Note to UT Chief Information Officer Brice Bible following meeting of July 6, 2006 Brice, Thank you for taking the time to meet with me yesterday to go over plans for this year. The below is a summary of the items we discussed, for the record. One item we did not discuss that came to mind after our talk concerns the draft IT Acceptable Use Policy that was distributed to the Security Review Board in mid June. Concerns were expressed to me, based upon the Faculty Senate's previous discussions of this policy about 2 years ago, on privacy matters. In particular the statement "there should be no expectation of privacy of information stored on or sent through university-owned information technology resources and commmunications infrastructure" presents great difficulty to faculty and staff required to follow federal policies (HIPPA, FERPA, etc.). Numerous research projects on campus have to meet federal privacy guidelines. The statement in Section 19 of the Policy therefore contradicts the first bulleted statement in the "Purpose" section, which notes that protection of confidentiality as required by federal law is an objective of this policy. It would be best if the Privacy section of this draft be modified to make it clear that privacy of information on UT systems will be maintained in accordance with appropriate federal and state law. As I mentioned, I think the two most important items of faculty concern for this year from the IT perspective are (i) providing clarification for the reporting lines for IT issues between the System and UTK; and (ii) carrying out the email transition plan in a way that is minimally costly to campus units (in terms of staff time), accounts for the diversity of uses of such systems by faculty, is easily implemented by faculty at very different technological skill levels, and is communicated effectively to faculty so that they knwo the options available and can make informed choices of what works best for them. Beyond the above, we discussed: 1. I will confur with appropriate faculty to serve on the TAB, to make sure they can attend the standard meeting times of 3rd Wed of each month starting Sept. 20. 2. Regarding email matters, you noted that your staff are working with Deans to proceed so that the old Webmail will transition out by the end of December, that the size limit for mail storage will be about 100MB for students and 150-250MB or so for faculty/staff with a possibility the faculty storage size may be higher. Work will continue throughout this year to determine what other services (IM, video sharing, netmeeting, calendaring) are desired by students at a high priority. You noted that departmental mail servers operating out of sub-domains will still have mail directed to them by DNS without going through Exchange. Regarding a mail backup server to add redundancy at vendor level and avoid the recurrence of the email outage from several weeks ago, we discussed two options. I argued that defaulting to a public system was not a good idea and encouraged you to discuss options for building a back-up server here with the sys admins in A&S who have more experience than I in these matters. 3. Regarding the online music service for campus, you noted that UTK may well be the only campus in state to follow the State directives on making sure institutions are legal. You noted that the review threw out Ruckus due to the ads it contained and that when the bids were opened it appeared that Cdigix had made a very strong offer for UT's business that would be at very low cost for year 1 and would be available for both Mac and Win and available off-campus. 4. Regarding the cost-model for network charges on campus, you noted that Denise Barlow wishes to review the model this year, that wiring costs are not included in the cost model but is paid for sepaartely, and that as the ports on campus have increased, the cost model is not adequate to provide sufficient reserve funding to replace the network infrastructure as frequently as expected to be needed (every 6-7 years or so). 5. We discussed the need for faculty to make clear what the high-performance computing needs are on-campus and that you are willing to consider a variety of options for supporting clusters as appropriate. This is a need quite sepaarte from the availability of resources through ORNL. 6. At UT System level, you noted that we are about to light up a 2 lambda line, one to ORNL and one to Atlanta replacing Internet 2, that these may save some money but cost $500K per year paid to ORNL for 4 years not counting conditioning equipment to get it to an appropriate location on-campus. Regarding JICS, I will get you a set of comments on connectivity problems there. You noted that Student Info Systems are being discussed System wide and that it makes sense for a study to be done regarding whether the system built for UTK, though imperfect, might be best deployed elsewhere in the System. 7. On the topic of outreach, you requested faculty input on appropriate web-based or client based (Centra or alternatives) tools as part of a larger discussion of how much UT should invest in electronic outreach education (e.g. is this part of our mission taht is high priority). Cheers, Lou 7/7/06