INFRASTRUCTURE & INFORMATION RESOURCES
March 1998
Status Report
YEAR OF HUMANITIES AND ARTS (YoHA) WEB SITE - project number 10732
The Year of Humanities and Arts (YoHA) is intended to be an ambitious, inclusive program involving the many schools, institutes, and programs that make up the University of Michigan. YoHA, which will take place throughout the 1997-98 academic year, is being sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR). Support for YoHA is coming in from many units and offices. Centrally, the Office of the President and Office of the Vice President for University Relations have already made major financial commitments to support YoHA.
http://www.yoha.umich.edu/
In general, updates and additions to the site continue to be made as new content is available or changes are desired. There is an ongoing effort to locate anomalies in the site and correct them.
Illness has limited accomplishments this month.
Matt Stoeffler updated the YoHA Swish index, so searching is up to date.
A link to the YoHA calendar was added to the UM-Gateway News and Events page at http://www.umich.edu/UM-News.html
Current month server statistics for YoHA are available at... http://www.engin.umich.edu/cache/stats/org-YoHA.html
March stats are summarized as follows:
Program started at Fri-Mar-27-1998 05:23 local time. Analyzed requests from Sun-Mar-01-1998 10:38 to Fri-Mar-27-1998 00:50 (25.6 days).
| Total successful requests | 3,713 |
| Average successful requests per day | 145 |
| Total successful requests for pages | 1,855 |
| Total failed requests | 145 |
| Total redirected requests | 1 |
| Number of distinct files requested | 205 |
| Number of distinct hosts served | 490 |
| Total data transferred | 109,056 kbytes |
| Average data transferred per day | 4,261 kbytes |
February 1998 stats were not available at the time the February report was written. Therefore, they are summarized here.
Program started at Tue-Mar-24-1998 18:05 local time. Analyzed requests from Sun-Feb-01-1998 03:11 to Sun-Mar-01-1998 00:28 (27.9 days).
| Total successful requests | 2,132 |
| Average successful requests per day | 77 |
| Total successful requests for pages | 1,105 |
| Total failed requests | 75 |
| Total redirected requests | 102 |
| Number of distinct files requested | 205 |
| Number of distinct hosts served | 313 |
| Corrupt logfile lines | 1 |
| Total data transferred | 88,372 kbytes |
| Average data transferred per day | 3,169 kbytes |
(JW)
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN INSTRUCTIONAL ENVIRONMENT (UMIE) - project number 10594
A complete list of UMIE staff is available on our web site.
Significant progress on the user interface and functionality continued this month. The current version will be rolled out as a beta version in early April. New templates and documentation will be prepared for a rollout to Dentistry and Pharmacy at the end of April.
The lead developer has begun migrating LS&A and Engineering data to the MPathways-provided data structures. The designer and graphic artist have been working on the interface and they will begin bringing up the web interface using WebObjects in April. A demonstration catalog with LS&A and Engineering data will be available next month.
The course catalog team met with Rob Wilke, Mark Garrett, and Mary Wise in LS&A to discuss collaboration on interface for managing course descriptions in LS&A.
A team of students from the School of Information has been interviewing staff at LS&A, School of Information, and School of Dentistry to map their process, and propose methods for getting data to the course catalog project in a sustainable manner.
Roger Espinosa has completed the CGI version of the new reserves request interface for faculty members. The next step is to complete the Java interface and put the email back end into both request interfaces.
Mike Nowak and Ann Sprunger have been meeting with John Price-Wilkin and Maria Bonn from the Digital Library Production Service to propose a project to link University Reserves with the Digital Library.
This project is on hold until April.
The faculty steering team met to review the current schedule of UMIE releases and to review a mock-up of a new UMIE web site designed to make it easier to request services.
No update.
Beta version 1.0b2 of the Course Home Page Builder is available.
|
Date |
Product |
|---|---|
|
Apr 1998 |
Reserves - Pilot of Java applet for making reserve requests. Course catalog - Prototype with LS&A; data. Limited release of Course Home Page Builder to Dentistry/Pharmacy. Class lists - Web form to request class IFS authorization (PTS) groups for private web space. |
|
May 1998 |
|
|
Jun 1998 |
Course Home Page Builder 1.0 - Production version. |
Zoe Gurevich has reviewed her code and process for creating and managing PTS groups for classes with a group of web developers. She has modified and tested the code to make it accessible to other UMIE tools such as Course Home Page Builder, as well as the direct class list interface. The process has also been reviewed with the Registrar and Zoe is making changes so data privacy is protected according to U-M policy. Zoe has also been working with Sharon Smith in the ITD DOCLIB to make sure that we have a stable process for class lists for the spring and summer terms.
Janani Janakiraman continues to work on a system to add security to custom-built course home pages.
The UMIE team presented a recommendation for naming conventions for course and class-related resources on the web to the faculty steering team, IFS team, and ITD web services. A revised version based on their comments will be posted shortly.
The UMIE team continues to meet with representatives from and CRMs for several schools and colleges (Business, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing, Medical School) to consider how the developing infrastructure can be linked to school systems. This will be a major initiative of the project for 1998-1999, in partnership with these schools.
