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Hey guys,

Unfortunately my main avenue of updating SRAToday.com is on the fritz right now, so the highlights and updates of the latest SRA meeting will be posted below like usual but there will be no follow up on SRAToday.com until a later time, nonetheless, enjoy:

SRA 10C Highlights:

Mary Koziol gave a delegation from the floor about the upcoming restructuring and renovations to the MSU site (http://www.msumcmaster.ca/home.htm). Among restructuring the site to make it more user friendly and easier to navigate, new modules will also be installed to increase the site's functionality and use to students. One of the upcoming features would be MacID integration allowing students to use their MacID to login

An MSU Inc. meeting was held in which:

1) the new Board of directors were confirmed as Officers of the corporation
2) The selection of next year's auditors for MSU was postponed to a later meeting.
3) Julianne Simpson was appoint secretary to the Corporation for 2010-2011
4) Amendments to Corporate Bylaw 3 (see here) were aproved
5) A variety of items were allocated for and then expended, this includes the work to be done on the site by Orbis communication and UTS, several computers and network storage solutions in a variety of areas and services in the MSU. see here for full details


What happened in the general SRA meeting:

1) Bylaw 5 - Financial affairs (see here) and Operating Policy 2 - Employment (see here) were amended.
2) The 2010-2011 MSU Clubs were ratified (see the clubs here)
3) Board of Director year plans were approved (see them: Mary Koziol (President), John McIntyre (VP Admin), Nick Shorton (VP Finance), Joe Finkle (VP Ed)

Interesting Information that came up:

- The new system replace ELM will be called A(venue) to Learn and will be accessed at: http://avenue.mcmaster.ca/

- The new Campus Events Manager, 1280 Manager, and Diveristy Services coordinator have all been hired

- The OUSA Campus coordinator and Teaching Awards Coordinator have been hired

- Online voting is on track to be tested earlier in the year in preparation for the major MSU elections later in the year. It will be through the MacVote system and use MacID logins.


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MUGSI has a limit of 500 students that can access it at once

SOLAR has a limit of 250 students that can access it at once

(talk about the maximum allowable number of users....)

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Brought to you by: *****www.SRAToday.com*****

Wow, the user limits for MUGSI and SOLAR are much MUCH lower than I thought!=/

How hard would it be for you guys to cut all the bullshit from your meetings, and get straight to what the students want fixed and have been complaining vehemently about? (It's MUGSI/SOLAR btw.)

How many students attend McMaster?

Wikipedia says 20,600 full-time 3,836 part-time...

Solar: 250/~24000 x 100 = ~1 percent.
ONE percent of students can get on solar at a time. I know not everyone is trying to get on at once, but that honestly does not make any sense to me.

Originally Posted by Souldier

How hard would it be for you guys to cut all the bullshit from your meetings, and get straight to what the students want fixed and have been complaining vehemently about? (It's MUGSI/SOLAR btw.)

Considering that the MSU has no control over UTS, it would be pretty hard.

Originally Posted by Souldier

How hard would it be for you guys to cut all the bullshit from your meetings, and get straight to what the students want fixed and have been complaining vehemently about? (It's MUGSI/SOLAR btw.)

As mentioned, we don't control MUGSI/SOLAR, however, we have been lobbying to have it replaced for some time, and the university has finally gotten a move on. Unfortunately, a large portion of the electronic infrastructure at Mac along with MUGSI/SOLAR being replaced takes quite some time and money.

At the beginning of the summer, myself, Vishal (ex-MSU prez), and Huzaifa Saeed all met with Gartner, the consulting/planning firm the uni has hired to go about replacing the whole structure at Mac, and not just MUGSI/SOLAR; and we let them know everything that was wrong with it (practically a 1 hour MUGSI/SOLAR rage rant) and they clearly understood its a problem.

Now the bigger problem for them and the uni is time, and money....

I know you guys are working as hard as you can because you're all students and this affects you too, but did you try showing it to them?
1. Make them pay you 6 grand.
2. Then make them try SOLAR. No no..not just logging on at 2 PM on an off day...Wait until the first years attack it and then duct tape hands to mice and make them try registering.
Only when they cry and/or break a laptop will we know that they're going to give us their best possible product.

