Technical Support Provider Forum

Presentations from TSP Forum on:
Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Topic/Speaker:

VPN implementation
Wyman Miles; Senior Security Engineer, OIT-CIT IT Security

• Wyman used a PPT presentation to cover most of the information on the upcoming VPN implementation.
• VPN is roughly analogous to what dial-up was.
• IP-Sec will encapsulate any other services.
• VPN treats RedRover as "off-site," which allows it to be used for testing and demos.
• April 19 is targeted for the "go live date" for general availability, and it will be available to anyone who can register for RedRover (all members of the CU community).
• A web-based component to the software will be part of phase2.

Latest news on BASIL
Jon Atherton; Packaging & Delivery Lead, CIT Information Systems

• Jon distributed a handout (MS Word doc) outlining the SALSA infrastructure/BASIL update.
• Feedback or answers to the questions addressed on the handout should be sent to ba-feedback-L@cornell.edu.

Briefings on... CU IT forum, Vista, & Campus Agreement
Sunny Donenfeld; Director of Distributed Support, Office of VP for Info Tech

Campus Agreement:
• Jen Holleran from Computer Science spoke on Sunny's behalf regarding the Campus Agreement.
• This is a follow up to the update on exploring a Campus Agreement with
  Microsoft for Office Professional. The ITMC representatives were asked
  to consider how much time you think your unit is spending tracking
  office licenses annually and whether or not going with a Campus
  Agreement would save not only your unit money and time, but also the
  University as a whole. Based on the information presented at the ITMC
  meeting and talking with the folks in your organization we would like to
  get your feedback.
• Current state:
  • Licenses purchased through Select are per machine and on average we've
    been spending about $95 k annually for licenses and media. This does not
    include licenses purchased from other venders such as Dell, Campus
    Store, Staples etc.. This also does not include those units currently
    using a campus agreement (spending approximately 30k on the Office piece
    of their separate agreements).
  • Campus Agreement covers public computers/ labs, 2nd, 3rd, nth Cornell
    owned machines (physical and virtual) for individuals, upgrade any PC or
    Mac to new version of office anytime, no need to track licenses.
  • Work at home (.01) and requires tracking.
• Proposal:
  • Campus Agreement for Office Professional Plus (Access, Excel,
    InfoPath, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, Word) 8872 fte's x $~20(level
    B pricing) = $177,440 annual cost
  • Weill: 3411 fte's x $~20 = $68,220 annual cost
  • We think the savings University wide will be at least 3-4 fte's.
• Please send Jen Holleran (jen@cs.cornell.edu) any thoughts you have about this proposal.

IT Forum:
• The 2007 Cornell IT forum will be held on June 13, from noon to 4:00, at the Duffield Hall atrium.
• The forum will kick off with keynote speaker E.P. Rogers, former CIO of MONY presenting from 10:30-12 at the Statler Auditorium.
• Sunny is currently looking for additional participants -- there is no charge for participants from the Cornell community. Please contact itmc-feedback@cornell.edu to volunteer to facilitate a session.

Vista:
• The previous message the Vista-SIG had sent to the community was "don't upgrade," but that has changed...
• The new message is for technical support providers to please upgrade to Vista in order to test its use as the primary operating system -- as this is the only way to find out potential real issues.
• Please e-mail all Vista testing results to vista-l.
• E-mail Sunny at sd94@cornell.edu if you are interested in using the test lab for testing Vista.