A meeting with the Law School is planned for April.
(MN)
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ON-LINE (UMOL) - project number 8064
There were 229 new U-M Online subscribers in the month of March.
Communication and Content:
Becky and Ellen made a presentation to the Development Council in early March. This group is comprised of over 100 central, school, and college development officers and staff. Based on the information they received at this meeting, the School of Public Health, College of Education, College of Pharmacy, and School of Business Administration have agreed to provide information about subscribing to the service to their graduating students.
Becky met with College of Pharmacy Development staff to discuss how the service can be used to improve communication between the college and their alumni. They plan to present information at their March Alumni Board Meeting and will explore the possibility of having the college fund accounts for Board members as a pilot for future use in other programs. Linda met with the School of Nursing to discuss using U-M Online software and services to facilitate communication between alumni and students during the pilot of their mentorship program this summer.
Continued efforts are underway to arrange meetings with the following units for April -- Law, Natural Resources, Social Work, Kinesiology, Dentistry, Education, and Rackham. These meetings will explore how U-M Online can assist the development and alumni relation's efforts by providing a means to better communicate with their alumni.
Content for subscribers added this month -- new WCBN student athlete interviews; TIAA-CREF panel discussion; 4 WUOM Commentaries are in our public area under the Visitor's Station. All permissions and encoders for March/April Coffee with Faculty series are set and ready to add to the site.
The UM Online communication and promotion plan for spring graduates is underway. UM Online staff participated in the second annual Union Fair March 11-13 and met one-on-one with over 300 students during the event. Student response to information about U-M Online as a means to continue using email, personal homepages, IFS, and other computing services was very positive. The students also were enthusiastic about using an online form to subscribe. The Alumni Association Senior Day events will take place April 20-21 and U-M Online staff will participate. Other promotions include announcements on UMTV Channel 26, space advertisements in the Michigan Daily, targeted email to all graduating students, information to all students about continuing IT services during the summer, an article in the CAEN Newsletter, and information on the Wolverine Access student business page.
The Application brochure, which is the primary marketing piece, is being revised. The new brochure will promote a single service package with dial-in costs additional. The plan is to reduce the number of pages, thus reducing the printing and mailing costs. This revision should be completed before the end of the fiscal year.
During February, there were 77 general information email contacts with UM Online subscribers and potential subscribers. This is considerably less than in February, but consistent with pervious months
Infrastructure and Technical:
The move from a stand alone server to Web services distributed environment is waiting for a Verisign certificate and other minor administrative tasks before it can be completed. The move will be completed sometime in April. The online application form deployed in January was used heavily by December graduates. Regular site maintenance continues to require Scott's attention. Much of the newly revised User Guide is coded and ready to link to the site after some final review and editing.
The CD-ROM version of the U-M Online Internet Access kit is being revised to provide more up-to-date versions of software to subscribers. Some user documentation is being written to accompany the current versions of Eudora and Netscape.
The Alumni Association's Alumni PC sales program pilot (formerly known as Big Blue) continues to be discussed. CDW and IBM are reviewing the program and a decision will be made shortly as to whether to continue.
Monthly server statistics are available at http://www.umonline.umich.edu/stats/.
UM Online core team: Linda Hancock Green, Becky Spaly, Brian Vaughan,
Ellen Vaughan (project leader)
Web support: Scott George
Technical writing: Susan Topol
(EV)
There was a BTJP meeting held at Penn State. Bob Riddle and Kevin Coffman attended. Bob gave a demonstration of the web access allowed by using the Dascom product currently in evaluation at U-M. Both Gradient and Dascom gave talks about their current and future products in this area.
The group discussed the ICAAP deployment project underway between Penn State, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. ICAAP follow-on projects for the entire group were also discussed.
BTJP - Big Ten Joint Project
CIC - Committee on Institutional Cooperation
ICAAP - InterCollegiate Authentication & Authorization Project
(KC)
CAMPUS WIDE DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM
THE FEDERATION: DIGITAL LIBRARY PRODUCTION SERVICES - project number 10450
The Federation projects are funded by ITD, University Library and the Media Union. A list of staff is online at http://www.umdl.umich.edu/dlps/who.html.
In many ways, March was a month for the status quo. Now that all of its data are loaded and all of the hardware/software is in place, PEAK activity now consists of largely silent behind-the-scenes improvements and regular use by the customer institutions, most of whom are now on board. Image Services is busy adding collections and extending the current interface. No new staff joined us, and there were no new departures. At the same time, there were some pleasant aberrations. The new Kontron equipment arrived, and though not entirely calibrated to our satisfaction, should result in some significant gains in productivity. The HTI staff with SGML Systems worked on an entirely new type of collection, the Marta Werner publication of Emily Dickinson writings, where our web-based methodologies were used to create (the first iteration of) an extraordinary CD-ROM application. Making of America did not change (re-indexing has been postponed until April) but use nearly doubled from the previous high month. Data on usage and collection sizes will be available by April 5th at http://www.umdl.umich.edu/dlps/stats/9803.html.
