In attendance: William Dougherty-NIS, scribe and chair; Dean Kirstein, Kevin Davis-UCS; Kimberley Homer-SETI; Dave Adams, Bill deWindt-Learning Technologies; Susan Brooker-Gross-IT Mgmt; Karen Herrington-IMS; Mike Moyer-Data Center Mgr; Brian Jones-CNS; Richard Quintin-DBAA; Lylah Shelor-Facilities.

DBAA: HokieMart will be unavailable Friday March 23rd, 9pm through noon on Sunday, March 25th, 2012. Hosted service being upgraded. No known changes to users' interaction. A web page will announce the unavailability during the process.

SETI: Tentative deployment date of InCommon silver on April 1st. No downtime or affect on users. Will impact TAS admins, but no real impact on users since it's a Sunday.

-Project to investigate development of an IT announcement calendar and tools has been initiated. No development work yet, but looking at what would be required. Interns to be used for this phase. Suggestion to use Twitter was made, but exactly how to use this service is still under discussion. Use of Twitter page may be best for routine, easily described events.

UCS: IT Status page will be up in another month or two, before summer sessions start.

Learning Technologies: Scholar upgrade to begin Saturday, May 12th. Pre-announced window of 5am-8am.

Discussion ensued about how to establish and whether to announce to users our standard maintenance windows. What is best to tell users? When is it best to tell them? When the outage doesn't affect the entire service (like when a single server is bounced on the e-mail system with 20% of users or when network gear is rebooted taking out a floor in a building) what is the best arrangement? What should go on the calendar? Who should have access tot he calendar? UCS would like to know in case they receive calls, but should public know.

Instead of a public calendar site for all IT service interruptions, posting a page on the actual service (where possible) *when* a service is actually down may serve a broader audience. A calendar announcement would serve IT reps from the departments who assist end users. An actual push of the announcement would be better for end users, be it through Twitter, FaceBook, RSS, Google+, etc.