Faculty Senate University Computer and Electronic Communications Committee
Thursday, September 9, 12:00 - 13:30 Room 905-09, Campus Center
                                Draft Minutes
Attendance: Alvarez, Billings, Brewer, Fisher, Hilbink, Kunkel, Levin, May, 
            Sharick, Sims, Stidham, Stoia, VanKleef, Zucker

I. Minutes
 A. Minutes of May 11, 2004 posted at URL:
http://people.umass.edu/fsucecc/, were 
    approved as amended. 

II. Elections
 A. Election of New Officers
    Nominating Committee provided candidates:
        Steve Brewer for Chair
        Joe Kunkel for Secretary
    Ernie May assumed the chair for the election, asked for further nominations from 
    the floor and closed nominations when no further nominations were made.
    The Slate was promoted without objection.

New Chair Steve Brewer assumed charge of the committee. 

III. Announcements and Question period.
 A. FSUCECC Former Chair (Joe Kunkel)  The Annual Report will present items for action by 
    the Senate.
 B. OIT 
   1. (Rosio Alvarez). In the absence of Heidi Dollard, who was busy responding to 
    the SPIRE crisis, Rosio gave us a review of the crisis and how OIT and the SIS group 
    was approaching it. Rosio emphasized that the underlying database was secure and that 
    all the problems were associated with the portal interface to the database that was totally 
    new in PeopleSoft Ver. 8. The situation reached a crisis on Tuesday Sept 7 when students 
    tried to sign onto SPIRE and seemingly filled up a queue that did not empty from the 
    bottom as transactions were completed. At the moment it is not known why this is 
    happening. We are employing several consultants and independent experts on PeopleSoft 
    SIS software. These experts are expected to be needed for no more than about 30 hours of 
    consulting. The plan of OIT is to (A) Fix the system (B) get people back to work using 
    the system. 
   2. Rosio responded to several questions from the committee: 
    a. Backup capabilities include Mobius that is still available to print out reports. Students 
    are being directed to the Registrars Office to obtain the most recent class locations and 
    times. 
    b. The problem with our transition to Ver. 8 was exacerbated by the fact that we had only 
    recently installed Ver. 7.6 and were required to transit to Ver. 8 with only short 
    experience with the previous version. 
    c. Load testing of the software was done but seemingly the exact conditions that resulted 
    in the crisis had not been simulated. 
    d. An argument for implementing a visible ticketing system was made now that we are at the 
    beginning of a version cycle. The argument that problem fixes should wait until the new 
    version is installed is now untenable. We need to keep a record of problems and their 
    path in being fixed. Rosio was amenable with a request to use a ticketing system to 
    accomplish this. 
    e. Steve Brewer noted that the existing ticketing system of OIT maintains the ticket but 
    removes it from the queue when it determines, for instance, that it is a Registrar problem, 
    which they should fix. Brewer requested that the ticketing survive until the problem was fully 
    resolved. 
    f. Robert Levin questioned why it should take 600 pages to provide a printout of a catalog 
    description of courses when the paper pulp pamphlet of courses was previously available 
    in a small fraction of that format and for a very low cost.
    g. The entire committee agreed on our support of, and cooperation with the efforts of OIT 
    staff in their carrying out of Plan B.
    h. Nonetheless, the committee was close to unanimous in our dissatisfaction with the 
    PeopleSoft SIS package as experienced to date and supported a Motion included in our Annual 
    Report which urges a committee to be established to explore the competative options available
    as SIS packages being used by our sister institutions with similar demographies.
 
 C. SIS LIAISON 
    Howard Stidham reported that the SIS Liaison Level I group met Aug 16. A report on 
    that meeting is posted at the website and is appended to these minutes as his report to our 
    oversight function. The next SIS Level I Group meeting is 1 PM Sept 28 A217 Lederle 
    hosted by Rosio Alvarez. 

IV. New business
 A. Draft Annual Report to the Faculty Senate (Joe Kunkel)
  1. Joe Kunkel presented the draft Annual Report for discussion. It was provided in earlier 
    draft form to the Committee as an Email text attachment and as a PDF file at our website. 
    Wording changes and addition suggestions had been received by Email and additional 
    changes were accepted from the floor. 
  2. Ernie May suggested that if the Report was to be submitted for the upcoming Senate meeting 
    it would need to be submitted to the Senate office quickly. Kunkel promised to have it 
    submitted by the following day. 
  3. Robert Levin asked how the leadership of the Liaison Groups I-III was expected 'to coalesce' 
    as suggested in the wording of the Report.  He suggested that they need more of a roadmap than 
    was given. Joe Kunkel responded that there was more explicit description of the 3 level 
    structure given in the Senate document urging the Liaison Group to be formed.  The lack of 
    structure was seen as a reluctance of the administration to call for the structures to be 
    formed. The proposed ticketed list of SIS problems is seen as a structure around which the 
    three Liaison Levels could organize:  Level I acting on list items that are identified as high 
    priority.  Level II receiving, categorizing and sorting list items into prioritized solvable 
    problems.  Level III receiving problems to triage - which have available solutions, - which 
    are problematic and need to be added as ticketed problems to be passed on to Level II.
 
 B. Agenda for the coming year.
  1.  SIS Liaison oversight.
  2.  Email usage rules.
  3.  Subcommittee structure.

Respectfully submitted,
Joe Kunkel, Secretary