October 31, 2012
ADMINISTRATIVE COMPUTING ADVISORY COMMITTEE
OCTOBER 31, 2012
Present: Linda Thornton, Jim Fergerson, Sue Traxler, Roger Lasley, Rod Oto, Dan Bergeson, Julie Anderson Absent: Julie Thornton, Sam Patterson
Guests: Linda Borene, Willy Lee, Les LaCroix, Jaye Lawrence
AGENDA:
1. Review Minutes from September 2012
2. Update on Chief Technology Officer (CTO) search
3. FY2013 ACAC: Administrative Technology Inventory
4. Administrative Technology: Reason (Jaye Lawrence)
5. Current initiatives in ITS: SharePoint (Les LaCroix; Willy Lee)
Review Minutes from September 2012:
The minutes from the September 26, 2012 meeting will be reviewed at the November meeting.
Update on Chief Technology Officer (CTO search):
As a member of the search committee, Linda gave us an update on how the process is going. Several meetings were held early this fall to develop a job description and the ad was posted. They’ve received over 48 applications and think they have a good pool of candidates. The committee has been reading applications and will be narrowing down the top ten candidates for their next meeting. Skype interviews will then be scheduled in mid-November. From those conversations, they will narrow down the pool and invite several candidates to campus for interviews in December and/or early January. Since this will take place over Winter Break, the committee will be working on how to target faculty and get their input during the on-campus interviews. Rod stressed that it’s also very important to get student input. We do have lots of student workers around over break. Linda will take that suggestion back to the search committee.
FY2013 ACAC: Administrative Technology Inventory:
The purpose and intent of this topic is to spend time this year gathering information for the new Director of ITS by doing a review of administrative technology. ITS does have current hardware inventory information that could be pulled from Web Help Desk. Sue also noted that the IT collaboration group with St. Olaf has made a list of administrative systems both campuses use and compared them for any overlap. Linda’s thoughts were more in the area of software from the end-user perspective. Does software we currently own/use have issues or meets our needs? Dan suggested we present it as more of a status report with regard to software products, where are we in the life cycle and include version numbers.
Sue showed us the shared systems document with St. Olaf and thought this would be a valuable piece of information for our new director. Their intent is to also share it with the President’s Collaboration Group. After discussion, the committee agreed that a “status report” of administrative technology would be a good starting point. Linda will put together a draft and determine how much detail, user scope, and criteria to capture.
Administrative Technology: Reason
Jaye Lawrence joined our meeting and gave us a historical overview of Reason. About ten years ago there was no web content management at Carleton and at the time there was a large IT project to introduce a campus portal product. The product chosen, Luminus, didn’t work very well. The Web Services Group then developed Reason and it has been an open source project ever since with the goal of allowing staff to maintain their own website content. A variety of schools (Luther, Beloit, Kalamazoo, Sage, and others) use and actively contribute to the software development and meet occasionally to collaborate and make programming enhancements.
PROS:
· Continuity – experience of user base and technical team.
· Other than human costs, there’s not much other expense. No yearly maintenance fees.
· Reason was built here and adapted for a lot of purposes such as the campus handbook.
CONS:
· Freedom and flexibility can be a double-edged sword. Demands are increasing and need to be managed in a mindful way. Our default themes are behind-the-times and can give Reason a negative impression.
· Question of scale - performance issues are growing pains.
· What’s the cost of going it alone? Little external support network. Would we be better off using a tool developed by a third party?
Jaye noted that Web Services goes to the Hi Ed Web Conference every year and in conversations about content management systems - everyone struggles with it and approaches it differently. Web Services has done a number of things to engage and reach out to users through training sessions and Web Wednesdays, but is looking for better ways of getting more input and welcome’s ideas. One suggestion was to form a User Group that meets regularly and could help with prioritization. In conclusion, Linda invited Jaye to use this committee as a sounding board.
Current initiatives in ITS: SharePoint
Willy Lee and Les LaCroix gave us an overview of SharePoint and why ITS is strategically looking at the product and the possibilities it offers us. SharePoint is a Microsoft enterprise collaborative tool that does many things (group worksite, share documents, content management, collaboration tools, and more) and overlaps with a number of things we do. It started out with a request from External Relations to move away from Cognos and find a better solution for their volunteer management portal. SharePoint is part of our Microsoft licensing so the startup cost is relative low – mostly people resources. ITS has set up a SharePoint instance and is doing some testing. Richard Goerwitz and Martha Larson are doing a presentation on Sustainability at the Educause Conference next week which was done with SharePoint. What could we replace? Cognos, IT project management tool, some Reason stuff. We need to focus on areas that overlap with a tool that we already have and identify areas of benefit, like SQL then grow usage as we learn more about it.
To get a good sense of how SharePoint can be used, Les directed us to the Lynda.com training videos. We could also have Richard attend a meeting to demo some SharePoint work. In conclusion, it was suggested that we identify learning opportunities for our next meeting.
Meeting adjourned at 4:45p.m.
Submitted by,
Candyce Lelm