MMM Minutes 07/17/03

Minutes of Smathers
Middle Manager's Meeting
July 17, 2003

Present: Denise Bennett, Rich Bennett, Denise Bogart-Caballero, Robena Cornwell, Trudi DiTrolio, Lori Driscoll, Carol Drum, John Freund, Leilani Freund, Tom Minton, Patrick Reakes, Jan Swanbeck, Carol Turner
SysRequest – Online Ordering
  1. Located at: http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/SysRequest/MainMenu.htm. Anyone can submit a request - the departmental chair will approve or deny - it then proceeds to Systems for configuration and ordering. This process was previously conducted on various vintages of paper – it will go completely online at the end of the month.
  2. Most agree it works well. We’ve come to a consensus about needing an alert that something is waiting to approve – an email nag will soon be added.
  3. Also in the works: attachments will be allowed so that WORD documents, product literature, order copies, etc. can be included.
  4. Criticism regarding the jumping rabbit – rectified: click on it to kill.
File Exchange
  1. We are trying to get away from large email transfers. It takes up the email space of people on the outside and stresses the Library mail server.
  2. If you have a massive amount of information to disperse, put it on a Web site, then send out the URL. Personnel has been using this method to great effect.
  3. Collaborative documents – sharing within departments – the public folders on the Exchange server can be used for this purpose. However, the public folders have become a bit of a junk pile. It is overburdening the server. Some of the items date back to 1999.
  4. In what format are most of the documents and files that are being shared? WORD and Excel, mainly. That said, our software should cover it. There are no reports of a plethora of Adobe Premier documents or anything along those lines.
  5. There is a push in the computing community to open source. OfficeSuite applications have a hold on the industry. Alternatives to it could break the hold. The city of Munich, Germany recently announced that it was going open source and dropping Microsoft entirely.
  6. We need to keep looking – OpenOffice 1.1 has been released – we are evaluating it. It would make a monetary and effort difference. We do not have a plan, we’re just thinking about it.
  7. Some applications can be exchanged with greater ease than others – WORD and Excel are fine. PowerPoint is more difficult; the graphics don’t hold up.
  8. Start thinking about any applications that you need to translate and if they have specific features. We have no plans to move, but anything is possible in a budget crunch.
Browsers
  1. AOL is letting go half of their people who work on Netscape. They are not developing Netscape, will probably go with IE.
  2. IE is the primary Web browser. There has been reports of a cascading windows problem, only with the operating system. The IE 6.1 release is the last one that will come out as a standalone product – until a new operating system is developed.
  3. Opera is a Scandinavian browser, works well except when reading some code that is proprietary to IE. Go to http://www.opera.com - download it and give it a try.

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Last updated July 22, 2003
by Debra Fetzer
debharr@mail.uflib.ufl.edu