- 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.

We are getting closer to the prototype testing of the Oracle and Exchange cross calendaring project. The Oracle people will be here at the end of the month.

The proposal to turn North Hall into a research oriented computing facility continues to gain traction. We have a local Cyberinfrastructure Research committee chaired by our VCR where, in a recent meeting, our Budget and Planning folks came to the table and generally agreed on our lack of alternatives to turning dozens of rooms on campus into small datacenters. We will continue to flesh out the details of this proposal in two areas – a financial model that shows how such a facility might be maintained and successfully evolve, and a technical plan provided in a study being conducted this month by Darby Falkenstine of IBM Global. The work done at Lawrence Berkeley in this area has suggested potential service models.

The details of the Pointsec agreement negotiated through OP’s ITSS have been passed on and we are hoping to find some time to evaluate this technology’s applicability in some contexts.

BCP/DR is one of the older topics on our plate given that the current effort started over 3 ½ years ago. As has been suggested by the Data Center Manager’s Group (DCMG), it is the topic that makes little headway in the face of chronic understaffing. Additionally, our campus Audit Services has started forward with a new series of IT focused efforts and the Administrative Services Division has created a new process group charged with specific definition of recovery times and objectives. Recent reports from DCMG suggest that there is no one solution and that campuses might achieve results by forming partnerships amongst those with similar needs. To that end, we have designed a solution that will provide us a true hot recovery capability that is oriented towards our minimal technical diversity and is financially feasible. Finance is the key issue here, given that DR is relatively straightforward if there is reasonable budget.

We are generally outsourcing all Identity evaluations and proof of concept projects in an effort to continue making headway in the enterprise identity space. A contract to show how our Sun Directory could provision an Active Directory in real time through the use of MIIS was recently completed. We are now just starting on the same effort with the Sun professional services people utilizing their JES middleware products. The second phase of this will be to integrate the JES single signon and role based authorization capabilities into our uPortal beta implementation. Severe staffing constraints prevent us from engaging in any kind of product integration into a single architecture, so we are choosing which path of single vendor technology we might walk.

We continue to be highly supportive of the Kuali community source initiative for higher education financial systems. A justification as to why a multi-campus implementation makes sense has been written. From an ability to execute perspective, UCSB has no financing in either the IT or functional offices to support any kind of financial systems evolution. Discussions amongst the divisional financial officers, the campus CFO and the Administrative Services VC, suggest little to no possibility of this situation changing in our near term planning horizon (< 3 years). It is generally believed that a student systems ERP is a higher priority that will fully utilize any marginal resources.

Sakai is gaining traction through additional pro bono support from Instructional Computing in the form of a half time senior technologist. We now have three different campus organizations contributing a variety of resources to the effort led by Instructional Development. George Michaels, Executive Director of Instructional Development, is leading this initiative.

A campus committee studying LMS needs and solutions has been active for approximately two years now. The need for a strong management, reporting and auditing tool in the training venue is accelerating and we will likely attempt an RFP in the next few months. In support of this, we have a purchased report from Brandon Hall research on the acquisition of low cost LMS products. We are interested in the outcome of the Riverside RFP and any other campuses that may be addressing this need in the near term.

In an effort to build a bridge to future replacement ERP systems, we have created a real time replication of our transactional system database to an outboard SQL Server. The first utilization of this technology will be Student Affairs building an Operational Data Store as a backend to near term initiatives. If we move forward with a replacement financial system, this technology will allow us to run two systems in parallel for evaluation and testing.