Office of Information Technology

Technology Advisory Board (TAB)
Minutes of Meeting of January 19, 2005

Attendance:

Barbara Dewey, Steve Dolgner, Stephen Esposito (Proxy for Chaz Molder), Jim Gehlhar, Ray Hamilton, Julie Little, Anne Mayhew, Mike McNeil, Faye Muly, David Ratledge, Andrew Schafer (Proxy for Jessica Hodge), Rita Smith, Robin McNeil, Stan Pinkleton, Jelena Pjesivac-Grbovic.

FY 06 Departmental Award Review

An online listing of the departmental requests for FY 06 funding was distributed to the voting members of the Technology Advisory Board prior to the meeting and copies were made available at the meeting. Steve Dolgner led a discussion of the awards for each department. The awards closely followed the priorities assigned by the Dean of each college. A motion was made to support the award recommendations and approved, without dissent, by the 9 voting members present.

SONY/Napster Pilot Program

Stan Pinkleton provided an update of the SONY/Napster pilot program. This pilot program provides access for 6000 students in the residence halls and off-campus university housing to the SONY library of copyrighted music. Over a year in planning and negotiation, the program started on January 7. Since that date approximately 1500 user codes have been requested and 850 Napster accounts have been activated. OIT maintains a website with information about requesting a user code, activating an account, and a Frequently Asked Questions section. In the next few weeks a cache server containing the most requested songs will be installed on the Knoxville campus to reduce the demand on the ResNet Internet bandwidth. Network usage will continue to be monitored both on-campus and to the Internet. This information as well as other issues will be evaluated at the end of the first semester of this pilot program. Steve Dolgner requested 25 user accounts for the SGA leadership, to include the newly elected leaders for the 2005-06 academic year. This will allow their full participation in the evaluation of the pilot program.

E-mail Quota Increase

The leadership of the Graduate Student Association and the Student Government Association have advocated for increased e-mail quotas. In response the Office of Information Technology has updated backup technologies and expanded disk space to allow an increase in quota for all users effective January 7. The quota for faculty, staff and graduate students was increased from 40 MB to 100 MB. The quota for undergraduate students was increased from 20 MB to 50 MB. This will result in an increase in the percent usage of the available disk space and increase the time to backup this disk space. Thus, further increases will not be possible with the current technology and resources, however the e-mail quota will be included in the discussion of e-mail consolidation.

With no further business, the meeting was adjourned. The next meeting of the Technology Advisory Board will be Wednesday, February 16, 2005, at 2:30 PM, in the 4th Floor Conference Room, Andy Holt Tower.

Minutes by: Karen Tadlock