- A new campus advisory committee for the UCSB Research Cyber infrastructure has been created by our VCR for Research, Dr. Michael Witherell. The existing campus IT committee structure is composed of a top level IT Board, with advisory committees for Academic planning, Technology infrastructure, and Enterprise (business) planning. The new Research group will help round out our advisory structure.

- The campus CIO search is active and candidates have been submitting their applications. Advertising has been done in the Chronicle and via the A T Kearney executive search services.

- A data inventory of all repositories containing personal data has been underway. Solicitation of this information has been through a number of campus list server mailings and meetings of the Information Technology Planning Group, within which there is wide campus participation. Upon the initial passage of SB1386 we inventoried the business services side of campus IT, and we are now attempting a similar effort in the distributed arena. There are also discussions on the follow through for other recommendations found in the UC Information Security Work Group report.

Coordination with Oracle for implementing a test version of their Exchange cross-calendaring systems has begun. In conjunction with Student Affairs division, who runs a large Exchange based email system, we will begin an incremental testing and development program with a subset of customers so as to better understand the real world issues of cross-calendaring.

Our 1960’s construction data center triage progresses with the replacement of a failing chiller with a new 40 ton unit. The IT Board has continued to monitor this issue and discuss the benefits of a modern facility that enables co-location of high performance computing clusters. There is general endorsement of the concept, but still no light in sight for finding the available funding, consortium or otherwise, to make our facility viable. In the meantime, we are addressing the small components of such an upgrade. This includes a dry-pipe fire suppression system, overhead lighting and some cable trays.

Current work in our Identity Management (IdM) initiative is the long desired goal of distributed creation and management of specific demographics on campus. The IdM system is provisioned by the well-known data streams for students and employees, but thus far, specialized entries such as visiting scholars, contractors, campus resident vendors, conference attendees, etc. require a manual entry and deletion process. We have specified the requirement to create groups of users that can be administered by one or more people already present in the directory, and that those administrators have the power to create, update and delete within their authorized demographic(s).

Instructional Development, directed by Dr. George Michaels, is working with interested faculty and technical staff on the development of the Sakai platform. We have deployed an experimental uPortal based infrastructure to that end. In addition, we continue our examination and associated discussions of the Kuali financial information system as a replacement for our 30 year old mainframe based system. Part of this examination is the synergistic deployment of open source solutions with particular focus on uPortal, Enterprise Workflow, Sakai, and Kuali. The open source offerings are now sufficiently rich that they give rise to the same stove piping issues commercial vendors have had to face in the creation of integrated frameworks. It would be beneficial to have a multi-campus interested parties group dealing with the issues of open/community source deployment.