MUSEUM EDUCATIONAL SITE LICENSE (MESL) PROJECT - project number 10019
http://mesl.itd.umich.edu/
MESL ends in June, and Wendy Lougee has contacted each of the museums
requesting an extension for at least a year.
Results thus far --
All museum content with agreed-upon extended use will be migrated to Digital Library Production Services, Image Services, and deployed in the new system by July 1, 1998.
Otherwise, MESL is largely in production mode.
MESL (https://mesl.itd.umich.edu) server stats for February 1, 1998 through February 28, 1998.
Program started at Mon-30-Mar-1998 09:39 local time. Analysed requests from Sun-01-Mar-1998 07:59 to Mon-30-Mar-1998 09:29 (29.1 days).
| Total completed requests | 3,418 |
| Total failed requests | 14 |
| Average requests per day | 144 |
| Number of distinct files requested | 791 |
| Number of distinct hosts served | 211 |
| Number of new hosts served in last 7 days | 38 |
| Total bytes transferred | 34,057,855 |
| Average bytes transferred per day | 1,171,855 |
Downtime for ezekiel.rs.itd.umich.edu -- 0
MESL ITD Team: John Weise, Zoe Gurevich, Katarina Lukaszewicz, Sandy Colombo
(JW)
CORE JOURNALS PROJECT - project number 10013/T0002
The Core Journals project is a partnership with UMI deploying around 1000 core journal titles in all disciplines in image format, linking them with Wilson Indexes in MIRLYN and putting in place the necessary structure for printing, accounting, and billing.
| March 1998 Core Journal Statistics | |
|---|---|
| Total Articles Requested | 6977 |
| Total Successful Prints | 6799 |
| Total Pages Printed | 34532 |
| Average Article size (pages) | 5.20 |
| Total Unsuccessful attempts | 178 |
There was no Confer U downtime this month.
| STATISTICS | |||||||
| Jan'97 | Nov'97 | Dec'97 | Jan'98 | Feb'98 | Mar'98 | ||
| Total Conferences | 304 | 68 | 75 | 57 | 44 | 44 | |
| Total Participants | 11,310 | 6,660 | 6,733 | 6,837 | 2,300 | 2,300 | |
Some COW Statistics:
![[Your browser isn't displaying images]](http://www-personal.umich.edu/~zoe/cow03.gif)
COW software has been upgraded on Mar. 17, 1998 1:31 AM (NO DOWNTIME!).
Everything seems to have gone flawlessly.
The upgrade has a few
changes, primarily to allow people to edit things more flexibly, and a
few changes to the profiles.
Before COW will move into production, we need to update the OIT's COW tutorial, and redesign the "Conference Manager" pages. We plan to do this before end of June 98.
There was no COW downtime this month.
Confer U & COW Team: Dave Winkel, Doug Heavrin-Brown, Linda
Green, Scott George, and Zoe Gurevich.
(ZG)
WOLVERINE ACCESS - project number 9889
A mini FAQ is 90% complete and will be implemented early April. We are adopting the Knowledge Base concept to improve response time and communication to the student population by improving the FAQ.
The
Wolverine Access Server Statistics are available
at http://www.umich.edu/~waccess/stats/
(MP)
The Office of the Registrar called a second meeting this month to get a
status check of outstanding assignments. Support for TOES was the
main topic and how the major support for Visual Basic, Crystal Reports
and the mainframe probes will be transferred to the Student Area for
continued support in '98-'99. Gloria Thiele stated that she had
discussed documentation needs with Sharon Smith, manager of
Documentation Library, and how or where they should be kept. Gloria's
concern is that the Student area trouble table rotation people will have
access to all documentation if needed. Mary Pearce will follow up by
transferring the TOES project information (currently contained in a
Lotus Notes database) to DocLib. Several meetings with the Student
Area coordinator occurred to outline and develop a common documentation
tool. Current documentation on the TOES system resides in a Lotus
Notes database and will be combined with a ROSCOE member now being used
by the trouble table rotation group for mainframe programming
support. This new LN will be accessible via the Web and will be
simple to use.
(MP)
The development team presented a demo of the STUTEL system to the
customer in late March. A discussion of why or how a student appears on
the rejection error list transpired during the meeting. The majority
of the rejects were thought to have occurred because of a social
security number change which did not get updated in the ITCom
database. These social security number changes originate in the
Office of the Registrar but are not always an issue for ITCom. The
only records in question are those students residing in ResCom or
married student housing. This is under further investigation. The
final test group was identified and beta testing will begin in early
April. A second meeting is scheduled in mid-April to finalize the
testing and finish phase I. It is anticipated that this project will
be in production by late May and the black border closed. No other
phases have been identified.
(MP)
DATA ACCESS INFRASTRUCTURE - project number 10899
Two of the production GQL diagrams (HR & DAC) have been delayed in the
move to production scheduled for April 6th. . Major formatting issues
were resolved with the HR diagram and we now have a workable model. The
Human Resource diagram is currently being tested by the customer who has
had little time because of commitments to M-Pathways. The DAC diagram will
be delayed because of the Development Office needing to get EIS ready
first and the requirement that SQL*Net v. 2 be installed.
