Well, this is different…

I’ve been attending the Common Solutions Group meetings (thrice yearly) since 2002 but this is the first attempt to do a meeting totally online.

Topic 1 Shared Services

First discussion was regarding info sharing around possible shared services.

• expertise in virtualization (especially VMware)
• joint partnerships and related issues: operations, shared vendor licensing
• discussion about global server loadbalancing; especially between institutions that have F5 loadbalancing infrastructures.

James Hilton presented on shared services.  He talked about shared email as a service and mentioned issues of legal and procurement (NACULA sp?).  Working through the general council issues.  There is a subgroup.  Request to send Tracy Futhey or James Hilton a note if other institutions are willing to work toward a shared framework for shared services.  Looking for more use cases.

Shel offered that Kauli foundation could be used at model for such a framework/consortium

Topic 2 iMobileU

Michael Gettes of MIT presented.  He said that he didn’t have a great deal to report on standards development, however, he did share that MIT had made considerable progress in developing iPhone apps for various campus academic and campuslive types of functionality.  They are publishing these apps as opensource.  There is momentum in more schools wanting to use the MIT apps base since the terms of licenseing have changed significantly since TerriblyClever was purchased by BlackBoard.

The Ceremony of the Vote

Now this was very interesting.  Adobe Connect had a couple of nice functions that really worked for the voting.  While the list of possible topics was on the shared screen, we had the ability to “raise our hands” which was very usable.  Also, there is a polling feature on specific questions.  We didn’t push that latter function very hard, but it worked.

We end up with Collaboration Platforms, Identity Assurance and Mobile Applications as being the 3 short workshop discussions.  That is, we voted not to have one long topic but rather three short, as has happened in past meetings.