February 11, 2009 Minutes

  EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY
COMMITTEE

February 11, 2009

ATTENDEES: Rich Hansen, Stan Judkins, Mike Murphy, Leif Nelson, Jerry Rosenberg, Fred Sherman, Pam Wilkes, Vijay Veeramachaneni

GUESTS: Sharon Luciw, Chien Shih, David Gillett

Convened:  12:30 pm

1.  INTRODUCTIONS (All)

2.  APPROVAL OF THE MINUTES (Fred)

• Will stand approved as posted

3.  GENERAL NEWS (ALL)           

Approval of Teleconnect Fund Qualifications (Sharon)
Special fund set up to benefit community organizations and K-12 districts and gives a 50% discount in the price of telecommunication circuits has now been approved for use by Community Colleges

We have submitted our paperwork and are one of the listed agencies at the PUC that qualifies for this discountWaiting to hear back from AT&T to find out how much our discounts will be

• The CAC (Chancellor Advisory Council) did approve the change to AP 3250 (our procedure on computer use and abuse)

Had to do with adding a simple one-line to the document about the illegality of downloading copywrited material and is now part of the procedure

Leif inquired if ETS has done something with marketing to notify students of this change

ETS is working with the public information officers on both campuses to do this

Leif wanted to know if ETS is taking a proactive approach as far as monitoring the network for connections that are establishing a Limewire or Nabster that facilitates the multi sharing of illegal downloads

ETS monitors for unusual activity of any sort

Leif wanted to know if ETS had a protocol in place where the District Police would be involved or the administration and the Deans

ETS is in the process of completing an internal ETS protocol on incident response (could be incidents of any thing)
At the last meeting, invited Ron Levin plus other groups outside of ETS to come in a comment about the procedures
Fred was going to send Leif a copy of the procedures and wanted get any comments that he might have

Mike Murphy inquired about the status of VPN connections to the campus network into offices from off campus

Faculty are inquiring about remote desktop connections to their office computer

Actually two issues:

1) VPN

Because of all of our current projects it is in ETS' plan to roll out in the near term
If there is an urgent need for it, we could reconsider and reprioritize   - according to Mike there are a couple of PSME faculty members that are very concerned

2) Remote desktop connection

There are some security issues to setting this up

Mike also inquired about the status of wireless on the FH campus

Currently the wireless that is being rolled out for FH is on the Middlefield Campus – the highest priority set by Judy Miner and her staff
As soon as Middlefield is finished, ETS will go down the priority list of other places at FH

Fred did not have the priority list available but told Mike that he would make it available

Mike mentioned that it sometimes takes 6 – 8 hours to get his files delivered after he has released them in Abaca

Mike to send info to Chien
Part of the problem could be that there are two defenses for our e-mail – some time the backend protection will think that the frontend release is really trash

•  The committee met Tuesday, February 10^th
  
• Decided to change the size of the Dell monitor from a19" to a 20" in order to match the size of the iMAC
  
• Talked about the fact that there wasn’t a firewire port on the Apple laptop
  
• Talked about the impact the new version of MS Office is having on the district
  
• At the next meeting plan to talk about a new VMware called Fusion to be used in place of Parallels
  
• Mike Murphy ask what was being done about Eudora since it is no longer being supported by Qualcom

  E-mail as well as calendaring are on a long list of IT projects that need to be addressed at this district

• There are three components of the EIS system that have been put down successfully since last year:

  1)    Storage area that stores all the data base information
  2)    The application which accesses the data base and interacts with the user command
  3)    Luminis – a portal which allows the user to access the application server

• Currently moving toward implementing the user configuration and training

  Going to bring up the first module – Finance  - July 1^st as well as the Luminis access module at the same time

• Two tracks of activity going on

  1)    Finance team is building the chart of accounts and discussing the migration strategy

  A lot of users are participating in the training and a lot of users are participating in setting up different validation tables

  After the user finishes training, they can move to the database and then move into a preproduction staging area which will be frozen after it has proven to be ready and then changed to production

  2)    In the Luminis area the team is defining how people are going to log into the system  - what type of ID they will use to log into the Portal.