(MP)
The customer is currently testing corrections to the data load made
last month. Updates to the data dictionary continues. Completion of this
project keeps getting delayed. The project developer indicated to the
customer that he would assume all is well with the diagram and would
move it to production by April 3rd if not notified by the customer.
This diagram is one of those on the GQL production migration list that
must be completed by April 6th.
(MP)
Testing of the Attribution Model was delayed because the project was
moved to a new test server, Kiwi. The BUDG1 system has been tested on
Kiwi by a team member and all user test accounts have been verified that
they can sign on. The security forms will be sent out in early April
along with a reminder that GQL411 must be installed before accessing the
diagram from IFS. All remaining table and field names were finished
this month. The team member from Data Administration distributed the
layout of the Physical Data model to the rest of the team in late
March. The remaining create table scripts are expected to be completed
by mid-April. The development team is still waiting for test data to
cover the last modules called Source and Use. The customer is
currently working on data dictionary definitions which are required to
complete the online dictionary.
(MP)
The "Group E-mail Services" include REQ, LISTstar, Targeted E-mail, and Classlists.
Project Coordinator: Kari Gluski
REQ addresses the idea of a "Group Mailbox." This month we began working on plans to contact users by phone and invite some to view demos or begin piloting alternatives. Additional work with the Notes web mail access and Notes IMAP4 mailboxes raised issues about several features we knew users would find confusing. The IMAP4 mailbox turned out to require a shared password to work for multiple users. Neda assiduously searched for an alternative, talking to many people at Argus until conversation with the GPCC group revealed that their test Cyrus Solaris IMAP4 server supported group mailboxes. While this new technical option has a few drawbacks, it looks like the solution we need. Users will not need to share a password to use it and they will be able to use familiar IMAP clients like Pine, Maildrop, or the new Windows Eudora IMAP4 support to handle their shared mail folders. The service would need to be put into production but it can run on a templatized Solaris server and be fully compatible with our normal UMCE operations environment.
Chuck Lever has proposed that the Listserver, REQ (in future to be called Group Mailbox Service), and Targeted E-mail run through the same server. Targeted E-mail and Group Mailboxes will be cost-recovery. Details of how to put this into production are to be worked out. Kari will work with the various project leaders and service providers to identify FTEs responsible for ongoing administration, and will coordinate getting this into production with proper documentation for both the technical and customer sides.
Therefore, we still expect to provide a basic function group mailbox service with a fixed quota which would be offered to University units using the Cyrus shared mail folders. Cost to the unit will be $400 per year to set up and operate the mailbox. The option of web browser access and Notes mail will be available at the same cost. Disk space for archiving large amounts of mail would be charged at our normal rates.
We are investigating options for those who need actual workflow management and tracking of e-mail sent to the group. The ARS/Remedy software, already licensed by the NOC and in use at MCIT, looks promising. Further investigation of ARS/Remedy for 4-HELP and the ITD Accounts Office has been budgeted for next year, but if the Accounts Office wants to test it earlier that can probably be arranged. A visit to MCIT to discuss their use of the product is planned.
Next Steps -- The target is to have REQ shut down by July 1.
The group comprised of Chuck Lever, Gavin Eadie, Jim Sweeton, and Kari Gluski continued to meet to prioritize service requirements and decide on software to evaluate Listserv, Listproc, and Lyris. The field was narrowed by the requirement to choose a platform compatible with the UMCE operational environment; i.e., Solaris. Chuck is maintaining information about the evaluation process at http://www.umich.edu/~dirsvcs/mailing-list/products.html
Jim now has access to a test server and will begin installing software, which is all freely available for evaluation. We plan to direct some large lists to the services without producing any output to see how they perform. Kari is working with Chuck to determine the likely operational costs. Ideally we will share hardware with other group mail services (see above) to be more cost-effective.
Next Steps -- The target is to migrate to a new server platform by July 1.
On March 20, Sandy Colombo met again with Financial and Doclib staff and managers to finalize rates and billing for the service. The decision was made to use Service Unit Billing. There is an issue about departmental X.500 lists that we did not get closure on so Damian will schedule a meeting with Sandy to discuss this service.
The service has been a pilot user of the new Stats Service Network Queueing System, a batch job scheduling tool. This allows DocLib staff to schedule jobs to run unattended at off-peak times.
Next Steps --
Work on a web interface for faculty requests and an automatic process to create various types of class lists continues. Mike Nowak obtained clarification from the Registrar's Office about privacy and policy issues and the new class lists process and products will protect students' privacy much better. Additional work by the group (described under UMIE) to develop consistent naming conventions for class list groups is seeing good progress.
The current class list creation software has been moved to new directories where it will be more maintainable and access can be permitted precisely as needed. Budgeting and planning for the service to operate next FY out of DocLib operationally and as part of the UMIE project managerially are already underway.
