Arnold: We seem to be alleviating the email problems.

We have received little to no complaints about the performance of myMU during registration. I was unaware of the editorial in the Parthenon from the person complaining about registration delays; no Help Desk call was logged.

I will track down the person and contact them about problems.

We have been able to slow down some of the bulk email coming into campus. It is a slow process, should be finished by Thanksgiving.

myMU upgrades were completed which means we have Content Management under the Luminus portal which means that once that is incorporated into the entire process will give us a better way to manage content and its currency. Which means that when you put a piece of information in there, you can set time periods and update periods.

The Banner 7 upgrade will take place over the Thanksgiving holiday. There is a tutorial out there on the Banner page. The changes are in the details of navigation.

Frances: Terri Byrd did training on Banner 7 with the Associate Deans which was very helpful and really appreciated.

Michael: I did hear a lot of negative feedback about the slow down on myMU. I tried to explain to students about slow downs being common in high traffic times.

I would like to suggest moving the registration time two hours prior to the midnight time period. My goal is to shift the time period to alleviate the problem.

Per Arnold: we need to gather more information to try to throw some more power at the server rather than change the time which would essentially just move the problem to another time.

Frances will discuss it with Roberta and get the Registrar’s input.

Jingping: We are in the process of doing migration to our new III Millennium integrated library systems. If everything goes well the Millennium system (WebOpac, Circulation, Catalog and Acquisition) should be live in the first week of Jan. 2006. So far everything is on schedule.

With the new system the first impress of our users will be that the system is much faster and more stabled than our current system. With the Millennium system we will be able to add new services or improve current existing services. We will implement several new products/systems in Spring semester. For example, we will use III WebBridge to provide links from Google Scholar to electronic items and resources in our collection. It means that citations presented to users of the search engine will include direct links to the library's resources.

Allen: David Johnson wanted me to cover some things. Beginning next week we will have WIMBA active in Vista. This is the audio enablement in Vista.

We have also acquired a product called Macromedia Breeze and we are working with four faculty members for the spring term to begin trying it in their classes. It is a web conferencing product that can be used for meetings; we may even try using it for the next ITC meeting to link with this product as opposed to the traditional video conferencing product. It scales for many more users, happens from a single PC. It should be active next week for testing and we will pilot it during the spring term.

We just launched a new project to review our portal technology and potential outsourcing of some of the things we are doing in IT. We will be looking at products that will be coming out.

We also want to acknowledge products that have been brought up before such as Facebook. We have about 90% of our students active on Facebook. This figure matches the 93% that the company claims at all institutions. We have to reexamine this product. It is a source for providing a social environment. They seem to be addressing issues we worry about such as security and privacy issues fairly well. If it is that popular we may want to look at streamlining a channel on the portal for it to eliminate a dual log in and perhaps integrate it somewhat.

We also have been evaluating costs on services we provide. One of those services is student email. Recently various sources have been offering free email with more capabilities than we offer.

More recently, MSN and Google are offering multi gigabytes of storage. We are trying to re-examine whether or not it makes sense to continue to offer email accounts. MSN has released the university program and they will allow us to brand MSN services both e-mail and their “spaces” area as marshall.edu domain and essentially outsource the e-mail service. It is free of charge if you accept advertising such similar as what we have with Facebook. We went through that with the Luminus portal and may not want to do it again. If we don’t want advertising, the cost is $3.00 per student, per year. The group I am heading will be looking at portal components.

Google is far behind MSN right now in the technology.

Since the last meeting, we attended EDUCAUSE and spoke with WebCT about the purchase by Blackboard. They feel that the combined entity will be quite strong in the market. The CTO of WebCT will be heading up the technology for the combined product. The combined product will not be available for 2-4 years will be more like Vista. We will be meeting with faculty in the next month or so to talk about the new version of Vista that does change the user interface. We are going to recommend not to go to Vista Version 4.

Tom: Question about filtering email. Per Arnold: we have a front end engine that filters out well known spam sources. The new version of Outlook provides a junk mail filter engine. We have been somewhat reticent to come out with a front end engine that cleans out email without users having some say in the perimeters.

As we move to the new email server we hope to come up with a product to refine the perimeters of the email engine so the user will have more control.

That is planned as an enhancement on new email service.

Cellular Phone Stipend Plan

Arnold: What you have available to you includes the changes I made from your suggestions at the last meeting. Most of it was moving the pricing out to the Authorization Form and the stipulation that they have the proper device. We now have a unified form that includes the Cell phone and Internet policy.

We also added some definitions.

Voted and approved

Remote Internet Stipend Plan

Arnold: I wanted to point out one section that I reworked. We moved pricing to the end, but I missed one instance on the first page, I suggest that we strike the $55.00 per month and change that to “specific allowance amount”.

Voted and approved

Computer Disposition/Surplus Program

Arnold: We went over this the last time, and there were no changes from the last meeting. We need to correct the spelling of disposition in the title. I also suggest changing “Policy” in No. 2 to “Program”.

Voted and approved

Email Retention Policy

Arnold: This one is a Policy because it is important. Page 3 is a table that says what content retention policy will be. Ephemeral content is short lived; it will essentially be left up to the user as to what content is moved out of email onto a more permanent storage medium. I have referred us to the University Document Retention Policies and Practices which effectively does not exist at this point. All we are doing is establishing a frame work. I have defined ephemeral, but the actual imposition of the policy overlaying all the various content would have to be handled then, there’s still a definition to be made there. Do we arbitrarily make all email ephemeral? Do we make it substantive content? All we are doing is defining right now.

Frances: Some emails contain documents that could be ephemeral or general content, now it is easy to put all email into the ephemeral category.

Arnold: We are giving user 90 days to make a decision on whether to retain email content. We will look at technology to save and retrieve email.

We have to draw a line in the sand to make some kind decision.

We are going to have to deal with legal storage and the potential overload of the servers.

Discussion about definition of various types of documents: Frances feels that she needs more instruction about what is considered a certain type of document. Requested that we delay vote on this until December meeting.

Donna feels that she would be more comfortable making this decision once the university defines ephemeral content.

This policy refers to a university policy that does not exist. The university policy needs to be written by those with the authority to write it.

VOTE TABLED UNTIL DECEMBER

Distributed an example of the proposed ITC Policy Format for the BOG. The idea is that all of our policies will be re-written to conform to BOG policy format.

Data of raw numbers for registration activity distributed.

Adjourned.