Meeting was in the ITD Conference Room September 6, 2002
The purpose of this focus group was to identify areas that needed development for the ITD "Lab Kit" were to be used for teaching faculty and possibly staff desktops.
The members of the focus group were not considered to be represtative of the campus -- indeed, many of the clients targeted by such an initiative have no identified support group. All of the plans that come out of this initiative will need to be modular and 'tiered' so that groups or individuals can pick as much or as little as they need with no direct ITD support.
Here, "User" is shorthand for "Faculty or staff member"
"Unit" is support organization in College or Unit
What follows is John Klein's subjective bullet list of issues on which to focus.
LICENSING
- Need clear doc of actual costs for software licenses when used outside of labs
- Volume discounts are important to drive cost per seat down and encourage participation
- Support Units need reporting/auditing/tracking tools for their users, who may not be in direct contact with them regarding software usage
- Central offerings must be granular (a la carte packages as well as whole suites)
CONTROL OF DESKTOP
- local administrator groups (eg the support folks in IE have full admin privs on all workstations in IE, but not in CALS, and vice versa)
- Support Units need reporting/auditing/tracking tools for who as admin privs and where
- User must have full abilities to install and remove local software
- User must have full access control ("my students" can log in here, others may not)
- Support unit must be able to perform unattended software installs (without central assistance)
- Windows policies must be settable by the support unit (eg turn off roaming profiles, set "home" directory to local servers, etc)
PDA SUPPORT
- We need to identify the specific needs, but PDAs are increasingly important in the Colleges
REMOTE ACCESS
- Users with University owned laptops/desktops/pdas working from home
- Users need access to files and data on campus from off site
- Users need access to printers/plotters on campus from off site
- Users need access to printers/plotters at home from campus (?? jak wants clarifications ??)
- Support units need remote control of desktops on and off campus
--> Policy based access control with reporting, or exclusively user initiated
DISASTER RECOVERY
- Need backups of user data (all user data)
- User initiated restores
- Off site recovery of critical network services
- Open file backups (Users often do not logout)
- Consistancy offers cross support unit training (processes the same makes substitution possible)
AUDITING/REPORTING
- Units need breakdowns of network storage use
- Units need reports of client configurations (OS and Service Pack)
DOCUMENTATION / TRAINING
- Support units and some end users will need detailed specific implementation and policy instructions
SUPPORT TOOLS
- Rebuild PC, similar to current lab environment
ACCOUNTS / PART TIME FACULTY / RESEARCH ASSISTANTS
Support Units creating accounts on demand
- Pick list of services desired
- Automatic expiration of temporary accounts
- "Login accounts" to get to a desktop on a particular platform are more desirable than "full services" accounts, which would include e-mail and other services.
APPLICATIONS
- Faster turnaround for centrally supplied applications
- Chinese and other languages
- AntiVirus
- OS updates remotely scheduled by support units
Issues that were identified as problematic:
- Difficulty in co-ordinating "Office" versions
- Difficulty in co-ordinating hardware specifications and replacement schedules
- Difficulty in determining what should be documented centrally.
- What PDA support will entail
- How to leverage Keyserver for "tiered" floating license support
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