MMM Minutes 07/03/97

Minutes of Smathers
Middle Manager's Meeting
July 3, 1997

Present: Stacy Carr, Gary Cornwell, Robena Cornwell, Carol Drum, John Humphrey, John Ingram, Richard Phillips, Jan Swanbeck

Internet Outage
  1. Someone in Russia misconfigured a router yesterday, resulting in about half the world being cut off from the Internet. All of the .com sites in the U.S.A. were cut off.
Campus Networking
  1. Search for CORE vendor continues. Recommendations are to go out next week, decision should be reached by the end of this month.
  2. Internally, we are waiting for Journalism to actually give us the network access that they agreed upon.
  3. The small web servers are having trouble finding the SCSI drives, they essentially "go to sleep" - the PC drives wake it back up - we are trying to find a fix.
Hardware
  1. We are continuing to put out the last of the machines that we have received.
  2. Half of the electronic reserves machine are in.
Campus Email Changes
  1. Will not be as expansive as first indicated. Will start with 10,000 users: incoming freshmen, transfer students, law students & students with non-conflicting Grove accounts. Funding issue is not settled yet.
  2. USPS - there is discussion about whether to give them email access at all. If they are given the access, it becomes a tool whereby staff could work at home - which is against federal regulations. This could conceivably open the University up to lawsuits.
Library Email Changes
  1. The Libraries can’t wait for pending decisions, we don’t want to be spending anymore money on the mainframe. We will probably initiate one single address change and NERDC will help us migrate our pointers to our own mail alias.
  2. We will run email on the NT Server using the Microsoft Exchange package that was distributed with Office’97 - which will be a desktop based system. All of our mail would be on one server, changeover & backup would be instant. There will be at least five times the storage space and a simple web interface - so we can send & receive from the web.
  3. Liaisons will be tutored in the workings of the new email system first, then they will pass on the information to the rest of their respective staff.
  4. Staff members who are terminal based - with no web interface - will have to stay on the mainframe until they can be switched over. We are hoping to get everyone off those terminals this year.
  5. No one will be cut off from email, but people may have to share access to micros if necessary. The goal is to have one micro per staff member, allowing people the freedom to customize their own work station and improving communication.
  6. Microsoft Exchange allows for the use of mailing lists, enhanced documents with rich text and shared folders - where documents can be passed in a group project.
Systems Locator
  1. Systems has been trying out an electronic locator - for personnel to keep track of each other’s whereabouts. It is very functional, can possibly be passed on to other departments and is available through the NT Server.
Systems TeleCom Spec Position
  1. So far, the pool of applicants for this position has not been satisfactory. A lot of those seeking the position have been telephone technicians - due to the job title. Some internals have expressed interest - will see if they show up in the pool. May have to change the job title if qualified applicants don’t apply.
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    Last updated February 18, 2000
    by Debra Harris
    debharr@mail.uflib.ufl.edu