Minutes - May 12, 2000
1:30-3pm - I.G. Greer Room 224
I. Welcome and Announcements
Jeff Williams called the meeting to order at 1:35 p.m. and noted that the attending membership did not constitute a quorum, hence the meeting would be informational in nature. Members absent were Doug May, William Griffin, Ed Pekarek, Al Harris, Kevin Howell, Lynn Lysiak, Troy McHenry, Jeff Craven, Don Rankins, Peter Wachs, Teresa Canton.
II. Review of Minutes - April 14, 2000
The minutes of the last meeting were reviewed and with no amendments were offered.
III. Update on IT infrastructure improvements
Jeff Williams reported on recently implemented infrastructure improvements and briefly discussed the newly acquired and installed, redundant servers. He mentioned that the year-to-date expenditures on such infrastructure approached 7.3 million dollars and that details on these expenditures would be available through the Technology Update link on the ASU home page. He further stated that the Campus Pipeline will be modified and upstated to accommodate all newer web browsers.
The CP forum page is now available. Click here.
IV. Update on Preferred Internet Service Provider selection process
Tom Culver (Network Support Services, NSS) reported that the RFP for ISP bids resulted in 4 bids. The bid from Boone Online (BOL) offered the lowest pricing to meet bid specifications and negotiations with the provider are underway. Preliminary indications are that service will be offered at the following levels:
Block accounts for university departments: $8.95/month (up to 500 accounts), $7.95/month (up to 1000 accounts)
Minimum general account: $10.95/month for 1 e-mail box and 5 MB storage space
Premium general account: $11.95/month for 2 e-mail box and 10 MB storage space 1-800 access for all accounts available at $0.10/minute surcharge
NSS tests showed average connection rates of 49 kilobits/sec for the provider.
V. Discussion of E-mail preferences, quotas, purging, etc.
Jeff Williams asked ITAC to consider a workable e-mail management policy and to formulate an opinion on appropriate sizes and implementation of disk storage quotas on university computer systems. The question involves how to reasonably manage dramatically increasing storage needs. Dick Riedl (RCOE) noted that there are many graduate students (and possibly others) who do not even know they have email accounts (which may be filling with unread email) and that an educational campaign might help alleviate some of the storage pressure and that perhaps it might be appropriate to generate more “personally relevent” user IDs in the process. He suggested further that ITS should investigate ways to consolidate multiple email accounts for students and others in order to ease the task of managing email. Williams noted that Campus Pipeline has implemented the capability for a user to manage more than one email account.
VI. Update on Student Lab Printing
Dave Sampson (Student Development) reported on the efforts of the committee involved in developing print service solutions for Appalachian. He noted that preliminary indications are that the prototype of the hold-and-release service has reduced printing costs by up to 50% by simply requiring the students to reconsider their print requests. General discussion addressed the issue of charging (or not) for print services, given that initial plans are not to charge for standard printing (B&W, 8.5×11) but to charge for premium services like color and large-format printing. Tests of the proposed system are now underway in several departments and in some student labs, with full lab deployment scheduled for fall. Reidl suggested that an extensive notification and education process should accompany the deployment to inform all about the reasons, both environmental and financial, for implementing the change. Williams asked for and received a consensus that the project should move forward.
VII. Discussion of the Obligation to provide central disk storage space
Williams asked for sugestions and comments reference possible solutions to to allow the university to provide centrally managed storage space. He mentioned that there are “free” storage providers now available on the Internet and questioned whether these services might help the university meet its storage needs, particularly for heavy users of disk space.
X. Other Business
Dave Sampson asked the group for suggestions about how to manage and/or regulate bandwidth usage with the RESNET deployment.
Len Johnson (HRS) reported that the HRS web site has become the subject of increasing interest from other institutions. In an unrelated issue he told the group that the UNC-GA has notified HRS that Appalachian employees can now register for tuition-free courses during summer sessions.
John Spagnolo (RCOE) asked whether the preferred ISP vendor will offer accounts without email boxes at even higher discount rates. Tom Culver responded that the inclusion or exclusion of email boxes would not have made a difference in the ISP vendor bid, and that, therefor, the mailboxes had been retained in the bid.
No decision was made regarding the time for the next meeting, since summer schedules were rather inconsistent. The meeting was adjourned at 2:30 p.m.
