Summary of Kick-off meeting for the Scheduling and Announcement of Maintenance Subcommittee (SAMS): 08/19/08
 
(Although I'm not sure what committee we are a subcommittee of any more.......SAMS is a cool acronym.) 
Anyway, almost everyone was in attendance for the first meeting. Bill Dooley, Lylah Shelor, David Adams, Brian Jones, Barry Linkous, Joyce Landreth, Rob Sprague, Kimberly Homer, Karen Herrington, and yours truly, William Dougherty. Susan Brooker-Gross reminded us of our charge and started us off on the right foot. Only Kevin Shinpaugh was absent.  
Discussion topics included: 

• Calendaring options: The current IT Critical Dates calendar was reviewed. While this could play a role, the question as to whether maintenance activity could be considered "critical" came up. The DBAA (Database and Application Administration) Department has their own calendar which does other tasks, but this, like the IT Critical Dates calendar, is an in-house app that needs to be supported.
• Dreaming out loud: Ultimately we would like a tool that can serve as an internal posting mechanism, like a calendar, that can then notify appropriate groups of people (through e-mail or listserv activity, for example), can post to other announcement vehicles (web pages, wikis---like the CSC Dashboard, or other calendars), can cue us when potential conflicts arise, and provide a something for public consumption.
• Until our dreams come true: I'm going to set up a resource account with permissions for all of us to use for posting items for the next several weeks. This will provide a start up mechanism, warn when conflicts arise, and probably be easier than getting permissions for us on the main calendar. It will allow us to keep up with what is happening while we prepare to perform our ultimate role...........
• Which is to ensure communications flow regarding activity that may affect services and users. As part of this role, we need to watch for potential conflicts between planned activities. This will trigger a meeting of the group for face-to-face discussions. Otherwise, we communicate in other ways, includingà
  • Listserv: I'm setting up a listserv for this group.
  • CSC Dashboard; check the following URL to see if you can access. If you cannot, send a note to Joyce Landreth or Rob Sprague. You can also contact the call center to have something posted to it (1-4357). Home - old site - need to clean up & archive
  • IM/Chat: I'd like everyone to look into getting on to this system. Check out the following article. One of its features is to create "chat rooms" specific to a topic. SAMS could be a chat room. http://www.computing.vt.edu/vtim.htm
  • Telephone: It still works!
• The question arose, as it always does, about what type of maintenance activity we should actually post information about. The general feeling was, since almost anything we do could have a widespread impact if something were to go wrong, that if we currently send out e-mail notes about pending actions, we should post it.   
  Action items: 

1. The chair is working on getting all committee members on a listserv list, and to have access to the wiki space where earlier SAMS discussions took place. Once this wiki space is established, meeting summaries will also be posted there.
2. The chair will also begin preparing a "Use Case" or justification for possible development of our "dream system" for posting announcements related to maintenance activities.
3. A general meeting to share any updates and continue our discussions will be scheduled in late September after the rush is over.   
   Remember: The only known potential issue at this time is the ongoing installation of wireless equipment. Although impacts will be difficult to predict, possible widespread outages could occur.