Academic Support Computer Rep General Meeting

Thursday September 4th, 10 am - 11:30 am, NH 3001.

Minutes

New Vendor for Rollover Program

After going through the RFP process, Lenovo has been selected to replace Dell as the vendor in the Rollover Program. Lenovo has been in business for 22 years, and took over the IBM personal computer business in the year 2005. Metafore will be the distributer for Lenova. Metafore has an office in Waterloo.

We are currently finalizing the specs and prices for the Lenovo products we provide. To give you an idea what is being provided, here are some preliminary specs:

Standard Desktop: Lenovo M57p, USFF model, 3:0 GHz, 2 GB memory, 160 GB hard drive, 20" monitor, 4 year on site warranty.

Laptop Models: R400 (14" monitor) or T500 (15" monitor). The T500 is a higher end model. Both have 2 GB memory, 80 GB hard drive.

Pricing is still being determined, but the desktop will be about $900 and the R400 laptop about $1200.

Final specifications and prices will be available sometime during the week of September 8th.

Review of where we are with the rollover, and what we are targeting in the next year.

We started the rollover program in August 2005. To date, we have rolled over approximately 700 workstations. From now until August 2009 we have about another 70 workstations to do. Please check to see if you have any non-Dell computers (e.g. Vaults) being used by FTE staff that have a processor less than or equal to 1.6 GHz.

The rollover program plan is to roll over workstations every 4 years. There were a lot of Dells (about 250) ordered in the first year (Aug 2005 to Aug 2006), so those are scheduled to be replaced in the August 2009 to August 2010 time frame.

A reminder that the rollover is for Full Time Equivalent (FTE) staff in non-ancillary departments, and include staff that use computers in their job.

New FTE hires in the eligible departments qualify for the rollover.

Vista Deployment Update

New workstations that are deployed will now come with Vista, unless a client can specify an application they use for their job that won't run in Vista. There are Vista test machines available for loan on a 2 week basis. You can use the IST request system to request a Vista test machine. Vista issues are being logged at

http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/istweb/vistasp1problems.htm

and Vista issues can be emailed to sbeaupre@uwaterloo.ca. It is the special purpose applications, and the corporate applications that need to be tested.

Exchange - update on where we are(Trevor Bain)

An Exchange pilot is underway and going very well. People using Exchange really like it. Some nice features include:

1. a nice web interface, that looks like Outlook.
2. a nice interface to see setup your "away from the office" messages. You can specify the date/time range that the message will be sent, and also can setup a different message for UW emails than the message for external messages.
3. works well for Blackberry users.

There is currently no backup, but that is being worked on. The mechanism to move clients from admmail/mailservices is ready to go, and is working well. It is expected that all academic support staff will be on exchange in a year.

Training Opportunities in the Fall: SEW, Friday morning seminars, other training opportunities.

Electronic registration is now being used for the SEW program (paper copy is mailed to those that don't use computers in their job: http://www.ohd.uwaterloo.ca/services/tech/index.html

IST Friday morning seminars for September and October: http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/istweb/profdev/profdev.html

If any department would like to have training in a supported application, and has 5 or more people interested, please contact Bob Hicks.