Joint Operations Group (JOG) Meeting of 6/4-6/5/97

UCSB Campus Report

1. Accounts Receivable: We continue with a two-pronged approach. On one hand, we are aggressively watching the vendors. We believe it will be a year before we can properly evaluate PeopleSoft's new student systems (due out in the fall). We expect Buzzeo will have disappeared by then and we still don't see any enthusiasm for SCT, the only vendor we have seen that currently has a viable suite of products. On the other hand, we are aggressively pursuing the development of a new AR system in-house. We have selected JAVA as the development language, sent nine staff members to training, acquired Visual Cafe and are about to contract for outside expertise to jump-start the project. Our initial experience suggests that JAVA still needs to percolate a bit before it's ready to serve.

2. Travel Systems: We rolled out the first phase of the Travel Voucher System to pilot users. The system has a web front-end and uses Javascript, Livewire-Pro, Sybase and RPC to MVS/Adabas. Response time is slow on the Macs and, due to the number of new components involved, will require some analysis to tune. Also, we recently made our first direct deposit of a travel reimbursement into the bank account of a (happy) traveler.

3. CAD-FDX Project: We received responses to an RFQ to digitize the campus blueprint file. Quotes covered a wide range.

4. Transfer Articulation/Degree Audit (or TA/DA! as the projects are known locally): We have implemented two more releases of the University of Miami products and converted all tables to the latest format. However, we are still not able to run an audit successfully.

5. Room Scheduling: Schedule 25 was used to schedule classrooms for fall quarter.

6. Commencement: Students used the voice response system to select the graduation ceremony of their choice this year, saving paper and trips to campus.

7. Data Warehouse: Negotiations continue. We proposed a mini-capitulation in which we would provide all data to central offices and restrict individual departments to their own records with user views in the database. Some are now worried about how to deal with the middle tier of offices (schools and colleges). Given that disk space is cheaper than people time, we plan to wait and see who buys the client software (GQL) and then, perhaps, extract the records that they are allowed to see into a separate database.

8. Year 2000: We have identified 17 application systems that need to be investigated. We have counted the lines in each of these systems and, using industry averages, converted the line counts to estimated costs and FTE requirements. This technique suggests we have about $550K of conversion work to do. We plan, however, to replace at least three of the systems listed (BA/RC, FDX and Staffing), so the conversion effort will be reduced somewhat. We have arranged a series of meetings with the managers of these systems to prioritize, fund and schedule the work. The work will begin on July 1 and will require the addition of 3-5 contract programmers.

9. Electronic Mail: Simeon continues to roll out with production usage in four departments. Investigation of compatible meeting schedulers continues. See:

http://ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu/isc-web/osg/sbschd/sbschd.html

for details.

10. Divisional File Server: We now have six departments and about 200 customers sharing the server. Reliability is not, however, up to our standards. Crashes we have experienced resulted in lost file descriptors for Mac files. The descriptors can be recovered, but it is not convenient. This seems to be a known feature of NT. We are not happy with Microsoft support in this area but, as usual, we have hopes of curing these problems by moving to the next version (NT4 SP3) which is thought to include a better implementation of Services for Macintosh (SFM).

11. Authentication: We have installed AIX version 4.2 and are currently working through the installation of Kerberos. We are planning to synchronize the implementation with the next update to the campus directory, which will serve as the source file for populating the Kerberos directory.

12. Access to Adabas: At the request of the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, we are investigating techniques for integration of new systems with legacy Adabas data. Techniques under review include: RPC, ODBC, Replication, Screen Scraping and Gateways. We attended a presentation by CA on a screen scraper called OPAL that seems promising.

13. Network Computer: We obtained an IBM Network Computer and have been experimenting with WinCenter server software from NCD. Our preliminary conclusion is that this setup is not competitive with PCs. This was a surprise to us. I have a handout to share that documents our experience.

14. Student Email: We have contracted to provide facility support for the new undergraduate email system (Simeon). The machine will reside in our facility and we will provide operational support. It will have its own system administrator reporting to another unit. We are installing a card-key entry system in hopes of monitoring the traffic through the machine room resulting from this contract and other similar contracts that are pending.

15. Hardware Changes: We selected low bid (IBM) on a set of used 3490E cartridge drives. The retirement of the first Comten front-end processor is on schedule for July 1. CPU utilization on the 9672-R21 remains flat.