EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY
COMMITTEE

5/16/2007, 1:00-2:30 pm

ATTENDEES: David Gillett, Scott Heffner, Chuck Lindauer, Kent McGee, Sherri Mines, Mike Murphy, Fred Sherman, Alex Swanner, John Swensson

GUESTS: Sharon Luciw, Chien Shih, Bob Barr

Convened: 1:07pm

1. APPROVAL OF THE MINUTES OF THE LAST MEETING

· Will stand approved as posted

2. GENERAL NEWS (ALL)

· John Swensson wanted to know where we were with regards to being able to ramp up provisioning to avoid the issues that occurred when we had measure "E" and hundreds of computers were ordered that didn't get deployed in a timely fashion

According to Sharon, she addressed this problem with purchasing when she set up the process that is being used with Measure "C"

The existing process was reviewed, and the problems experienced with Measure "E" were taken into consideration, along with the multiple millions of dollars of funding sources and the pent up demands for the refresh of old computers
A new process has been put together:

1. There is a weekly coordination meeting
2. Purchase Reqs are exchanged to plan out deployments, to schedule out deployments, and to work with purchasing regarding their workload to ensure delivery of the proposed deployments
3. ETS is in the process of conduction a pilot imaging test with Apple & Dell to finalize the image configuration and then it will be a matter of finalizing the contract paperwork

Having the fixed factory imaging services is going to help us increase the volume of deployment

4. Resolved the problem of computer storage, on the DA campus, by getting some space in the basement of the old bookstore and getting two trailers in lot H on the FH campus to help with moving equipment in and out
5. Going to leverage the movers at FH to help with lower campus and campus center
6. During the summer, in order to increase the volume of deployments on both campuses, in the interim before we move past the factory imaging and go to vendor services for deployment into the labs for the refresh of equipment, ETS will be increasing the number of temporary staff they are going to hire

This will take a huge labor burden off the existing ETS Tech Services staff and increase the throughput

· John wanted to know if ETS will be ready for fall quarter

According to Sharon, if things go really well and the process is able to be started right away, there is a possibility that some of the labs could be done during the summer with the factory images

With classrooms and labs, the images are all unique because of the softwares that are installed on each computer
Currently the process is to wait until a certain number of weeks before a quarter to decide what images are going to be installed, but if the image is going to be deployed on the computer before it gets here, the planning of what goes in that images and the testing of that software image has to happen many weeks before – this will require faculty to determine further in advance what goes into that image (made up of the operating system and all the applications that get put on the computer)
The Deans need to let faculty know that ETS will be coming to them sooner to get the information for the images

AB 1802 has created a backlog for the DA campus deployment and the college needs to set the priority for deployment

3. STANDARDS REVIEW – COST OF AN AVERAGE COMPUTER (SHARON)

· The over all average cost (using ETS inventory numbers) for PC & MAC, desktops and laptops is $1,906.45

With approval, faculty and staff can upgrade from the current standards, which are ment to be the 90% solution

· The average replacement cost for only desktop computers is $2,169.56
· At the last HW & SW Standards meeting on May1st, there was a discussion to go from a 15 inch to the 13 inch MAC laptop

The average cost for a MAC laptop would go from $2,169.56 to $1,759.49
The over all average cost for computers (MAC & PC, desktops & laptops) would be $1,844.18

· Mike Murphy inquired about the standards going from $2K machines to $800 machines

This issue had been discussed at both the last Standards meeting and the last ETAC meeting

Comes down to what is supportable, and there isn't complete agreement of what supportability is
ETS has the sense that you need at least a middle of the road system in order to maintain a specific configuration, throughout the purchasing cycle
Chuck had mentioned at the last ETAC meeting that they are using some of the lower cost machines along with a piece of software that does allow you to put images on different architectures

Problem is that the published material for the software says that they support all business desk top configurations, but no guarantee that it would work with everything (hardware, software) – would need to do a full evaluation on the product

· The four year criteria on computer refresh, with an $1,800 average cost, was set when planning out Measure "C"

The average $1,800 cost did not include any provisional costs such as additional costs to help get the computers delivered to staff during the life of the bond; we are also procuring computers beyond what our current inventory is, beyond the one-for-one replacement

