Guests:

Rhonda Greene
Sid Holmes

1. Welcome and Opening Remarks

The meeting was called to order at 9 a.m. by Charles Kneifel.

2. Introduction: Ron Melbourne

Ron Melbourne, Director of Administrative Computing Services, introduced Mardecia Bell as the new Assistant Director of Systems, Data Base and Security; Sid Holmes as the new Assistant Director for Applications and Development; and Rhonda Greene, Information and Communication Specialist with ACS, as the new recorder of minutes.

Mardecia Bell is a new committee member.

3. Approval of January 1998 minutes

The minutes were unanimously approved.

4. Special Discussion: Help Desk software led by Larry Robinson

Three years ago, Larry Robinson was a member of a subcommittee charged with making recommendations for Help Desk software. At that time, the committee recommended CustomerQ from Quintis Corporation. It was a successful effort, logging in more than 73,000 calls in its tracking system and having more than 50,000 customers in its customer database. Since the purchase of this product, the vendor, Quintis Corporation, has changed its focus. The primary reason for purchasing this product was that Quintis Corporation had client software that would run on two out of the three platforms the university needed: the PC client and the Windows Motif client. Last year, Quintis announced a change to drop support for the Motif client and to focus exclusively on the PC client. The company has no intentions to produce a MacIntosh client. Since then, the PC client has been evaluated. The PC client has good features, but Quintis Corporation still lacks a Motif client. A number of alternatives were evaluated. Remedy Access Request System was considered. UNC-Chapel Hill campus had completed an extensive market survey on problem tracking software systems and had decided to go with the Remedy system. That factor and the fact that Remedy currently holds a large market share and that the software is highly customerizable made it reasonable to take a look at Remedy, Robinson said. In mid-January, an on-campus demonstration conducted by Remedy Corporation was held at D.H. Hill Library. Robinson also attended training in Maryland to get a better understanding of the issues of migrating and implementing the features into the current system. Remedy also shipped an evaluation copy of the software, which has been installed since early March. Robinson said evaluation will continue on the project for the remainder of March, and hopefully a recommendation will be made. Some of the issues facing the group will be integrating in-bound and out-bound e-mail into the Remedy product, getting existing customer and call data as well as solutions data into the Remedy system, and making sure the new system will perform as well or better than the old system. If the Remedy software is rejected, some alternatives will need to be considered because of the cost prohibition of Quintis software and the fact that the university cannot easily migrate to Quintis’ environment, Robinson said. It will cost more than $200,000 to become compliant in terms of the number of licenses with the CustomerQ product and an additional $30,000 per year for maintenance. With Remedy, the cost would be about $90,000. Charles Kneifel said Information Technology would provide the backbone server and middleware server licenses and probably one client license per major campus organization. The cost is $10,000 for five floating licenses and $600 (each) for fixed licenses. The Remedy client has an interface for MacIntosh, PC, Motif as well as a dumb terminal. The Web piece, installed about a week and a half ago, is not suitable for day-in and day-out use, but will be suitable for casual use, Robinson said. The Web server costs $12,000 (a one-time fee) for the entire campus.

5. Data and Data Access Standards/User Authentication: Ron Melbourne

   * Melbourne said the DADBT committee met this month. Basically, those who are working on PeopleSoft projects were given an overview to help them with PeopleSoft systems, and they also were given some of the technical background on how the servers would be set up. It was an informative type session, Melbourne said.

   * Melbourne reported that the group assigned to perform the implementation (User Authentication) asked for a rest until April 1. Group members will try to gather resources to work on the project.

    

6. Communication: Charles Kneifel

   Charles Kneifel reported that Sam Averitt and Carl Malstrom were absent because they were responding to a General Administration’s request for infrastructure assessment on campus in order to define a systemwide baseline for networking requirements. The goal is to get every campus within the UNC system up to modern networking level. NC State probably will not receive any additional funding, said Kneifel, because it is probably at or above the standards that described the baseline. There probably will be some (FTE) allocation to those campuses, which are above the standard.

7. Electronic Mail: Charles Kneifel

   A draft version of the electronic mail responsibilities guideline was distributed to committee members and discussed. From the guidelines, Kneifel reported that postmasters, or individuals responsible for implementing and maintaining the e-mail system for a campus organization, should be registered with their central organizations. Relevant information should include who they are, what group they serve, where their offices and servers are located, their work hours and a pager number. He also said SPAMMING or mass e-mailing is a growing problem and stated that postmasters are responsible for ensuring that appropriate anti-spam precautions are taken and for dealing with reports of spam originating within their domain. In addition, he said that a consistent university wide policy should be develop to address incidents of abuse of campus services. Also, the campus needs to agree on general rulesets and their implementation for internet mail. An example given is whether or not a misconfigured client should be allowed to send mail through the university’s system or should university personnel return an error to the user describing the misconfiguration. Kneifel said the user also should take responsibility for proper encoding of content and appropriate use of e-mail (see Client Responsibilities on handout). He also pointed out that there was a need for services to support e-mail. One such service is directory services, but there are privacy concerns – such as student privacy blocks, what information is delivered and where it is delivered – surrounding the use of directory services.

8. Other

PeopleSoft Survey: Ron Melbourne