  The system will provide a single log-in based upon your load and responsibility which will give you access to different areas of the system
  Currently working to define what is the minimal scope
  Will provide a lot of information and channel people based upon their load and assignment
  Defining what the minimal is for the finance user to see when they log onto the portal

• Have information sessions going on at the same time

Today on the FH campus during college hour

• The EIS project is on target with both the schedule and the budget

• Not an audit of numbers but of the current IA Plus (our current FRS, HRS & SIS) process

  Have a lot of peripheral systems, on both campuses that are being supported

  A lot of data is downloaded to different departments of both campuses

  Data is taken and manipulated
  This audit is focused on where this data goes and how staff keep the data safe
  The project has already gone through two rounds of review and interviews by the consultants
  Currently in the final round
  The draft report should be ready by the end of the month

• Hope to have something to bring to the March ETAC meeting for the committee to review

• Stan inquired if this audit included files that people have in FileMaker as well

  Yes, it does include FileMaker as well as other forms of file management being used

  It includes anything that receives data from the centralized IA Plus databasebrp> There may be individuals out there who are keeping sensitive information in electronic databases that were not audited

  This is primarily an investigation to help us understand where we are with IA Plus, where the information goes and how to configure Banner so we do it right the first time in terms of putting security in and getting it set up appropriately
  Looking at what we have done in the past and what we can include for the future

• Pam Wilkes inquired about the libraries as to whether or not they were on the list, and they are

• An alternative site to keep our essential operation data outside our primary environment

  Already have a site chosen – Carlsbad, CA

  Although going to a location out of the state might add to reducing the risk of seismic events, it would increase the risk of the telecommunication link itself going down for some other reason and the cost would be much higher
  We do not have a backup plan if CENIC takes a hit, but it is very robust and has multiple loops

  Will be able to load balance between the two locations for ordinary traffic

Initially was only going to be a recovery site in case the primary site went down
After looking over the architecture, it became possible with the addition of a small amount of equipment, to actually load balance between the two sites

• The Board approved this project and the vendor selection on February 2nd

• Yesterday commenced ordering the connectivity from the disaster recovery site to FHDA

  The connectivity will be going through CENIC (Corporation for Educational Network Initiatives in CA) – they have given us a very good rate
  This will connect the disaster recovery site and the primary site for data replication and load balance purposes
  After ordering, it will take 45 – 60 days to establish the connection and then begin testing

• Two major activities going on



1) The configuration of how we are going to automatically failover when a disaster occurs on the primary side
2) Determine how we securely keep the database in sync


• Hope to bring the Disaster Recovery up about the same time as the Finance module in Banner or shortly after, so we can have protection of our major asset, so we can recover in a very short amount of time

• This project is sponsored by the Risk Management group headed by Marsha Kelly; ETS is merely playing a support role in the roll out

• Finished the initial first testing earlier this month

  Had a mock-up scenario that was sent out to 97 CS employees

  Half of the employees successfully received the notification by e-mail/cell phone

  Found out that 39 had their emergency phone number, that they provided, sent to an answering machine
  Found 15 with incorrect numbers

  Will have to resolve these types of issues before going on to the next phase of testing

• The decision was made that the current process of entering emergency contact information through HR isn’t working

  During the second round testing, want to bring up an emergency contact website

The target group for the second round testing will include FH College, CS and everyone in ETAC
Testing is scheduled to start in mid-March

• Have a website for the emergency notification system set up under Risk Management on the CS website

• At this time will only allow a maximum of three different contacts that can be used for notification – cell phone/text message, office phone and e-mail

9.  FUTURE AGENDA ITEMS (ALL)

• Mike ask that the issue of student fhda e-mail accounts be agendize in the next few month for a discussion

  Mike suggested that he and Vijay to do research from the students point of view
  Mike will also do research from a faculty point of view at FH
  ETAC has discussed this issue numerous times over the past two years

  Has been discussed with senior leadership from both colleges and the district several time over the past two ½ years and the conclusion has been not to go forward with it

• Jerry requested that there be a wireless status update at the next ETAC meeting

• Adjourned:  1:24 pm

Last Updated: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 at 5:45:52 PM
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