Minimum Workstation and Software Site License Subcommittee Minutes

 

May 17, 2007
Meeting in AH-1120 at 10 a.m.
Diana Osborn, Chair

CATS Mini-Conference
Diana Osborn announced 5 attendees to the recent CATS Conference are scheduled to do a mini-conference presentation of the sessions they attended on June 7, 2007 from 1-3 pm in SSW-1500. The overviews will include links to download sites. Please come and share the experience.

AccVerify/Repair and HiCaption software
Cyndi Chie mentioned that both the AccVerify/Repair and HiCaption software is on the CD that Celia Chavez distributed for the HiSoftware projects. It was noted that these packages can be installed separately rather than all or nothing. This allows someone who just needs HiCaption to have only HiCaption installed.

Be sure to make the phone call for the unique code or grab it from the Internet site, when doing your install. This code unlocks the software and must be unique on each computer being installed. Otherwise, the software will stop working after 30 days. For those who are imaging or ghosting, you will still have to touch each computer and update them with separate unique codes. Also there is an auto update setting that is on by default and the program requires admin rights on a key in the registry.

Cyndi announced plans to have the 3-hour via phone webinar training recorded in June and made available on the web from the CSU's site. For other information, the SDSU web site is http://access.sdsu.edu.

The department software contacts (those who picked up the CD from Celia) must report their installations to Celia for the required tracking of the software at SDSU. Please send the total number of installations in your department along with the names and email addresses of the individual faculty/staff and/or name and location of the computer lab receiving the software no later than Friday June 1st, 2007. Celia will share the names with Cyndi Chie, who will develop a separate mailing list for update information and training options. Cyndi will not automatically include the email addresses Celia shares with the WEBDEVSDSU mailing list without the individual faculty/staff memberŐs permission.

Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Software Installations
Cyndi Chie stated the campus is trying to take advantage of an opportunity to bring computing labs up to the current versions of the Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Software. For example: Dreamweaver, Flash, etc. Please send the quantity, platform, name and version of these packages that are currently installed in your departmental computing labs. In addition, information is needed on ColdFusion Servers Of particular interest are any installations of ColdFusion 6.x or lower, as these versions do not meet accessibility requirements. If you include in your email any new requests, please keep their quantities separate and provide a justification of need for each. New requests will only be considered after existing licenses are brought up-to-date and the priorities set by the ATI team are accomplished.

Deep Freeze
Tabled for the next meeting, as a PO for 2000 copies has not been confirmed.

License Server for Assistive Technology
Severino Reyes from Student Disability Services is looking into the possibility of a campus solution (license server) to the problem of distributing assistive technology software (i.e. JAWS, Zoomtext, Kurzweil 3000, and Naturally Speaking). Currently, these software packages are mostly used by Student Disability Services, but there are other departments that have some of this software. Severino said the discussion has been started with ATI, including Rich Pickett, due to the need to have this software available in all student labs. In addition, other needs (i.e. sharing license between web developers, metering volume purchased licenses, etc.) may also be met with campus wide license server and will include Rich Pickett.

Severino will keep MWSSLS posted on any developments affecting students, faculty, and staff use. After additional discussion, Darrell Irwin volunteered to join the ATI committee and champion a wider solution to coordinate all site licenses on campus. Diana noted that FlexLM is running on the ROHAN server and Ron Nash mentioned it could handle another line in his Crontab program.

EndNote and RefWorks
Carolyn Baber from the Library is the new representative on the EndNote and RefWorks site license project. The RefWorks contract is expiring on June 30, 2007 as the Library only paid for 06/07 and cannot afford the $18,000 plus to renew the unlimited access. This would leave the 812 users of RefWorks adrift. It was noted that the 812 users were gained by word-of-mouth and not from any concerted public relations campaign. If the service were to be advertised, a surge in users would be the outcome. These current users are mostly undergraduates. Carolyn stated that porting their data to EndNoteweb is not totally straight forward, but is doable. EndNoteweb is not as flexible as RefWorks. More of the Library's databases can port directly into RefWorks, than they can with EndNoteweb. Neither product works with all of the databases.

Diana said that EndNote's vendor is offering the desktop version of EndNote with unlimited (plus home) use for students (including doctoral and grad student pursuing a degree), faculty, and staff for $20,000 per year with free access to EndNoteweb. Everyone mentioned the continued and rising number of requests for the desktop version of EndNote and that the Librarians have been offering training in EndNote use to students for some time.

MWSSLS committee therefore wants to recommend to the IT Managers that we should purchase the desktop version of EndNote now as this is the time to switch and that John Ross' involvement is needed to have Academic Affairs fund the request. Carolyn Baber will write a justification to continue RefWorks and what is lost by a switch to just EndNoteweb.

SPSS for Mac and Vista
Celia Chavez announced the latest version of SPSS for Mac does not work with the intel Macs and the fix (also know as version 16) won't be available until the last quarter of 2007. Version 11.04 does work, but some statistics may be off a little.

Also there is a hot fix available for SPSS 15 with Vista on the http://support.spss.com web site.

Camtasia/Snagit
Due to recent request for these software packages, Diana is requesting each department send her their current number of installations of both Camtasia and Snagit. This information will be used to explore purchasing possibilities.

Announcements
Diana Osborn reminded everyone that with the demise of the NAC committee, MWSSLS is a Sub-committee under the direction of the IT Managers Committee and Bob Newhouse is our official liaison to the IT Managers committee.

Merka Phoenix requested Parallels for Mac as a possible agenda item for next month concerning a volume purchase versus a site license.

Carol Tohsaku announced she is condensing the Chancellor's Office Survey workbooks for a 2nd distribution and will need responses back by June 8th.

Next MWSSLS meeting will be on June 21, 2007 at 10 a.m. in AH-1120.

PLEASE NOTE: The statements found on the MWSSLS Home Page are for informational purposes only. While every effort is made to ensure that this information is up to date and accurate, official information can be found in the University publications.

Last modified on May 22, 2007
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