If the average cost of the refreshed computers falls below the estimated $1,800 cost, the extra money could be used to help offset some of the provisioning costs or replacements for the new computers being purchased in addition to our current inventory

Scott Heffner suggested, for a possible future agenda item, if the HW & SW Standards committee brings a recommendation to ETAC to lower the current computer standards (a possible $200 - $500 savings per computer purchase), and if approved, there should be a discussion on what should be done with the additional savings

ETAC could propose recommendations and Fred could move them through Senior Staff & Chancellor's Staff
According to Fred, 90% of the budget from which we are going to purchase computers is owned by the colleges and not the District

Scott concurs with Fred that this should be a college decision

Currently there are many more computers than the ETS staff can handle

· Proposed changes from the HW & SW Standards subcommittee will be brought back to ETAC for discussion and ratification

4. ID MANAGEMENT UPDATE (CHIEN)

· The project was kicked off on January 25^th, 2007
· The objective was to solve the identity management issue we are currently facing on both campuses

Currently have the SI System, which has all student ID and demographic information stored & the HR system which has all the faculty, classified and administrators information stored

· The project in its first stage is trying to combine all the campus identity, including faculty, staff and students, into a centralized, manageable identity management system

When the system is complete, it will allow a user to go into the system and modify their user ID and password
Once the project is completed, there will be a centralized data store

· When the project was started it was divided into five milestones

1)   Design review – which was concluded on February 28^th
2)   Install all the system power – which was completed on April 16^th
3)   Need to take security identity information from SIS & HRS and combine and tabulate into the new identification management system data base – scheduled to be completed on May 21^st - on May 25^th will hand over to the district for testing
4)   Migrate the system into production status - scheduled to be completed on June 15^th – will schedule multiple testing after this
5)   Project is scheduled to be complete by the end of June

Will have ID and data stored in the front end
In the backend, ETS still has a lot of work to do to interface the 20+ systems to be automated
At this time there isn't an anticipated launch date for the end users

With the new system, the ugly name and password will be maintained within the Identification Management system

· The old system will work with the new system

Want to integrate the current Touch Net system
Once we have the identity management system in place, in the future, all identity from the EIS will be able to have direct access to the system
In anticipation of encountering bad data from combining the SI & HR databases, ETS is cleaning up the data

Currently ETS has combined the HR & Student databases in one place and although it is not 100% accurate, it is very clean
ETS has anticipated that there could be future corruption in the database due to changes made by students and staff and therefore the changes will be flagged and checked before becoming a part of the database

· With the new EIS system we are going to convert to, ETS will need to clean up all of the data in all of our systems before conversion – this will take several months

Typically there are data validations schemes built into modern systems

· IR&P created a data warehouse (in SQL) to allow researchers to do analytical work from student information

Lourdes Del Rio-Parent has created an automated routine to cleanup the misspelled city names, entered by students, before the information enters the database

· Scott inquired if we are going to be more vulnerable, from a security perspective, if we are going to a single system

This was taken into consideration when the project began
We are restricted by budget constraints
ETS has factored in redundancy

Two sets of hardware, located in different locations – to give us failover security

5. MAUI REPLACEMENT (BOB)

· Bob has a report, on the MAUI replacement, that can be distributed electronically
· Have been making progress at a very slow rate due to unexpected, major challenges

Wanted to buy a tool (bought Hyperion/Brio) that would clone existing MAUI reports
Needed to be able to query our existing RDB databases

Challenge #1 - Hyperion, as well as any of the other available tools, approaches a query and a report in a structurally different way than MAUI (a home grown system, developed on the MAC). It would be very difficult to create a Hyperion report that looks and feels exactly the way MAUI reports feel – can produce the same results, the same databases, the same formatted out comes, but it would be done in a different way, not immediately familiar to MAUI end users
Challenge #2 - Had a miscommunication with the vendor regarding our Oracle RDB databases - they understood it to be Oracles' regular standard databases, which it isn't

Not as crucial a problem as it could have been since we were considering the purchase of a new database
This miscommunication resulted in a substantial savings in training materials for the ETS staff

