Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

This group that I have assembled as a place to talk about both new technologies and new methodologies met for the second time. The members in this group are: Todd Houle, Phil Isaacs, Mary Glynn and Henk Meij. I asked each of the directors to designate a representative from their groups. The idea here is for the reps to talk to their colleagues and bring to the table any new ideas that as an organization we should be looking at.

In our first meeting we talked about various things including whether we should increase the size of this group. We have decided to stick with this membership for now. Yesterday’s meeting was attended by everyone and I want to spend the rest of the time to talk about that.

Mary talked about a topic that was discussed in the previous meeting – standardizing ITS wide application development to one or two languages and development environments. The general sentiment is that this is likely to prove counterproductive. However, it is also the case that we cannot have application development to branch off too much from mainstream, say someone wants to write apps in Python or in an extreme case ML or E-Lisp! We agreed that the current set of languages and environments are working and are as mainstream as it can get. 

I brought to the table the Microsoft Exchange project, Basically, we plan to look at moving to Outlook/Exchange for faculty staff. This is a non trivial project and is being primarily driven by the fact that many of our new employees coming from other organizations have used this setup and like it very much. The biggest selling point is the integrated email and calendaring and the support for various other functions such as Blackberry/Palm Treo support, hooks into any scheduling software we may end up with etc. etc. Most of our discussion was dominated by  why are we not looking at other cheaper or open source solutions and the answer also was there are no such solutions that exist now. So, we will proceed with this project. This is extremely complicated and we need to proceed with a lot of caution and this project will move into high gear as soon as we have a new Windows Specialist. James Taft will lead this project.

I also  talked about Web 2.0 initiative. Basically, we will be launching it as an official project for rollout this year. You will hear more from Mike on this who has agreed to lead this project in the near future. Basically, we will be looking at the application of Blogs, Wikis and Social Bookmarking (collectively referred to as Web 2.0 tools) to what we do and choose the right set of software to support them.

We then spent a lot of time talking about the lack of communication and project management process in ITS. It was mentioned that Administrative Systems groups have a process whereby each team meets often to go over all the projects they are involved in. The recent case of a training video from Athletics was brought out where, it was amazing to hear what happened. How the lack of communication and process resulted in many ITS staff members were independently trying to solve the same exact problem!

So, this group has receommended that we take a look at a project management process with an achievable goal. The goal here is to find a way to record project requests centrally so every one is aware of what “projects” are being requested/worked on and who is involved and to what extent. This will help avoid duplication of effort as well as oversubscription of a staff member’s time. The key here is to keep it simple and workable. Examples of earlier attempts at trying to do this were brought up and that they were not successful because the scope was too wide. Trac, a software that is being currently used for project management by a few staff members, was offered as a possibility, but Henk had some concerns about lack of functionality in Trac.

I will talk to the Directors in the next meeting about the need for an ITS wide project management (may be that is not the right word here) tool that is described above and move it forward.

Todd brought a couple of interesting ideas for which we didn’t have enough time, so we decided to talk about it in the next meeting -  one is about using Grid Computing to take advantage of unused CPU cycles on the Macs around campus and the other was to talk about the use of voice over IP. The first one is a very exciting topic and we will definitely follow up. The second one is not so exciting and I will write about what we have already done in terms of searching for a VoIP solution in one of my next postings.