Next Steps -- The goal is to test the automated web tools for processing
faculty requests for class lists in Spring or Summer for final large-scale
deployment by Fall.
(KG)
No report submitted.
(TV)
U-M GATEWAY - project number 10014
13 new entries were added in the Gateway catalog this month. There are now 535 catalog entries.
News items were updated on a weekly basis.
Gateway email was approximately 20-25% greater than what we have been considering "average". This is getting to be consistent enough that we're going to have to revise our idea of "average".
There have been several modifications/updates to the top-level GW pages, including the addition of a "Highlights" section on the News & Events page.
There was no downtime on the production servers this month. Traffic to the servers averaged 1.4M hits/day, with a large increase in both personal and departmental site traffic.
Traffic/server statistics for February (see www.umich.edu/admin/ for details):
| Personal sites | 22,631,997 requests served | 457,392 Mbytes transferred |
| Departmental sites | 20,637,431 requests served | 105,434 Mbytes transferred |
We are in discussion with OIT about assuming administrative duties for their Mac-based Web servers. This would provide us with servers for those customers who require a Mac platform.
DSC database folks responded to our request for modifications to their procedures in order to support our production needs - many items still at issue. We are pursuing.
Kevin is developing a platform to support secure credit-card transactions, a general calendar program, and Nursing's person-to-person Intranet functionality.
The following departments are using our eXtended CGI (XCGI) development space --
| Health Media Research Lab | Using our platform for WebObjects development. They are purchasing a separate disk drive to attach to our server and house their data. |
| Dentistry | |
| Corporate & Foundation Relations | Campus-wide intranet |
| Michigan Student Assembly | Online voting, Advice Online |
| UM Online | |
| UMIE | Course Homepage Builder, etc. |
| Human Resource Development | Online Professional Development Calendar |
| Alumni Association | Conferencing package |
| Campus Information Centers | Online Events Calendar |
| OSEH | P2000 Project |
Brian is continuing work on RealAudio usage logging. The following departments are using our RealAudio service --
Detailed information on production Web server configuration and statistics can be found at http://www.umich.edu/admin/.
| WEB Statistics | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Month | #Requests | #bytes | #hosts |
| March '98 | 43,269,428 | 562,826,000,000 | 1,397,258 |
| February '98 | 39,306,839 | 500,152,000,000 | 1,369,004 |
| January '98 | 44,224,703 | 564,978,000,000 | 1,421,379 |
| December '97 | 35,845,639 | 412,084,000,000 | 1,083,893 |
| November '97 | 40,298,091 | 443,271,000,000 | 1,263,023 |
| October '97 | 38,728,218 | 453,687,000,000 | 1,214,015 |
| September '97 | 32,966,652 | 379,847,000,000 | 989,069 |
| August '97 | 26,041,042 | 402,853,000,000 | 879,697 |
| July '97 | 23,809,743 | 336,930,000,000 | 840,724 |
| June '97 | 24,719,653 | 371,159,000,000 | 885,560 |
| May '97 | 25,344,926 | 451,719,000,000 | 987,880 |
| April '97 | 29,127,665 | 503,439,000,000 | 1,037,846 |
| March '97 | 28,982,975 | 526,444,000,000 | 1,023,042 |
| February '97 | 25,235,434 | 505,740,000,000 | 963,613 |
| January '97 | 31,910,670 | 543,198,000,000 | 1,008,447 |
| December '96 | 27,231,105 | 539,371,000,000 | 936,470 |
| November '96 | 27,148,553 | 557,387,000,000 | 975,816 |
| October '96 | 26,524,215 | 545,485,000,000 | 948,786 |
| September '96 | 19,600,827 | 382,286,000,000 | 734,210 |
| August '96 | 17,509,927 | 350,465,000,000 | 691,707 |
| July '96 | 16,958,757 | 327,815,168,000 | 681,536 |
(CK)
(**completed - include in "ongoing" list, unless detail provided)
(**completed - include in "ongoing" list, unless detail provided)
(**completed - include in "ongoing" list, unless detail provided)
(**completed - include in "ongoing" list, unless detail provided)
ITD TRAINING REGISTRATION SYSTEM - project number 9948
SCHOOL OF EDUCATION (SOE) Project - project number A8166
(XXXXX - black border is being processed; will have project number soon)
B8868 --Clinical Scholars Project
B8998 - Urology Surgery Database Project
B9987 - School of Public Health
XXXXX - Business School Database
XXXXX - CCGC, Cancer Center Geriatric Center
XXXXX - International Business Analysis
XXXXX - Prostate/Pathology Database
(RUG)
| Regents Office, HTML Bylaws (previously only available in PDF). |
| Graduate's Guide to Commencement at UM, a small site that needed to be updated. |
| Business School - Equity Project (#11304) |
Doug | They are moving their site to IFS hosting space. |
| Corporate & Foundation Relations (#10738) |
Melody, Jeremy | Continuing system updates per customer requests. Investigating some duplicates in database tables that may have been introduced by our data population scripts. Resolution in progress. Also designing/developing solution to mix contacts with comments and sort by date. |
| Dentistry: General (#11219) |
Denise | They have a new site under development, and have asked our assistance with architecture, navigation, etc. |
| Dentistry: Biologic & Materials
Sciences (#11187) |
Karen, Linda, Doug, Scott | An estimate for the BMS Intranet was sent to the customer at the end of the month. |
| Dentistry: Online Grades (#11341) |
Jeremy, Karen | An complete analysis and estimate (including the development of a web interface) was delivered to the Dental School contacts via Mike Buhr from Data Administration. Awaiting their decision to move forward or not. |
| Pharmacy (#10868) |
Denise | Evaluation of existing web site, plan for improvements and rearchitecture, w/special focus on integrating course web sites. Under combined auspices of partnership and distributed support pilot. |
| HRAA Professional
Development Calendar (#10756) |
Karen, Janani, Doug, Jeremy, Melody, Scott | Continuing development work on additional functionality and improvements requested by customer. Site at: http://www.profdevcal.umich.edu/ |