Originally Posted by Souldier

How hard would it be for you guys to cut all the bullshit from your meetings, and get straight to what the students want fixed and have been complaining vehemently about? (It's MUGSI/SOLAR btw.)

The Concerns regarding MUGSI have been relayed to the McMaster CIO(John Kierney) In detail by mysell, Vishal Tiwari(Old MSU President) & Richard Cioci SRA Science earlier this year. UTS has hired an outside consulting company to analyze our IT & Registration systems and their report will be released later on in the summer. In the last meeting myself & Mary Koziol(New MSU President) had with him he informed us that he "wants" to implement the improvements to MUGSI and roll out an ambitious multi year improvement program.

However the biggest hitch might be the costs, they will easily go above $10-20 Million and with the McMaster Deficit the CIO is trying to get hold of that funding. Once he gets funding starting September he can start the transition towards an overhaul.

In other words the SOLAR issue requires highly specialized and expensive form of labour because of its sensitive nature and more importantly expensive hardware set up and its not an easy thing to fix because of a number of reasons. Alot of it comes down to the fact that it is directly linked to the student records system and henceforth is highly sensitive.

If I manage to get the report from the CIO I will publish it on MacInsiders if I have the permission!

But in terms of the courses being full I have a feeling alot of the time it has to do with the intricate course permissions that the Registrars office and faculty offices in terms of seat permissions and quotas, I vaguely recall that from my meeting with someone from Registrars office last year. Wait listing was the main issue I've already discussed and asked for since I gathered from a few places(MI mostly) that most of the traffic on SOLAR is people repeatedly trying to check and see if the course they want has opened up or not, unfortunately the response was the same that it would take a 6/7 figure sum to specfically get waitlisting and we are better off wating for the big overhaul. I've also relayed the demand to Gartner consulting who held a focus group with myself, Richard here and former MSU President in April.

Some people have also said simplistic stuff like: Why don't you "increase server capacity" or "overhaul the system"

Well "coding it better" and "Getting extra bandwidth" as quick easy fixes are sadly myths in the case of SOLAR.

Since they are so obvious I have actually suggested them to more then one person in UTS, however the answer in short has been that we can "possibly" do a bit of that but the actual costs because of the prehistoric coding/IT Infrastructure of Student Records system means it will end up costing alot of money.

The CIO gave me a simple option, a) We can get this minor cosmetic changes in there that will slightly improve the system for a certain six/low seven figure cost or b) We can do a long run overhaul that most Ontario Universities are going through in the past few years(Waterloo recently), the long run overhaul will render incompatible any changes made with option "A" because they will be going with a brand new systems provider. Therefore the Admin will economically favor the latter.

But in my opinion the main issue here is that there is a lack of incentive for the administration to spend that amount of money "just" on SOLAR because having a low ease of registration doesn't stop thousands of students from applying to Mac Every year nor does it make current students pack up shop and leave(Keeping in mind that places like Uoft suffer from similar issues with their ROSI system). Sure there is a firestorm in the summer but it dies down soon enough, as someone who tried to lobby the university to get it changed it was a very hard sell, but atleast they did hire the outside consultants who are almost done their report and we have been promised improvements.

The tricky issue here is that SOLAR isn't a separate entity, it was built as a direct part of student records and was supposed to hold no more then 10,000 or so students at max. With the Double Batch(In 05 or 06 where they eliminated Grade 13) and exponential student enrollment it was by no means designed to hold 22,000 students. Hence what has happened is that they have applied patches and tape over the years to hold it together while the core itself is no longer capable of supporting 22,000 students. In other words we can't directly tweak aspects of SOLAR without affecting student records.

And lastly I haven't been able to procure a breakdown since the costs are very much estimated based on similar upgrades at other Canadian universities, the "actual" figure will only be determined after a RFP later on this summer(Or so I heard) and will most probably not be revealed to any outsiders like the MSU. The figure was not just for SOLAR itself but the entire Student Records department(Which is disturbingly manually fed) and accounting & payroll, libraries, research and so on. In other words the entire IT Infrastructure.

As for Bushra's comment that we should "show" them how bad MUGSI Is?

