UB2020 Projects Update Newsletter
December 5, 2007
- Oracle PeopleSoft selected for UB's transformed 'Student Systems'
- Vendor demonstrations for Shared IT Service Desk project scheduled for February
- Apple offers remarkable discount on institutional purchases
Student Systems Assessment
Reaching a major milestone of the project, Oracle PeopleSoft has officially been selected as the software vendor for the project and contract negotiations are being pursued. See Details
Voice Over Internet Protocol
Close to 1200 phones in total have been installed as part of the VoIP project, Barbara Vasbinder, project leader, reported. The installation schedule is picking up pace, and will do so even more as the IPLogic technicians come on board. IPLogic is preparing to install the infrastructure upgrade for the Call Center and Unity. Installs are currently happening at Dental Medicine, and will next occur at the Ellicott Complex. Peter Rittner, also a project leader, assured the group that 'the College of Arts of Sciences' implementation, the next major area to be implemented, should go very quickly and help the statistics of the timeline, due to its homogeneity and familiarity with the feature set.” | See Implementation Schedule
Shared IT Service Desk
A successfully compiled Request for Proposal resulted in responses from those organizations identified by Gartner as the ‘major players’ in the industry, reported Nancy Smyth and Daniel Arrasjid, project leaders. For several days in February, 2008, selected vendors will be presenting and demonstrating their products, open to the campus. Specific details for these sessions will be announced via listserv and on the IT Shared Service Desk website.
Server and Services Consolidation
Discussions about quotas and recharge models, a signed site license for Ghost (imaging software), a Symantec SEP11 presentation held on Dec. 6th, and upcoming Ghost training for 32 IT professionals are some of the major activities of the Services and Server Consolidation teams. Proposals have been prepared for a firewall solution (Symantec Endpoint Protection for workstations and eEye for servers) and patch services (Microsoft WSUS and Shalvik HFNetProtect for both platforms), reported Joe Mantione, team leader.
The Exchange E-mail team has entered into its second phase involving an archiving service and hardware rehabilitation. Archiving via a hierarchal storage model providing the ability for the customer to be able to search is the goal of this phase.
Computer Science and the School of Engineering have completed their Active Directory migrations, with the Graduate School of Education approaching completion. The School of Management and the Law School are scheduled to be completed during Q1 of 2008, which is the last of the migrations to UBAD.
Support model discussions for primary and individual service plans are on the teams' upcoming agendas. Primary responsibility for support of the underlying infrastructure will be CIO's area; individual IT units will continue their responsibility for training and consultation with their respective constituents.
Workstation Standardization
Although the strategy is to avoid gaps between UB2020 workstation standard models, the transition time from the Optiplex 745 to the Optiplex 755 has been delayed. Although the Optiplex 745 was officially removed from Dell’s product line (effective December 1), Dell has assured of continued availability of the Optiplex 745 for UB purchases. The processor selected for the replacement model, the UB2020 Dell Optiplex 755, is not on the Office of General Service’s (OGS) pricing list. OGS has selected a processor which has significantly inferior performance specifications. Discussions are underway to develop a solution as quickly as possible.
Continuing its work, the Workstation Standardization Team has configured a high end desktop, and will do the same for a high end laptop. The team is planning to develop and make available tools to enable customization of the UB2020 standard images without the need for re-imaging.
Negotiations with Apple representatives have resulted in the offering of remarkable discounts on institutional purchases of four standard configurations on a quarter by quarter basis. "What became clear is that Apple wants to forge a partnership in a different area - helping to transform the 15 and 118 Norton Hall into a collaborative learning space", said Peter Rittner, project leader. A faculty/staff group has been convened to conceptualize the space. By the end of December, Rittner and Rick Lesniak, Director for Academic Services, Computing & Information Technology, will submit a report to senior leadership outlining the general parameters which will define the layout and uses of the space. It's likely that a trip will be made to Cupertino, following review of the report, to forge a corporate relationship with Apple.
In the absence of the appointment of a standards board, the Workstation Standardization Team has assumed responsibility for developing the recommendations of the new year's hardware and software standards for students. This work is being done by a Workstation Standards Task Group of faculty and staff members. The task group will also engage in public sites planning.
Strategic Information Reporting Initiative (SIRI)
The SIRI Team is striving to deliver financial and human resource data, reports and dashboards to the community by the end of January. A great deal of ETL (extraction, transformation and load) work is ongoing, with the help of UB Staff and consultants from LPA Systems of Rochester.
The team is also entrenched in a plethora of activity, including field and data mapping results (from current database to SIRI database), continued data definition, and the use of the Oracle Warehousebuilder tool (ETL). The data transformation occurs during the 'hops' it makes from system to system, and this needs to be examined closely. The length of time it takes for the data to refresh is also being examined with the help of LPA.
The Business Intelligence (BI) Team led by Tom Okon charged with testing, designing, developing, and implementing reports and dashboards has completed training and are actively engaged in the design and build process using Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (the business intelligence tool). The BI Team includes staff from the business offices and Academic Planning and Budget. The reports and dashboards will first be released to the SIRI Customer Team for review and then will be extended to the campus once they are approved. "The tool is being bundled with Oracle as part of the SUNY contract, so there is hope for increased collaboration", said Gary Pacer, technical project leader.
A security model and customer training are topics to be discussed by the team. "The hope is that the data in SIRI will be more suitable for analytic reporting [than Infosource]", Pacer said.
ETL is the challenging aspect of the project and Pacer emphasized that the team is looking to the LPA consultant to provide the expertise required and the thrust to move ahead to other deliverables of the SIRI project such as the development of a support model. Getting the data into models that meet campus customer needs for reporting is one of the largest challenges of the project because of the diversity of sources, inconsistency, fragmentation, and numerous quality issues. These are issues that people across the campus have had to deal with in shadow systems over the years. The ETL and data modeling work SIRI is accomplishing will start making progress towards improved data for the campus, and address issues once so that campus customers do not have to massage the data as much on a daily basis. It is a good example of improved infra-structure that people do not necessarily think about on a day to day basis, but provides huge value through better foundations.
A UB2020 Information Technology Strategic Transformation Town Hall is scheduled for Friday January 4th, 2008 at 120 Clemens Hall. Topics being considered for presentation include an update from the Shared IT Service Desk project leaders, a preview of Strategic Information Reports Initiative's (SIRI) dashboards, a presentation of 'Learning Spaces' by the Workstation Standardization team, and UB's 'Great Place to Work' initiative.
We hope you found this UB2020 Transformation Project Update useful and informative. We are always interested in hearing from you. | Share your Thoughts
UB2020 Transformation Project Communication Team
Last updated: December 11, 2007 1:24 pm EST