Minutes, FTC meeting April 5, 2011

Presenting: Barry Schaudt, Mike Bourque and Rita Owens

1. ITS notes first – 5 laptops for grad students as donated by HP. Encourage student s to apply for these. One goal of the operation is to survey grad students as to what equipment they have. The donor will have some say in designees. Initially, plan was for printers. This time for doctoral students.

2. ITS inquiry: www.bc.edu as portal to mobile devices? OMC lead here. Is there faculty interest? Barry and/or Scott Olivieri eager to hear faculty interest. This is an Apple initiative based on iMobileU. Mike Bourque – “inroads on a platform that is non-specific, i.e. not Blackberry or brand specific.” Useful for admissions – GPS app for tours....

3. IT services luncheons. Three suggested dates. Each of the three involves specific people. Days of the week in the RAT. M.Connolly suggests that a table be cordoned off for the purpose. Come early? See appendix below.

4. Michael Bourque on student email system (highly condensed version).

Currently, 40% of students forward email; 70% of them to Gmail. IT wants to avoid Exchange with students. Too many problems. Google and Microsoft are remaining bidders for a new system.

Google analysis (even as decision has been postponed because of negotiations and delay to wait for outcome of a confidential legal issue which was explained to the FTCs present):

a- google .edu has a seven gig storage limit, but individual emails are 15 MBs limit

b- student email addresses remain the same

c- campus groups would remain the same

d- delay will be several months; not this September

Evan K asked – should we be recommending Google to students? General answer is yes. But eTeaching will not recommend Google apps; all the same Sakai is integrated with Google apps. The hope is that this will be resolved… eventually.

Bourque – Microsoft’s concern is that a generation of students will use Google docs, and not be familiar with Office. Thus, MS strong push for this business.

5. ENCRYPTION

Recent exposures – Epsilon and RSA hacked. RSA – internet security specialist – secure id cards possibly compromised.

Symantec’s PGP combined with Altiris now on campus – name and account number in combo must be encrypted now. Any device including a portable device (USB drive). BC owns PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) – determines whether anyone has data that should be encrypted; data scrambling will be instituted as now required by MA law when a name and account number are both in a document – can be read only by PGP device..

Appendix:

A reminder about the ITS faculty lunch meeting in the Rat (Lyons Dining Hall), tomorrow (Tue) at 12.

Barry Schaudt has organized these informative lunches for FTCs and for other faculty members in your department who have interest in faculty-computing questions and will welcome meeting key ITS staff in an informal, collegial atmosphere.

Please pass the attached outline on to possibly interested (or to all) colleagues.

We have our next FTC meeting on Wednesday, 04 May, when we will also run our customary end-of-year techno-goodies lottery, including some iPad2s in the mix for those eligible.

The next ITS luncheon, the final one of the semester, comes on Thursday 05 May.