Accomplishments
Media Services webcast the 2016 Spring Convocation ceremonies from June 12 to June 16. Nine ceremonies were webcast live through Akamai’s Content Delivery Network to an international audience, in places as far as Beijing and Cape Town. Each ceremony was recorded and made available minutes after the ceremony, and updated to a High-Definition version a day later through UVic’s Video on Demand service.
In 2014, UVic became the first university in Canada to be connected to the national research network backbone at 100Gbps when a temporary connection was established in support of the ATLAS Experiment. This past month, the connection became permanent through installation of a new 100Gbps-capable router. While the primary driver for this expanded connectivity is the Arbutus cluster (which we operate on behalf of Compute Canada), the benefits are extended to all clients of high performance research networking on campus. We are grateful for the support received from the Ministry of Advanced Education, BCNET, CANARIE, Compute Canada and Huawei Canada on this initiative.
Kevin giving us an inside look of our networking equipment in our data centre #nicecablemanagement. Photo Credi: Hans Yodzis and Ron Kozsan
Earlier this year the older portion of the NetApp SAN in EDC2 was upgraded. The new hardware includes 64 TB of solid state drives (SSD) which are significantly faster than the old disks. This improved performance will be of benefit to things such as VMware hosts, Oracle databases and other demanding applications. Migration of data to the new storage was completed seamlessly behind the scenes without disruption to services.
The PrintSmith Upgrade project was completed and closed (PC0665). This project upgraded a vendor product and moved it to the data center, as well as enabling a web-based interface. This resulted in a faster and much more secure Print ordering solution for our Print Services clients.
More than 70 Digital Signage nodes were migrated by DSS from a UBC service that is going end of life, to a new BCNet service as part of the Digital Signage Migration to BCNET project (PC0751). This was done with minimal interruption to displayed content over a very fast 4 day period.
All of our standard desktop and laptop models were recently refreshed to new standards. DSS created and tested new Windows 10 Enterprise 1703 hardware specific images for each model and these are now included on all standard computers as they arrive from our supplier. More information about our desktop and laptop models can be found on our Technology Solutions Centre website.
Our deployment of JW Player has been updated to version 7.11, which adds a Javascript engine to play HTTP Live Streaming videos. This new version of JW Player fixes the issue of Firefox and Chrome blocking the Flash engine to play videos. In addition, our Video on Demand Self-Help Wizard was updated to support the new player and the change in streaming delivery.
Around Campus
In several client areas, including Financial Services and Office of the Registrar, AppLocker policies have been applied to all workstations. These policies add another layer of computer security, controlling which applications can run on machines. Unknown or untrusted applications will be blocked, resulting in a reduced risk of infection from malicious software such as viruses. These policies will be further applied to other DSS supported areas, including University Systems.
Our Client Technologies team met with engineering IT staff to review options for upgrading video conferencing equipment in two Engineering rooms in the ECS building.
Our Audio Visual Services team has completed approximately 90% of the summer classroom maintenance. A key goal of this maintenance is to improve device labeling to make the equipment easier to use for instructors.
Continuous Learning and Improvement
On June 1, Wency led a session to better understand and evaluate our project intake process in University Systems. Project Managers were asked to map out their ideas for process improvement and the PMO is now reviewing the feedback.
Dave and Veronica showing off their stickies! Photo Credit(s): Chandra Beaveridge
Throughout the month of July, project leaders attended training sessions on improvements to the PMO Methodology and about general techniques for project management. If you have any feedback or training ideas, please contact systemspmo@uvic.ca. Upcoming training sessions are available for registration through the PMO training site.
Ivan completed the “PM in the PM” workshop on July 31, great job! Photo Credit: Chandra Beaveridge