Minutes - November 9, 2001
2 - 3:30 pm - I.G. Greer Room 224
Persons Present:
Ex officio members: Jeff Williams (ITS, Chairman), Doug May (ACS), Margaret Yaukey (Faculty Senate)
Voting members: Brian Brown (Student Services), Teresa Canton (Advancement), Clayton Cooke (Business Affairs), Mark Miller (SGA, subst. for Dustin Bayard), Kevin Howell (Fine & Applied Arts), Greg Lovins (Business Affairs), Ed Pekarek (Arts & Sciences), Don Rankins (Registrar), Peter Wachs (Student Development), and Bill Ward (Academic Affairs)
Guests Attending: Pamela Graham and Thomas Van Gilder (Arts & Sciences), St eve Breiner and Greg Simmons (ITS, Instructional Computing Services), Erin Simmons (ITS, Webmaster’s Office)
I. Welcome and announcements
Jeff Williams called the meeting to order at 2:07 and greeted the membership.
II. Discussion of October 12 meeting
Williams informe d the attendees that the attendance at the October 12 meeting had not constituted a quorum, hence no minutes were taken, although notes on the conversations were posted on the web. He noted that attendance at ITAC had been falling over the course of several meetings and expressed concern that none of the representatives of Academic Units were present (recorder’s note: representatives from the colleges of Fine & Applied Arts and Arts & Sciences later arrived.)
III. Discussion of meeting time and attendance
Due to the low attendance at this meeting, discussion of this issue was deferred until an unspecified later date.
IV. Campus Pipeline/Portals, Status/Directions, Demo
Williams reported on the success encountered with Campus Pipeline (CP) during the fall semester. He noted that this had been the first semester where no upgrade was required to address a critical existing problem with the software. Appalachian is working closely with the CP development and executive teams to help set direction for the product, which has undergone a number of important strategic modifications, based largely on Appalachian’s imput into the development process.Williams noted that CP is now positioning its software to implement the open-source, highly customizable uPortal environment, which has garnered support of such partners as CP, Sun Microsystems, SCT, Dell Computer Corporation and others. Williams’ implication was that the forthcoming environment should be both technologically sophisticated and well supported financially. Among the proncipal benefits to Appalachian would be the ability to fully tailor the web environment to the roles of visitors to Appalachian’s web sites.
Along with CP’s movement toward the uPortal environment, CP is beginn ing to incorporate a highly touted content management system into its Pipeline product. The tools now in development will provide a full suite of web-based content management tools for web development, information storage and retrieval, and web-based presentation without user’s needing to develop programming or web development skills.
Williams then demonstrated prebuilt “screen shots” of the upcoming release of CP and its tools.Williams then demonstrated some a spects of version 3.1 of CP, a released proposed for implementation during Spring Break of 2002. The current (v. 3.01) and upcoming (v. 3.1) versions both remove the back-end for e-mail services from CP and move them to the iPlanet “enterprise” ready e-mail engine, a customizable commercial implementation of industry-standard IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) e-mail and LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) services. The newer version should offer us the capability to centrally stor e both e-mail and web-accessible address books. One additional feature being investigated is the capability to use role-based (e.g., students or faculty, in specific courses or other groups) targeted messaging, where messages are stored as single copies in a repository rather than as dozens or hundreds of individual e-mails in users’ mailboxes. Reasons for the careful (hence, slow) implementation of these new tools lay primarily in the difficulty of migrating users’ e-mail into the new system; the Sy stems group wants to assure that both address books and e-mail will be properly migrated before proceeding. Implementation of version 3.01 of the CP/iPlanet software is planned over the Christmas break and for version 3.1, implementation is planned for Spring break.
V. Other information items
Williams reported that testing for the SCT Banner human resources system is currently underweigh and training for the eventual end users of the system has begun.
VI. Other Business
No other business was discussed.
VII. Adjournment
The meeting was adjourned at 3:10 PM