| HRAA Gateway (#11368) |
Doug, Karen | Completed most of the work desired by the HRAA contact. Some minor revisions are still in progress on some sublevels. Discussions are in process for an HRAA Intranet. |
| Technology Management Office
(TMO) (#10816) |
Carol, Scott, Kevin | Working with their staff to get server administration back in line - new contact is Jerry Jackson. Site at: http://www.tmo.umich.edu |
| School of Nursing, Intranet (#11333) |
Denise, Kevin | The Intranet is nearly complete with more information added to the site. Nursing has decided to use the calendar tool Kevin McGowan is developing for the Common Calendar. Kevin is also working on the Person-to-Person section of the Intranet. Denise is also working on some policies and guidelines for both the private and public sites. |
| Pathways Network (SoE) (#10766) |
Scott, Kevin | Coding pretty much done. Kevin to get their database online with the new Mac server. Very, very close to getting this up. Customer is happy and seems to appreciate our perseverance. |
| Transportation Services (#tbd) |
Karen, Melody | Completed analysis document and an estimate of development costs/timeline should be ready in early April. |
| MSA - Advice Online (#11235) |
Bret, Jeremy | Completed the process of converting the site to static files using the Private Web Space to secure them from prying eyes. Moved the instructor search CGI program to production. A little bit of cleanup and documentation remains to be done, but it's nearly complete. |
| MSA - Online Voting (#10690) |
Dave, Kevin | Elections held 3/18-19, and went very smoothly from our end (some communication issues with MSA folks, some of whom were new this election). |
| Health Services (#11364) |
Bret | Some low-level activity supporting their HTML conversion efforts. |
| MStores (#tbd) |
Jeremy, Janani, Tina | This project under auspices of Arlene Wolf/Martha Bhatia, but really a departmental system. Customer has revised requirements. We will provide new cost/time estimate in early April. |
| MCIT, Kerberos (#11318) |
Jeremy, Dave, Carol | Assisting MCIT with Kerberos authentication on AIX server, and planning migration of some users to XCGI. |
| OVP Development (#11346) |
Jeremy | Progressing nicely - interface built for maintaining a password file. Starting the work of tracking down the format of the input and output file. |
| Business School (#11345) |
Kevin | Investigating server configuration, statistics logging, and site visit reporting alternatives. |
| SNRE (#tbd) |
Denise, Karen | This project involves gathering and updating some information on the SNRE site. |
| Medical School Partnership (#tbd) |
Melody, Carol | New project, much through UMIE channels, adding a db backend (oracle specifically) to the course home page builder, and then after that is successful, modifying the course home page builder system to handle departmental needs and faculty needs. |
| Maintenance and Utilities Contracting
Group (#tbd) |
Karen, Doug | Further modifications on the first version of the Contracting Group website are in progress. Expect first version to be rolled out in April sometime. |
| U-M Arts Coordinator (#11376) |
Karen, Doug | We have rolled out the beginnings of a UM Arts website for the UM Arts Coordinator. More work on the website expansion are planned. |
Web Services provides assistance on several ITD projects. Currently, we have staff working on the following --
| COW (#10017, #10047) |
Scott, Doug, Dave | Scott trying (unsuccessfully) to retrofit the OIT COW tutorial. This is becoming higher priority, and will take a lot of Scott's time over the next month or two (~100 hours). |
| ITWeb (#10498) |
Melody | No news this month. |
| ITD Software Licensing/Distribution (#10164) |
Karen, Doug | No news this month. |
| UMIE (#10594, VCA, #10752) |
Karen, Bret, Jeremy, Melody, Scott | Scott working on HTML tips for Course
Home Page Builder and editing Bret's instructions for
template creation. Electronic reserves may need some assistance with their access database. Melody is the contact, and is conferring with Pamela B. as appropriate. |
| U-M Online (#08064) |
Scott | Move to IFS still waiting on Verisign certificate and other admin tasks. Some RealAudio production. Put most of the UMOL User Guide (~60 pages) online. Plus, a fair amount of site maintenance. |
| X500/Slapd (#10622) |
Dave | Development of prototype Web interface to slapd protocol under way. |
| Business School | Met with Pringle Smith and Becky Gaffney about providing support for Departmental pages. Linda is coordinating w/Scott and Doug. |
| Dentistry - Online Grades | A complete analysis and estimate (including the development of a Web interface) was delivered to the Dental School contacts via Mike Buhr from Data Administration. Awaiting their decision to move forward or not. |
| ITD Equipment Inventory | No news back on funding for this project yet. |
| Housing - Rescomp | Melody and Carol met with Jim Gowell to discuss an online trouble reporting, scheduling, and tracking system. Carol met with S. Harris (CRM) to follow up - process modeling/systems analysis should be next step. |
| ITD Computer Sales | Dave and Carol met with Phil Harding to discuss their desire for online transaction handling. They want to announce in July. |
| MedSport | A very rough estimate, based on a short project description provided by the customer, was sent along. The estimate must be processed through Purchasing. Awaiting a decision from the departmental contact. |
| SNRE | Sent an estimate for minor web work for the SNRE homepage to school contact. Awaiting their decision. |
| ITD ITCom | IT Communications has asked for assistance with their Web site. Denise will meet with them in early April. |
March's WWW SIG group meeting was held on on 3/19. Vlad Wielbut gave an extensive presentation on Web-based group/community tools. Kevin McGowan and Tony Winkler demonstrated and discussed the Dreamweaver HTML editing tool. The next session is on 4/16, and will include a presentation by Jeremy and Bret on the JavaOne conference and Java tools.
