Minutes, July 15 meeting

IT Futures Collaboration Subgroup (group 4)

Minutes, meeting #1 July 15, 2011

Taken by Ben Ransom

Attendees:  Morna Mellor, Chip Mrizek, Minh Nguyen, Paul Singh, Ben Ransom, Bob Ono, Curtis Bray, Gary Sharpe, Lowell Valiant, Uwe Rossbach

We briefly discussed the overview of each topic area charged to this subgroup, and decided on four of the nine that we felt we could and should be addressed further:

(Priority 5 is highest --- we will address further)

Those areas with priority 0Ã?Â? above are well underway on campus and warrant no current IT Futures input.  Lync is in pilot testing and approaching rollout, so, same thinking on this.  EDOC Lite is deemed not at all close to usable here, and much of its functionality is likely in Sharepoint.

Topics for next meetings, with a focused view toward recommendations, are:

Smartsite:   Needs further discussion in particular to itÃ?Â?s sore spots, the gradebook and class related features.  A first posed recommendation could be to survey (some group) as to where/how it is lacking.   Also to discuss: 

-       do we have resources to make improvements to the problem areas, and how might release of Sakai 3 impact our desired improvements if at all.

-       Might sharepoint become the better place for non-instructional collaboration

-       Are there improvements we should seek from rSmart?

Sharepoint:  Regarded as high potential benefit. Further discussion:

-       What features would be most beneficial (and attainable)

-       Deployment and management strategy (how much silod versus central)

-       Cost share model (licensing, disk space).  

Campus Data Accessibility:  This regarded as a long term problem area that just cantÃ?Â?t seem to get solved, and it continues to impede application development.  We didnÃ?Â?t address further, yet.

Video Conferencing:  Regarded as quickly burgeoning need with potential to either be duplicated effort and cost, or centralized NOC hosted solution with standardized unit endpoints.   Very large cost savings in the latter.  Further discussion:

-       Ballpark cost savings of standardized solution

-       Ballpark of what the need/interest is across campus (including instructional vs research vs administrative ...my add).  UCD ATS is likely good source on this

-       Bullet the tie-ins or differentiations to other infrastructure such as Lync