April 8, 2009 Minutes

EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY
COMMITTEE

April 8, 2009

ATTENDEES: Rich Hansen, Kurt Hueg, Stan Judkins, Kent McGee, Sherri Mines, Mike Murphy, Leif Nelson, Jerry Rosenberg, Fred Sherman, Alex Swanner, Pam Wilkes

GUESTS: Sharon Luciw, Chien Shih

Convened: 12:34 pm

1. INTRODUCTIONS (All)

2. APPROVAL OF THE MINUTES (Fred)

• Will stand approved as posted

• Mike Murphy has a new remote access system available for his CISCO lab classes and through the cooperation of a lot of people including the ETS security team; he has incredible access from the outside to his labs

• Met March 17th

• For ergonomic reasons agreed to include a keyboard and mouse in the standard for the laptops

  If a monitor is going to be requested along with the laptop, it will be added under the peripherals in the standards document

• Had to do minor adjustment to both the Dell and Mac configurations

• Deploying the grant funded Fujitsu tablets at DA, for use by instructors in the classrooms

  Not to be used as a standard business machine in an office
  Currently the grant is only for DA
  Rumors that Fujitsu might want to provide a grant to FH as well
  DA has some machines in the library for check out by students that is working real good
  Not all the tablets have been distributed yet, they are being bought in groups based upon what the college has requested – currently have 75-80 machines that have been deployed

  The DA Technology Task Force and the DA Deans are responsible for determining who on the DA campus gets a Fujitsu tablet

  $500K in the original Fujitsu grant to DA

• A couple of milestone events are about to happen:

  1) Campus wide training is going to start June 1^st
  

  The training plan will be ready by mid April
  Have already identified the first go live batch users to be trained
  Training materials are being prepared
  There will be trainings scheduled at both colleges
  There are three tracks that have been identified:

  1) General navigation of Banner - how to sign on, where to get your normal reports, etc.
  2) Finance specific users - how they are going to use the finance system
  3) General processing training

  2) Go live readiness assessment will be conducted the end of April

Will conduct interviews with all the module users to assess the progress that has been made

• So far everything is on schedule for the July 1^st go live
• General Banner training will probably go out to everyone based upon space availability

  Initial training will be for all the users relevant to the first module go live
  Will purchase computer based training material that will be put on both college websites

  Costs about $1,800
  On demand type of training across the web
  Will primarily focus on finance

• Sent out an all campus e-mail talking about the fact that we are going to be switching Meeting Maker versions

  Currently using version 8.5.3
  Have not kept current with the upgrades
  Have to make the conversion now because of the compatibility problem with new MAC computers

  The new MAC OS does not have the ability to access all the features of Meeting Maker

  Spoke about archiving

  The database is getting too big which causes instability; sometimes causes sluggishness in how it works; sometimes users are prevented from signing in

  A decision was made to take a look at whether or not we should purge some of the data in Meeting Maker and transfer only a portion of it

  Has been presented to Chancellors Staff and Senior Staff – both have agreed with the purging mechanism
  Two methods to archive Meeting Maker data

  1) One involves the HTML
  2) Second method is text based and allows you to go back all the way to the beginning – not real pretty because it compresses the text from all the messages together, but is easy to search

  The recommendation was to go forward with purging all data in the system that is pre 2007

  May need to purge a couple of months out of 2007 due to corruption in the database

• Going forward it will be relatively easy to archive about every six months using the more friendly HTML process

• Going forward, plan to continue to purge all data out and only bring two years worth of data forward

• New 8.8 version of Meeting Maker is supposed to have support for the iPhone and iCal which is currently be tested out by ETS Tech Services

• Not planning on looking into a new calendaring system until the latter part of the EIS conversion (2011)

• Mike is concerned about the district waiting until the last possible minute for e-mail and calendaring

  According to Fred it is the send mail not Eudora that is limiting us and we have:
  1) Red projects - it is broken and needs to be fixed right now and are currently working on
  2) Yellow projects - not broken yet but marginal in performance and could break at any time - these are prioritized and are working on them as well
  3) It works right now even if it doesn't have the greatest functionality but provides a basic service - where our e-mail and calendaring fit in
  4) Systems that work pretty good but there is probably new functionality out there that could improve them but they are pretty good

• Will make a backup of copy before the information is purged

Legally there are no limitations of how long we need to keep these records since they are considered personal records to conduct our daily business

• Currently have about 1,150 accounts that can be assigned to full time faculty, administrators, permanent employees and part time faculty if requested by their deans