Denise and Carol met to discuss updates/revisions to the Web Services web site. Denise has started to implement some of these revisions, and is also updating the Staff Picks weekly (usually). Edited/reformatted the how-to-homepage.
Product Support and Evaluation:
RealMedia - purchase is complete, and the new server is in testing. This server is available to campus groups for testing streaming broadcast applications. Contact Brian Vaughan for more information. We are working with Ellen Vaughan and Becky Spaly to determine how best to migrate the encoding service under Web Services for campus-wide availability.
WebObjects - this tool is being assessed for use on two projects: Transportation Services, and UMIE's course catalog, and also to support the needs of the Health Media Research Lab (HMRL - Ed Saunders). At first glance, the development environment is quite resource intensive (WinNT and min 64MB), and the server requires several MB of RAM per application, which could impact server load. Several team members will attend the upcoming training class.
Java - Bret and Jeremy attended JavaOne conference and will present information about their experience at an upcoming WWWSIG meeting.
Hans has documented his CGI libraries for common use. Documenton can be found online at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hmasing/web_architecture/
Dave is working with a computing support staff member at the Business School to port the Web authentication cookie server code to Windows NT. This will be useful to many folks around campus.
(CK)
The Groupware and LAN/NOS services are now working together. A business plan outlining services in in preparation.
(ML)
(CB,WC)
(WC)
(AI,WC)
0 hours of outage time (at least as of 3/25, when reporting). The new
News Server software is working well, and we're planning to add
additional disk space sometime in April or May.
(AI,BV)
IDENTIFICATION, AUTHENTICATION, AND AUTHORIZATION (IAA) - Project 10618
The UMCE IAA service is responsible for the UMCE uniqname service, UMICH.EDU Kerberos authentication service, and UMCE protection group (authorization) service. The Kerberos database contains ids and passwords for over 170,000 users.
A uniqname client program has been developed for Windows 95 and Windows NT workstations. The new program allows uniqname administrators to create new uniqnames and should be available early in April.
The effort continued to eliminate vulnerable computer passwords, part of an ongoing campaign to increase security of U-M's computer networks and data. We are assisting the ITD Office of Policy Development and Education by checking passwords for the UMICH.EDU Kerberos cell. These are the passwords that most U-M faculty, students, and staff use to access their email, use for dialin access, and use to access IFS files. During winter term, passwords are being checked, and passwords that can be recognized by a dictionary check are identified. Owners of these passwords are being asked to please change their password. During March, students with recognizable passwords were asked to please change their password to a better password.
Currently the UMICH.EDU Kerberos server only supports Kerberos Version 4 applications. In order to support Kerberos Version 5 applications, such as Oracle, we have started a project to migrate the Kerberos server to one that will support both Kerberos Version 4 and Version 5 applications. During March we made more progress on fixing the database replication of the MIT Kerberos Version 5 server. Citi is planning to migrate their AFS Kerberos Version 4 server to the MIT Kerberos Version 5 server. We have started to add code to the uniqname server to add uniqnames to the MIT Kerberos Version 5 database when uniqnames are created.
We have been having performance problems (slow file access,
slow logins, etc.) during periods of peak usage. We have made some
software changes to improve performance, and we are going to upgrade
several of our server machines to faster processors as soon as
possible. The new hardware is being tested and the production IAA
services will be migrated to the new machines as soon as testing
is completed.
(MG)
The Institutional File Service (IFS) provides a distributed file system based on Transarc's Andrew File System (AFS). Students, faculty, and staff store files in IFS home directories. There are currently over 84,000 IFS home directories and the IFS stores over 398 billion bytes of data.