They already have a good idea of how bad it is. there is a way to find out how BAD McMaster Registration system is. There is actually a way(Not exactly 100% reliable, but atleast it gives a rough estimated idea)!

http://static.globecampus.ca /uploads...ChartsOnly. pdf

That link above is the Globe & Mail 2010 Annual Canadian University Report; McMaster IS the lowest(Tied with UofCalgary) with a C+ grade for "Ease of Registration". I actually relayed that fact very clearly to the CIO and he did agree with me that our registration systems need help, that is why a consultancy company was hired and most probably Mac is going to invest in an overhaul.

But here is the other thing, McMaster got 2nd best in the larger schools with an A- when it comes to overall "Most Satisfied" students, now If I were an Administrator of the University I would pay more attention to that and be less concerned that I might be losing students because they are dissatisfied or that Mac is getting a Bad Rep with future students.

Most people also seem to be quite happy with the Quality of Education(A-). Ease of Registration doesn't negatively impact what we learn nor our experience with the community(Like for example extra curricular opportunities, social events and so on); rather it is more of an "inconvenience" that people go through. The only major downfall is people not being able to get certain courses/electives they want because they couldn't get in, but on the other hand "someone else" gets that instead of you in a random lottery of "who gets in first", whose to say who deserved getting into that course more?


Another question that was brought up: Why Hire an expensive outside consultancy company and not give it to a local IT Firm at a cheaper cost?

I'll take a speculative shot at it:

As you can see here the company Gartner http://www.gartner.com/technology/re.../education.jsp are a world renowned company when it comes to identifying the issues with a complex IT infrastructure and recommending vendors and solutions for it. They are being hired to look at the entire IT system and MUGSI as a part of Student Records is a part of that.

It should be clear that MUGSI cannnot be taken apart and "fixed" by a ragtag bunch of students or a local tech company. It will require expensive companies with millions of dollars in R&D, the Education IT sector is very unique and different in that sense.

Same with "Increasing server capacity" and "overhauling the system": They are nothing more then buzzwords that everyday people(aka people without a strong background in Compsci;Including myself before I was briefed in detail about this by UTS) seem to throw around as "solutions". Sadly they aren't the solutions in this case, Student Records needs to be built from the ground up with the utmost care because of the sensitive nature of what it deals with.

There are only a few companies in North America(I think none in Canada) capable of doing that and they definitely don't come cheap.

I fully trust the CIO to make the right decision given his background in Infrastructure overhauls. He has made it quite clear in his strategic plan that systems overhaul is a priority; all that is required is the money and that bit is upto the McMaster Board Of Governors. And I'm not sure where this factors into their priority, after all we ALL got the Email from PG saying Mac faces a $100 Million deficit for the next year.
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Now Souldier, a few people will get frustrated and usually would reply to your comment saying "Why don't you stop complaining and making unrealistic demands from the SRA "Volunteers" and get elected and have a go at them etc etc"

But my question to you is simple: the SRA is elected as "representatives" of students and our job is to convey the concerns back to the administration, we do not have any direct power to change anything with MUGSI .

I do believe we have done that, the reason myself and Richard were invited to that consultancy firm meeting was because we both have been pestering UTS & Registrar since we got elected in October 09 about these issues. In our meeting we relayed every single issue and suggestion we had ever heard about MUGSI(Alot of them from MI) and gave it to the consultants.

At this point the situation is that UTS realizes there is an issue with MUGSI and they have hired a company to get them a detailed assessment and they are committed to improving it.

The University is facing a $100 Million deficit and have already made major cuts all across the board; I'm not entirely sure how willing they would be to spend a good amount of money on the IT Infrastructure.

So, What else would you like us to do taking into account my entire spiel about our efforts & What we have been hearing from UTS?

p.s: Unfortunately with my election to "External" affairs(I.e: My current role is to deal with issues beyond the Campus at the Municipal, Provincial and Federal level) I will no longer be able to pursue these issues "officially" because they no longer fall under my mandate, if you have any questions or concerns you can email the University affairs Commissioner[email protected] ca or the President Mary Koziol [email protected] r.ca who have taken over my Google Apps project as well.