Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

When we renegotiated the telephone contract with the merged SBC/AT&T last year, I was very excited that one of the outcomes would be that we will get “Caller ID” despite the fact that we cut down the amount of the contract by $100K a year. As we all know by now, it turned out to be not truely “Caller ID”. Welcome to the old style telephony. They say one thing and they mean something totally different… It turns out that we are getting all the components of the Caller ID from SBC, but unfortunately the Nortel switch that we have can only pass the number through and not the name.

I have had many inquiries about this subject, so I asked Adrian to investigate it further. It has been at least a month since he contacted the vendor and finally I have the answer today… And you are not going to believe this. The switch needs to undergo upgrades before this can happen. And yes, you guessed it right, it will cost $100K (negotiable) to accomplish this….

One of the items listed there is $55K for upgrading the processor with a Pentium…. One expensive Pentium that is…

Since it is indeed negotiable, I have offered (reluctantly) $5K. I know the answer from them, but to me this is how much it is worth. So, I think we are going to have to live without the names until the telephone technology changes.

Now, back to the reorganization.

I touched upon the Media Development Lab, which will be in Academic Computing Services group. Originally we were planning to hire one person, who will beworking half time in MDL and the other half doing Social Sciences support. Mike and I talked about this and we feel that this may be hard. So, we are seriously looking at hiring a 0.5 FTE for two years to do Social Sciences Support. Why two years? This position is required because Manolis who is currently supporting the Social Sciences will be managing The Quantitative Analysis Center, which is funded for two years thorugh a Fund for Innovation grant.

We would like to make the MDL position to be a full time position. However, this means we need to find additional money so the position is funded full time. Mike and I will be working with Bonnie in the next few days to look at all funding and come up with a plan. Based on what I know, I feel confident that this is a distinct possibility. Until we know this fully, we will have this position on hold.

Another position that we have been looking to fill is a Unix administrator who would split the time between offering support for an academic UNIX computing and ITS sysadmin functions. This position will report to James, with dotted line reporting to Jolee. You can look at the job responsibilites here. We received very few responses to this advertisement.

Upon further consultation internally and with the Science faculty who are interested in this position, we have decided to re-advertise this position. James is in the process of reworking the job description and will share with others and will repost it. We are also increasing the salary range for this job to $45K-$55K.

In the meantime, we have an internal candidate who is interested in the Unix position. We are in the process of setting up meetings with relevant ITS staff and the science faculty or their representatives who are interested in talking to this candidate.

Doug Baker will be moving on to Administrative Systems soon. James is in the process of writing the job description for Doug’s replacement. Because James will have to spend more time on managing his staff and some of the projects in the pipeline, we will be looking for someone with very strong Windows server management skills along with some scripting experience. Another project that will become critical for us to look at in the near future is moving to Microsoft Exchange for primarily administrators so we can get out of Meeting Maker – for various reasons. This is by no means a done deal. I will write more about it in the next few days.