The Transarc AFS client for NT workstations has been made availiable from ITD software licensing. Information on how to obtain and install the NT client.
The IFS team is migrating the eighteen AFS file servers to the latest
version (3.4a) of Transarc's AFS software and to the latest version (4.2)
of the AIX operating system. We have ordered two new file server
machines that will increase the IFS storage capacity by over 100
billion bytes of data (from 500 billion to over 600 billion bytes).
(MG)
(BD)
ONLINE DIRECTORY SERVICE - project number 10082
The purpose of the Online Directory Services team is to further the mission of U-M's Information Technology Division by deploying a set of high performance, large-scale, standards-based on-line directories that integrate various technologies and University business processes into services that are relevant to campus computing users.
Delivering accurate directory information to its users on a timely basis is the fundamental mission of a good directory service.
Members of the Online Directory Team continue to work with the Office of Development to plan the implementation of an online Alumni directory service. Mary Pearce will deliver a business plan and cost analysis to the Office of Development in early April.
Dave Winkel from Web Services has assembled a basic CGI-based LDAP client with Kerberos authenticaion. The new client is configurable to allow us to grow our directory service, and to allow us to use the new client with other directory-based services. We plan to have a fully-functioning client with more-or-less complete user interface design and documentation sometime in May for delivery to the team that will build the Internet Access Kits.
Ellen Vaughan is analyzing data flow from HR databases at DSC to our directory. We will use this analysis to re-implement the jobs that provide directory data, in order to improve data quality and simplify the process. Howard Young is re-implementing the regular batch updat process to allow us to run it without putting the directory into read-only mode, and to begin expiring entries again; this work will be completed sometime this summer.
All of the directory administration tools used by the ITD Accounts Office now use only the master directory server. This removes replication from the account administration loop, so that replication problems will have little effect on the creation of new accounts.
ISODE has helpfully provided some technical support for our 5 year old release of the directory software. We will acquire their current product for evaluation when it comes out of beta.
We have a copy of the final release of Netscape's Directory Server on order, and will install it when it arrives.
Our local Sun representatives have provided a demonstration copy of Solstice Directory Server release 1.0, which is based on U-M's slapd implementation. This version of the server has some interesting features, such as disk monitoring, that help make it a more production-oriented server base.
(EV,CL)
GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTING CYCLES
The main purpose of the GPCC team is to further the mission of U-M's Information Technology Division by developing and deploying a group of high-quality, large-scale, high-performance computing solutions (including appropriate infrastructure).
General Information:
Collaboration efforts are continuing with the Departmental Information Services team, the IFS team, the Online Directory Services team, and CITI. These efforts include work on campus on-line directory efforts, umich.edu cell Kerberos 5 migration, the targeted e-mail service, and support for databases on departmental servers. Pilot efforts with ITD Contract Services are continuing. New collaboration with other UM database administrators and database developers is also starting, and collaboration with CSCAR is reviving and being reshaped..
ITD Login Service (Project 10001)
Usage:
The IFS password file now contains more than 84,917 entries; the password file is almost six and a half megabytes in size. The ITD Login service has 78,688 subscribers, up by 0.6 percent from last month. On weekdays, our pool of 16 login machines supports an average of 2,400-2,500 concurrent users between the hours of 10AM and 5 PM, peaking at over 2,600 users. Usage continues to grow.
New Features:
No new features to report this month.
Technical Achievements:
No change here this month.
ITD Statistics and Computation Service (Project 10006)
Usage:
The ITD Statistics and Computation service has 1,236 subscribers, up 63 subscribers (5.4 percent) since last month. During the day, as many as 25 concurrent users run everything from SAS and SPSS to Pine and home-grown Fortran programs on our Ultra 2300. Targeted e-mail customers also make use of the service to deliver bulk electronic mailings. The list of software available on the service is available at http://kiosk.itd.umich.edu/software.
New Features:
Work continues on our batch processing subsystem and alternate local home directory support on the main Statistics server, poleposition.rs.itd.umich.edu. MATLAB licenses were renewed, and ArcView was upgraded to support the ESRI Internet Maps Server.
Technical Achievements:
No change here this month.
Workstations at NUBS and Angell Courtyard Computing Resource Sites:
GPCC supports 10 high-powered UNIX workstations around campus for the subscribers of the ITD Statistics and Computation Service. These workstations have the same applications available locally on them as are available on the Statistics and Computation Service. The intended purpose of these workstations is to provide a graphical-capable interface to powerful UNIX computing resources. There are 6 Sun Ultras at NUBS and 3 at Angell Courtyard (specifically, they are Ultra 1-170s), and 1 Ultra at CSCAR (Ultra 1-140). We record an average of 55 users logging in to each machine per day.
ITD PowerAdmin Service (Project 10828)
Usage:
This pilot service now supports 95 machines (including the Login Service and Statistics and Computation Service machines).
New Features:
No new features this month.
Technical Achievements:
No change here this month.
E-mail: itd-login-admin@umich.edu
(EV)
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