• Have added a college wireless VLAN to the FH library so you will see guest and college when you log in

  This will allow students and faculty to log in with their student ID and pin number
  There is more bandwidth and better response time
  Guest is still there for public access

• Received a priority list from DA

  After the student community services, science complex and admin are turned on will go to S Quad, L Quad, A Quad and then depending upon the timing of the renovation E Quad and then move to L Quad and then Forum which would complete Group A
  Group B has not been prioritized by DA as of yet

Child Care center, G Quad, LCW, PE Quad and miscellaneous meeting rooms
In between all of the locations mentioned, any buildings that are renovated or built, those buildings will come on line with wireless

• The priority at FH is to still complete the roll out of wireless at Middlefield while bringing up any new buildings or renovations on the FH campus

  Still waiting for a couple of key pieces of hardware in order to be able to migrate over to the new controllers

  Parts were ordered early last month, haven't been received yet and in the process of trying to track them down

• Busy last term and this spring break bringing the network into DA A92, DA E24 and moving the DA E1 Auto Tech group to an off site swing space (Piercy Toyota, San Jose) while their building is being renovated

• Completed the partial upgrade to the gate connection in the DA ATC building

  Last summer replaced the 359 computers in the ATC
  As predicted the old Alcatel network did not support the new computers very well and did not allow any kind of changes over the network so had to stop other projects to upgrade the equipment

  Looking forward to upgrading and changing the entire building in the future

• FH's lower campus currently does not have wireless because of authentication issues and CALEA but does have pathways for future wireless roll out

• FH's Tech Tack Force will create a priority list for deployment of wireless on the campus

• Leif wanted to know if there have been any discussions or requests for wireless coverage in parking lots and out lying areas for authenticated users

  The main focus of wireless is for the student
  In the original plan for the wireless network was a phase three that would go out into the outlying areas
  If the hard-wired network is compromised so to will be the wireless because they all run through the same core equipment

• Middlefield campus Internet connection goes back to the DA L7 data center, it doesn't come back to FH

  Looking into getting Middlefield it's own link but it may not happen before construction begins on the DA campus this summer

• Currently supporting 8,970 accounts with about 5,000 of the accounts being permanent

  The most accounts that can assign is 9,000 because of how we provision the ugly name ID's
  Chien thinks that there will be a solution to the problem after we adopt the Banner Luminis unique ID sign-on
  Since we cannot get rid of the ugly ID, because it is tied into 3 or 4 applications, we will have to maintain them and will have to be made a subset of the CWID

• We never get rid of an account once it has been assigned

• Has to do faculty submission of grades

• Did some improvement to the grade submission in the old system without Flash 10

  Faculty cannot just go to a class roster and submit all the information in one batch, they have to do it individually
  When Adobe software is installed on a computer, if there is an upgrade, you get a popup window asking if you want to update the current version you have

• This update occurred just before grade submissions and some computers on the campus do not have administrative rights and therefore were unable to be updated to Flash 10

  Jerry felt that the next time we do an update that it should not be done just before grade submissions are due
  Chien assured Jerry that there is now an operating procedure in place to prevent this from happening again

• There are plans for a lot of site work on the DA campus due to construction projects

  There will be significant power outages that will affect most operations/departments on the DA campus if not some at FH as well

• Three things are happening on the west side of the DA campus this summer

1) Site preparation for the new mediated learning center
2) The loop road will move out towards 85
3) Will have to get utilities out to the new mediated learning center

Because the east side of the campus has more power, cooling and heating than the west side, the campus has to be rebalanced

• The west side of the campus will look like a war zone because of all the digging that will have to be done

Where the digging will take place will intersect with existing electrical and telecommunications data cabling
Will need to be coordinated so it doesn't disrupt with existing services

• During the balancing there will be numerous power outages over the course of a year

First outage planned for Labor Day weekend 2009 - for four days (Friday - Monday)
Second outage will be during the winter 2009 break for five days or more
Third outage is over the Presidents Day weekend in February 2010
Fourth outage July 4^th weekend 2010
Fifth outage over the Labor Day weekend 2010

• During outages the power probably won't be going up and down, but down for the duration

Can't afford for the data center to go down because it will also affect the FH campus

Looking at generator power
What are the essential services that are required during these outages and how are we going to keep them powered properly?
Will have to have people on stand by to refuel any portable generators that we have
Also worried about the emergency phones in the parking lots

• There are many questions that need to be answered and will be discussed at an over all coordination meeting on 4/9/09

• None were brought forward

• Adjourned: 1:57 pm

Last Updated: Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 11:32:38 AM
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