ITMC Meeting Agenda
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
G10 Biotech, 1-2:30pm
- 1-1:15pm
Ensemble Update - Chris Lyons - 1:15-1:40pm
Risks Associated with the Use of Third-Party Vendors of Electronic Communications, Information Sharing and Collaboration Services - Pat McClary - 1:40-2:05pm
Provost Initiative Update - Polley McClure - 2:05-2:25pm
Dell Bundle/Microsoft Rebate Updates - Michael Swenson
The ITMC would like to welcome the following four new members:
• David Pinker will now be representing Alumni Affairs & Development
• Rob Bandler will now be representing Student and Academic Services
• Brian Cornell will now be representing the College of Architecture, Art and Planning
• Tom Romantic will now be representing the Division of Financial Affairs
Meeting Minutes:
Ensemble Update - Chris Lyons, CIT Project Management
The project has moved from "green" to "yellow" status due to concerns with losing technical people through SRI who were working on the project. Although no milestones have been missed yet, the project has been moved to "yellow" status until the impact of those retirements is better understood/planned for.
Active directory is on track with the June 15th milestones.
25% of student have already moved to C-mail.
Rollout - survey on timing (calendar - impact on units) - A large percentage of respondents said it would have some impact if the roll-out was "department by department". The survey results have now been posted at:
http://www2.cit.cornell.edu/ensemble/about.html
A direct link to the PDF can be found at: http://www2.cit.cornell.edu/ensemble/docs/ENS-RolloutSched-SurveyReport-09may.pdf
Based on the campus feedback as well as other's experience, the plan is to now move everyone at once. Have located an automated calendar migration tool - CalMover- which will allow Legacy calendar data and future meetings to all be brought forward in the new system.
The team is currently working on pilot to test roll-out tools.
The team is planning site visits to get with each unit. Account Managers from ATSUS (CIT) are scheduling those meetings.
ITMC Questions to Chris:
What's the status of user training? CIT T&D is already running training programs. They are working on web tutorials, and will have access to (and budget for) external resources. They have the ability to run large numbers of people through training all at once.
Will "yellow" mean changed dates? Don't know - yellow indicates decisions need to be made.
Update on Umail? - No. Waiting for Microsoft to do their upgrade, then we will schedule to fit other commitments (because we will have work to do on the MS offering before bringing it live). Date is later in 09 at this point, but can't be sure until Microsoft hits their dates.
Gannett & AAP are interested in having on-site training for their people (need to check with CIT T&D).
Risks Associated with the Use of Third-Party Vendors of Electronic Communications, Information Sharing and Collaboration Services - Pat McClary, University Counsel
Pat noted a distinction needs to be made between personal email and institutional email. One major consideration - whatever email you select, will have you be in compliance with existing CU policies, security, record retentions and ediscovery. There is a review underway to get a handle on whether there are problems posed by 3rd party vendors and how they relate to the university's policy. Tracy Mitrano, Greg Menzenski and Pat are working on these policy reviews.
Legal is working on creating a guidelines document. They are hoping by this summer to have a follow-up to the DDD memo which will give the community more guidance.
Pat identified two major legal concerns:
1. FERPA - the privacy of student education records - protected by federal law. What needs to be put in a contract to protect student education records. The Federal Law defines it as anything that identifies a student. Need to have certain provisions in the vendor contracts to meet the law. We have been receiving push-back from vendors in regards to making these changes in their contracts. We are kind of stuck in the middle.
2. Litigation and the pre-trial discovery phase of litigation. Once we are "notified", we are required to freeze all the records that may be relevant to the case - a requirement we need to be able to meet in some way.
An ITMC member asked the question: Outside products have useful functionality and better pricing - are we saying that people are going to have to do without these?
Legal is not saying "no" - just asking us to be cautious - ask for legal to review Third Party agreements. There are clauses that can be problematic (i.e., conditions subject to immediate termination of the service - and legal expense obligations).
A member mentioned a challenge - faculty use of free services (i.e., using Gmail - listing their Gmail on "Who I am"). We can't make it technologically impossible for people to use these services. Polley and Pat noted the reason the memo did not tell people they "couldn't" use third parties is because there is good work going on that they would not want to have stopped (i.e., Blogs, wikki's, etc.).
Polley believes eventually there will be an agreement worked out between the vendors and higher education. A "higher ed standard". Currently, if the data is stored outside the university's systems, the individual may have to work with the Third Party to personally retrieve the data. There are probably faculty who are not aware of this - a suggestion was made to involve FABIT.
Update on the Provost Initiative - Polley McClure
As of this morning, the university has hired a consultant to help with the Provost Initiative. The firm is going to start work as of this Friday. The consultant is going to be looking at the whole university - how can we do things better - cost efficiencies. It is still not clear what the process is going to be in terms of evaluating specific campus functions (i.e., IT, Finance, HR, etc. across Cornell) but that will probably start following the consultants overall university review.
An ITMC member asked the estimated time frame in when the IT review is going to occur? Polley said probably some time in the next 5-6 months.
Dell Bundles/Microsoft Refund - Michael Swenson
At the last CCD meeting, Debi Benson from University Procurement, informed the group of a management/Board of Trustees decision that effective July 1, 2009, all purchasing must start with EShop. If a product is not available through Eshop, it can then be purchased through a university preferred vendor. If it is not available through a preferred vendor, than the current process stands (RFP, etc.). This new directive will disallow Dell purchases through the New York State contract, which ITMC members noted can save about $200 per computer.
Michael explained some of the major differences between the NY State Dell contract and the current Cornell Dell contract. One major difference noted was selection, as there are only three Dell systems available through the State contract - one desktop, one workstation and one laptop. The current Cornell contract offers many more selections, higher levels of service, and other beneficial Dell participation and contribution with Cornell.
Cornell is in the process of re-negotiating our contract with Dell and Michael encouraged everyone to let him know what they would like him to bring forward on behalf of the community for the contract negotiations.
A decision has been made to spend the refund the university received from Microsoft on purchasing the MS Desktop Bundle which covers MS Office, Core CAL (Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, SCCM), Windows OS Upgrades. This refund should cover the cost for the next 2-3 years.