Accomplishments this Month

• Our Computer Help Desk assisted a record number of people in May. Via telephone, email, and in-person assistance, the Computer Help Desk provided service to 6200 patrons! The service expansion project is helping to bring these services close to our students, faculty, and staff around campus. We now offer these services later into the evening (10pm) and on weekends.
• Several members of University Systems attended or presented at the recent BCNet conference in Vancouver.
• We have delivered a training session to Computer Science staff so that they may begin their migration from their independent email service to the central Exchange Email and Calendaring service.
• We recorded and delivered the Shelagh Rogers named as UVic’s next chancellor video for University Communications + Marketing.
• We have prepared the live stream and Video on Demand (VOD) for Spring Convocation. New VOD encoding techniques and multi-bitrate streaming will allow us to deliver 720p on-demand video.
• Media Services held an Open House on May 23, 2014. The Open House provided demonstrations of video conferencing, the
• BlueJeans network, webcasting, and AV rental equipment. New brochures were made available to attendees of the event.
• We have worked with the organizers of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) to gather software requirements, test, and build our PC and Mac workstations to support this event. Several DHSI sessions will be offered in our computing facilities from June 2-6.
• Workstations and displays ordered in support of the 2014 computing facility workstation infrastructure upgrade project have arrived. These workstations will replace any aging workstations and monitors in our computing facilities to ensure that our clients are using technically-current hardware and software.
• We have facilitated numerous instructional workshops and tutorials on the Online Academic Community, i>Clickers, and the Cascade Web Content Management System (CMS). These sessions help to instructors, staff, and students informed of how to use our services effectively.
• We are working on a solution to help clients transition off of Windows XP. Our Technology Solutions Centre (TSC) now has a number of bootable USB drives with an updated Windows 7 image for clients to borrow or for Systems staff to take on site visits if necessary.
• UBC network and security staff were interested in our experience with the PaloAlto next generation firewall at our network border. We have provided them with an overview and demonstration of our implementation.
• We have completed the first draft of the Information Security Methodology, which will help define and communicate the processes and services that our Information Security Office provides.
• We participated in a Campus Café lead by Technology Integrated Learning on the subject of privacy in the online environment.
• The project to move Unified Messaging for voice messaging from Cisco Utility to Microsoft is approaching completion. Operational processes for Systems staff will be documented.
• We have continued network planning for CARSA, Continuing Studies, and the University Centre during building renovation planning.
• April reconciliations have been completed and the April 2014 summary report that provides transaction details and balances of all one-time fund allotments, carryover, and reserve accounts as well as fiscal year end forecasting on all departmental operating budgets has been presented.
• We have reviewed all new projects to ensure that budget clarity is presented. We are working with project managers to ensure final budget stages were successfully completed on projects currently being closed and all recoveries and chargebacks were applied.
• The Website Content Policy was updated, approved, and posted to the Systems SharePoint site.
• The Jira issue and development tracking system was upgraded this month to provide feature and security enhancements.
• A new online Course Experience Survey (CES) system has been launched for Summer 2014. This system replaces the old bubble sheet system and enables students to complete the CES online. More information is available on the Learning and Teaching Centre website.
• The new Percentage Grades system went live on May 1 and the first percentage grades were submitted by instructors on May 15.
• The ONECard System went live on May 1. Food card balances have been transitioned to the new ONECard system and new point of sale (POS) terminals have been installed in Food Services outlets. More than 8,000 new cards have been produced to date!
• We assisted Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) with the install and setup of their new computing and storage cluster.

Upcoming Opportunities and Next Steps

• We will work closely with Ceremonies and Events to deliver video streaming and recording services for June Convocation.

• We will investigate upgrading the Mac OS 10.8 based image to 10.9 in our computing facilities. Remaining current will ensure that our standard Mac image will work on the latest Apple hardware.

• Updates to the online tutorials for the Cascade CMS are being prepared and will be posted to the University Systems website. These tutorials will allow users to learn more about Cascade at their leisure while reducing the number of requests for repeat training.
• We are working to schedule and attend training in support of the System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) project. This training will help ensure that Systems staff are familiar and able to effectively use SCCM to manage a large number of workstations in our computing facilities.
• Online Privacy, Security, and Records Management training is being rolled out for new hires as part of a bigger project for employee training. New staff starting in June will be receiving this introductory training, which involves viewing video content hosted on the University Systems website.
• A draft addressing plan has been created for the move to IPV6. Further work to produce a list of VLANs and an ACL tool is planned.
• We will be running interviews for the competition to fill a permanent Research Network Analyst position.
• The final technical components of our Enhanced Role and Name Based Email Address system were installed in production. The anticipated go-live date for the first phase of this system is June 30, 2014.
• We finalized the WestGrid cloud purchase order to create a WestGrid OpenStack cloud for research computing jobs and persistent virtual machines. Once the new hardware arrives, we will migrate jobs off of our previous cloud software, Nimbus.
• We will be working with Athletics and Recreation to get swipe access for ONECard users at their facilities.

Projects Snapshot

PC0411, MediaDrop Investigation: The development server is built and MediaDrop is running. We are currently evaluating MediaDrop as a management tool and delivery system for Video on Demand.

PC0409, UVON and NETS Desktop Refresh Project: This project to replace 22 aging desktop computers and 29 monitors in UVic Online, and 6 desktops in Network Services with new regular desktops from the Technology Solutions Centre is nearing completion.

PC0393, Centre on Aging (COAG) Ladner Office Move: The office move has been completed successfully. The high speed fibre connection to BCNET has been installed and all renovations are complete.

PC0392, SharePoint 2013 Technical Implementation: The SharePoint 2013 development instance is complete. The SailPoint to SharePoint 2013 connector has been installed into the development instance and work on the new pre-production Active Directory (AD) environment has been completed. This will allow work on the SharePoint pre-production implementation to begin.

PC0391, SharePoint 2013 Governance Implementation: Continue writing documents to support our Governance implementation.  Hold a brainstorming session with project manager stakeholders to assist with determining the final structure for the project template.

 Customer Satisfaction

Our Computer Help Desk, Desktop Support Services, and Video Conference Services use a ticketing system to track issues they are working on. When a ticket is closed, clients are provided with the opportunity to complete a customer feedback survey using a 5-point scale.

Number of survey requests – 15

Number of survey responses – 4

Survey response rate – 26.67%