· It turns out that we are better off restructuring our reports

1)   It expands the capabilities of the report to be able to query several terms at one time, instead of only one term at a time as with MAUI
2)   Have a system that is much more efficient on both the end user end and the back end
3)   The Oracle database is a legacy database format which is going to disappear and we are going to have to convert over sooner or later to a new database

· We are now in the process of converting our legacy Oracle database to SQL server

IR has owned a SQL server for some time
Have already created a data warehouse in SQL

· Have decided to start with the FR part because the current MAUI reports in FR are considerably simpler than those in SI

Ran into problems when trying to load Fr into the SQL server

Crashed the server when trying to do the loading

Purchased a more powerful development server and installed SQL 2005 on it
In the process of installing FR on it

· MAUI databases are updated seven times a day for SI and 3 or4 times for FR and at least once a night for HR

Needed to find a way to automate the refresh of the SQL versions of the RDB and are now able to update hourly for the current term and every night for the last five terms

Bob thanked Lourdes Del Rio-Parent & Jim Clow for their excellent work on the project

· Already had MAUI SI created in the Research data warehouse called Deborah, so it didn't need to be recreated but figured out how to update it

Can now start to make SI clones in Hyperion
Have a duplicate database of Deborah called Francine, which is a major subset of Deborah and contains the students alternate ID's instead of their SSN, and therefore a more secure database to open up to a wider group of users

· In the process of converting RDB databases into SQL Server databases (restructuring of the databases so they are more efficient to use, and enable greater capabilities in Ad-Hoc and MAUI type reporting when doing the queries)
· Starting to create a group of pilot usersbr
· Hope to have the FR database up and running, in SQL, by the end of summer; soon after the HR database – which is last because no one uses MAUI to access the HR database, at this time only Hyperion or Brio are used
· Over the summer will start creating MAUI FR replacement reports and push those out to a test group in fall

Hope to open up to all MAUI FR users by the end of fall
Will be able to access reports through a client version of Hyprion or on the web

· Have an unlimited license for Hyperion for client users

Joe Lampo's group has figured out how to put the software on a server so you can fire up the application from a server instead of your own hard drive – this reduces installation and connection work

The client version does not work on the MAC, which is another reason for having a web version.

If you have an Intel MAC and are willing to boot it up on the Windows side, you can use the client version
Scott ask how a MAUI SI user is determined

Bob responded that at the beginning of the project they tried to identify how many MAUI users there were
If a MAUI user uses a particular MAUI report, the user can be set up with an account and then it can be made available to them

To set up an authentication system on the Hyperion server is a lot of work

Looking to the ID Management system to provide the authentication to the MAUI server

· Will be able to access as an external application from within the portal

On the client version, once you sign in on the portal, then you will be able to click on a link and fire up Hyperion
On the web version you will be authenticated in, once you sign on to the portal

· According to Chuck, the use of MAUI by the administrators at FH, has dropped drastically since many of the reports they use can be gotten through the Portal
· Currently not in cube form

Have thought about creating cubes
Think that the cubes can be created relatively easily from the warehouse data

6. ETAC MEETING TIMES

· Scott requested a discussion on the meeting times for the '07 fall quarter

In the fall or winter of this academic year, some FH faculty requested a time change of the start time from 12:30 PM to 1:00 PM for purposes of being able to attend college hour

At the time, Scott mentioned that he would be okay with the time change for winter and spring quarters, but not for fall quarter

Scott requested a 12:30 PM start time for fall quarter only, with no changes to the day and then a change back to the current 1:00 PM start time for the winter and spring quarters

If this can not be done, Scott will have to work it out from his end

· Chuck brought up the fact that if the start time should be moved back for the fall quarter, and FH staff what to go to college hour, that they can either miss half an hour of college hour once a month or miss ETAC
· It was decided to move the start time for ETAC meetings back to 12:30 PM for the fall quarter and then back to the 1:00 PM start time for the winter and spring quarters

7. ADJOURNMENT

· Adjourned: 2:30 pm

Next Meeting: Wednesday, June 20, 2007, 1:00 – 2:30, via video conferencing