UCSB JOG/CPG REPORT Jan, 2003

JOG

• A subcommittee to the Information Technology Planning Group (ITPG) to serve as a forum for presenting, discussing, and proposing solutions to campus-wide data issues has been formed. The hope is that the subcommittee will define and encourage campus wide best practices for design, implementation, and change management of the data stores that house institutional data.

• UCSB is evaluating the Pathways data presentation being developed by UCOP. In conjunction with a UC wide committee discussing Undergraduate Admissions issues, UCSB volunteered to evaluate UCOP's XML implementation with regard to data included/excluded, usability of the included data within a campus application, impacts of Pathways data on existing processes and procedures (identifying work step savings or additions), and suggestions for changes to the UCOP implementation that might provide additional benefit to the campus. The tasks required to extract the data from the XML document and present it for use in the UCSB admissions process have been completed. Unfortunately the timing of the project was such that the admissions cycle is currently at its peak and no resources are currently available to evaluate the impact of the data on UCSB admissions business practices. The admission cycle workload should lessen, allowing time to evalute business practice impacts, beginning in late March.

• UCSB continues to progress toward a software development environment that stresses reuse of component code to the greatest extent possible. This approach implies that campus software development groups have knowledge of existing components and have the ability to invoke the components across diverse development architectures (Java, .NET, etc). Based on overhead associated with Web Services, implementation of a formal Web Services architecture will probably not be the path taken. However, the basic concepts of Web Services (easy access to, and reuse of common components) are certainly the goal. A critical piece of this approach is the development of mainframe based servers which provide access to data stored in Adabas when invoked by common components. To this point, we've developed brokers that represent a large percentage of the necessary functionality (interfaces to financial data, budget data, student data).

• Authentication: The UCSB Directory (LDAP) continues to evolve as the source of truth for individuals currently associated with UCSB. As a step in that evolution, the 2002-2003 Campus Directory (paper) was published from the campus directory. In addition, the UCSB Directory is also the source of data to be used for publication of the UC Directory. In addition, several applications are now authenticating against the directory.

• Authorization: We are in the middle of a campus-wide coordination effort to finalize the language of an RFQ for middleware that will, at a minimum, allow for web application single signon and delegated administration of authorizations utilizing directory based roles technology. This will be completed at month end. The Transfer of Fund and Transfer of Expenditure applications, currently under development are targeted to be the first two operational systems to take advantage of the single sign-on capabilities this product will provide.

• IS&C is currently beginning research into acquiring a new IMAP server software product for IS&C EMail customers (about 1,000).

• We would be interested to hear input from any other campus that is dealing with the Oracle purchase of Steltor (the vendor of the Corporate Time scheduling product).

• BARC, the Billing, Accounts Receivable, and Cashiering System, has completed the final stages of integration testing. During Fall quarter, the new BARC system was run in shadow operation with the existing system to verify the implementation in an "operational environment". Also during Fall quarter, perfomance tests (bulk data loads and multi-user tests) were conducted that indicate that the implementation will perform well within limits of necessary response times. Currently, final technical issues (final code clean up, platform fine tuning) are being addressed, and campus coordination tasks have been started. We are still targeting Winter quarter to move BARC into production.

• Implementation of the fully automated Transfer of Funds (TOF) system has entered the final stages of user acceptance testing. It is scheduled for deployment to the campus in March. TOF is a Java (JSP based) application that incorporates necessary approval/workflow steps and is fully integrated with the mainframe based Financial and Budget data stores. The integration is accomplished using the mainframe based brokers mentioned above.

• Implementation of the Transfer of Expenditure Web Application (TEWA) is in the implementation stage. TEWA makes use of many of the same components (authentication, authorization, workflow, mainframe interfaces) developed for TOF and is also a Java (JSP based) application. This application is scheduled for deployment to the campus in May/June 2003.

• IS&C had been investigating the purchase of a new IBM mainframe. The target hardware, generation 6, was the smallest and least costly machine that was appropriate to the UCSB environment. The decision was made to defer the purchase primarily due to the increased cost of software licenses for the generation 6 machines.

CPG