In attendance: Bill Dooley-DBAA/ES; Lylah Shelor-Facilities; Barry Linkous, Brian Jones-CNS; Kim Homer-SETI/QA; Susan Brooker-Gross-IT Mgmt; Karen Herrington-IT Security Office; Rob Sprague-VTOC, Tim Rhodes-Systems Support

  • Pre-meeting discussion:
    • How are meetings scheduled?  Some attendees responded to the request for discussion points with details.  Does someone make a call on having a meeting based on these responses or should all issues being discussed in these forum.  The approach will be a request for discussion points on the Monday before 2nd Wednesday meeting.  If there is agenda the meeting will be held.  DBAA and Network Engineering mentioned that they always have upcoming scheduled changes, which is the routine operation of their areas.  There was some discussion of the CC/CNS meetings and if that meeting overlapped this effort and should be combined.  All groups should be represented and should send a substitute if the member cannot attend.
    • Should this forum discuss impacts to development and pre-production environments.  Any maintenance can generate support calls.  The general consensus was items should be limited to production environments, unless changes to dev and preprod could impact the production environment.
  • Banner upgrades:
    • Installations are scheduled for September 20 and November 8.
    • Oracle maintenance for production Banner and Warehouse databases is scheduled on August 16 (this coming Sunday).
  • MyVT upgrade:
    • New MyVT service will be released to production on August 18.
    • This has been running on dev and preprod for a couple of weeks.
    • Ken McCrery's group is handling testing.
    • There was some discussion of the notification of these changes.  The MyVT change should be transparent, but the consensus was err on the side of more notification.  The user community appreciates notification of changes.  The down side is users that report unrelated problems based on the notification... "The change you made yesterday has been causing me problems for years."
  • Question: Where is the Critical Dates calendar and who has read and update access?
    • The calendar is linked from the "For IT Employees" page on the IT web site.  The URL is http://calendar.vt.edu/main.php?calendar=isccriticaldates&path=.  The calendar runs on the Web Hosting systems.
    • Read access is available to anyone.  Updates are made by designated calendar administrators.  Several members of the SAMS groups mentioned that they update this calendar.
    • DBAA group is working on a new Outage Notification System to handle maintenance and other outage notifications.  This system may automatically update the critical dates calendar.
  • Wireless Access Points:
    • Most of the changes have been completed, however there may be some cleanup work.
    • Wireless Access Point at The Inn will be updated August 13 (tomorrow).
    • After tomorrow changes, network changes will be on hold for two weeks.
  • CAS:
    • New CAS system will be released to production on September 13.
    • Cutover is expected to be transparent with no noticeable service outage.
    • Notes have been sent to TechSupport and client groups have been testing with the new CAS service in dev and preprod environments.
    • There was some discussion of checking with the MyVT application group to ensure that they have tested with the current and new CAS systems. MyVT rollout will initially be using the current CAS service.
  • Discussion of scope of announcements and the importance of back out plans. Some changes are difficult to back out and some problems need to be reviewed for "Is it broke enough?" One guideline mentioned was avoiding concurrent changes.
  • Alumni Google Mail transition:
    • No firm date yet, but sometime between September 15th and 30th, all Alumni only affiliates (i.e., those who have no ACTIVE affiliations such as EMPLOYEE, RETIREE, or STUDENT) will receive a note indicating that their accounts will be migrated to the Google service.
    • Their addresses and aliases will continue to work; their messages will no longer reside on VT owned and operated hosts.
    • If people take action within the first 30 days, they will be able to transfer their old messages. If they do not act, they will still be able to set up an account, they will simply lose their old e-mail.
    • Retirees are likely next on the list to migrate, with students coming after that if all goes well.
  • eProvisioning changes:
    • Software stack changes to phase out the old LunaCA device and migration from OpenCA to EJBCA. These changes will not be released to production for some time.
    • NoVA employees will be issued eTokens in the next few weeks. Technical support will be handled by NoVA staff. Currently they do not have any eToken applications.
  • Courseware:
    • This service is being shutdown on August 21.
    • OCS is working with users to migrate their content to other systems.
  • Exchange Migration:
    • Marc DeBonis' group is working on fixes for the Hokie Self Service system.
    • Otherwise accounts are being moved on a daily basis. UCS has a Wiki page where Exchange admins are updating the numbers as accounts are moved.