Systems Staff Meeting Notes 02/23/04

Systems Staff Meeting Notes
February 23, 2004

Present: Rich Bennett, Cynthia Bowker, Will Chaney, Bill Covey, Debra Fetzer, Winston Harris, Bobbie Meng, Geoffrey Stewart, Ying Tang
Announcements
  1. 350 pages of proposed rule changes at UF – announced last week. There is currently a search for the Vice President of Student Affairs. There have been changes in titles and who reports to whom. Staff can request a hearing on the changes. The proposal is hard to find on the General Council Website. One general theme throughout is the trend towards TEAMS – isolating USPS. Non-USPS will have their annual leave cash out increased to 480 hours upon termination from UF. Travel – must be paid within the same timeframe as vendors. College tuition – proposal for a flat rate of 15 hours, more per hour if you take additional courses. Facilities equipment – use & cost – new and variable. Unsatisfactory attendance can get you fired. Grievance appeals – added a single line – use of time. All TEAMS members are hired on a six-month probationary period. Not clear if this means new hires only or includes positions in transition as well. USPS has six-month probationary period as well. Supervisors can call for a special employee appraisal of not less than 60 days and no more than six months. Categories: provisional employee – meets minimum requirements, not fully qualified now but will be within six months – this eliminates the trainee status. TEAMS or USPS who promote or reassign – pay will be commensurate, not below the minimum. Provisional employee may be hired below the minimum. Can’t keep same salary if you accept a demotion. Workman’s Comp – home department is responsible for complying to all rules/paperwork. If they fail to comply, they are responsible for all costs. Student Affairs, Housing and Student Employment – racial, harassment, etc have been struck out and it refers, instead, to the state ruling. Changes where what was formerly the Office of Academic Affairs is now the Office of the Provost – title changes. Tenured person can now be brought in and they can retain that status. In summary: 480 hrs paid annual leave (TEAMS), erosion of USPS status, managerial reorganization, open-ended fee structure. Estimated between 1800-3000 have moved to TEAMS. You can now sign up for TEAMS anytime you want.
Review Minutes of 2/16/04
  1. Cynthia will eventually be getting the queen sized bed.
  2. Library Update – Rich attended, no news.
  3. ALF is now ‘the’ Alf. TMT announced an Open House to be scheduled for the Alf.
Moves/Construction Status
  1. Lori has announced that all of the books are out at the ALF except for those at MSL.
Ongoing Systems Updates
Orders
  1. We will soon be purchasing a new clump of workstations again – cut off is in March. W2K or XP? Depends on how they have to be configured. If we get XP, we’ll leave them that way – conversions to W2K have been too painful. W2K is close to the end of its life cycle, anyways.
Networking
  1. Server Room – AC is partially installed. The electricians are searching for the power path. Borrell will be coming Wednesday to turn of the fire suppression system in the tape vault/server room so that the AC braising and CNS drilling for panduit wiring can be completed (without setting off the fire alarm/suppression system). Hope to be done by the end of this week.
  2. Metasys machine – Physical Plant has decided on a completely different security system (not Semco) – so this machine will probably be going away.
  3. The ALF – 20 ports – do those include the laptop ports approved by Steve Shorb? Yes, it includes them. We will stay at 20 ports unless we have approval for more.
  4. Building H2O – not running brown at the moment. Cause for that problem last week is unknown.
  5. Old workstation cleanup – 100 deleted on Friday. Will received several emails and was able to rectify a number of machines. There are 54 machines that can legitimately not connect (laptops, rebuilds, etc).
  6. Marvin/Geoffrey are working on public upgrades - rebuilding GXS 110 & 200’s.
Software Projects Status
  1. FireFox browser evaluation – Cynthia’s overview: Java Script – standard, same as Opera. No scroll bar problem occurred frequently, but you can use the middle mouse button. Some anchor links don’t take you anywhere. Firefox automatically blocks pop ups, and you can turn that feature on/off. Storage Retreival displays immediately – in general, it is faster. It opens your series of bookmarks in tabs. It is an open source browser. It is highly customizable. Cookies can be set on/off. Geoffrey would like to try it in the public area.
  2. Marc updates for Resource Services are complete.
  3. TILT server – MySQL is now working on it.
  4. New Storage Retrieval page for staff was requested by Lori Driscoll and has been created.
  5. Mark Sullivan has been hired for the new Analyst position that reports to Systems but resides in DLC. He was hired on the basis of a single interview. Per Bill, he is not to be a liaison nor have administrator control on any machine. Need to change the Admin password on all DLC machines.
Web Projects
  1. Tom is standardizing the Library departmental pages – may have staff/public versions.

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Last updated March 1, 2004
by Debra Fetzer
debharr@mail.uflib.ufl.edu