July through September 2009
AMIT
A great deal of effort was put into the Wikis 3.0 upgrade on August 1, 2009. This resulted in bringing Wikis ahead 4 major releases, fixing a number of application/system configuration issues, integrating confluence with LDAP, many fixes to the application database along with UI changes and other updates. After the upgrade we had to deal with problems around Touchstone CAMS users accessing Wikis given the history around account management of this service and finally fixing all these problems working with the Touchstone team to complete the CAMS-LDAP integration work. AMIT has now positioned wikis to be much more easily updated and maintained. We expect applying software updates going forward should only take a few to several days instead of the months of work in the past. AMIT has initiated the process to upgrade wikis to 3.0.1 just prior to the end of the quarter and expects to have it completed within the first few business days of Q2.
AMIT also completed the IS&T web site deployment in concert with NIST. Also a significant effort given the complexities of configuration and the
changes made when deployed to production. We responded very well have positioned this service to be easily updated with minimal effort and satisfied a smooth deployment process for the developers as well as NIST for production.
As we all know, AMIT is involved in a great many things. The mobility service deployment process continues to evolve as we resolve issues with back-end components in concert with mobility developers. AMIT has been key in deploying developer tools along with Dave Tanner (more on this later). 1/3 of AMIT, Andrew Boardman, continues active involvement with Athena OS updates and deployment along with Bob Basch. While doing all this project work, AMIT is also responsible for assisting all of ISDA with system and application integration issues, interfacing with OIS on almost all production deployment concerns and increasing involvement in DRS projects like MITBI and assisting with some of the Stellar related systems issues where possible and appropriate. AMIT has initiated work to bring all services using Touchstone to use
Shibboleth 2.x software and configuration. This work will continue into Q2 to try and complete by Q3.
Lastly, working in concert with OIS, AMIT has initiated the process to purchase 3 servers according to OIS specifications to be managed by OIS as part of the VMware server farm but dedicated for use by ISDA/AMIT. AMIT will manage VM deployment on these servers for ISDA in order to provide more timely and cost effective service to the ISDA developers. We expect to have this work completed by the November 15 billing cut-off and expect to see a $40-70K overall savings on server costs for ISDA.
Developer Tools
David Tanner has completed the work on Developer Tools for the Nexus Maven repository, Bamboo continuous build service and documenting the IDE configs for Netbeans and Eclipse. David and AMIT have created production service instances of these services and have moved ISDA to these new systems. AMIT is working with OIS to upgrade the SVN repo which should also stabilize Fisheye used by the Kerberos Consortium. We expect to have completed the migration of all users of the old services to the new by end of October and turn-off the old services shortly thereafter. This effort has been underway for nearly 2 years and the last year has seen a clear definition of these services and an effective path forward to this point of completing the work and moving these developer tools and services into a maintenance mode. See the Devtools wiki at wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/devtools.
You will find videos and other documentation of how to use and configure these services and tools. This work also involved transitioning the
Moira web service over to OIS since it needs to write to Moira. While this has delayed the deployment of DevTools, it also sets a path forward for
moving other ISDA web services over to OIS, something AMIT has been wanting to do for some time. Dave is now spending time on Mobility and will devote 20% of his time once he has learned the environment and will then proceed to some other work on Identity Services during Q2.
Identity Services
Touchstone use continues to progress. As previously noted, significant effort has been put forward on the CAMS-LDAP integration by Bob Basch. We completed the work with a saturday outage of Wikis but lots of changes to CAMS and our LDAP environment to make everything seamless. At this point we are in the hands of CCS to finish the new Moira/Web UI to provide a better experience against LDAP and Moira to allow our community to more easily find and manage LISTs and find collaborators via CAMS. MIT Libraries continue app development to make further use of Touchstone. Barton went production in Q1. Overall, Libraries are happy as we continue to work with them to help solve day-to-day and content access issues (DMCA related). We spent some time working with HR to help them configure Touchstone but also found a number of security
issues which we clearly documented and presented to them. As applications switch to using Touchstone we get problems related to special situations like how military users configure their systems to access services like Seminar XXI. Unfortunately, this takes away from the dev work but it is worth understanding and fixing these edge cases. Work has begun implementing the next version of the Identity Provider (shibboleth 2.x) and we have configs defined in support of the 2.x Service Providers which AMIT is rolling out. We also continued to work with the Alumni Association toward the use of Touchstone for their applications but progress has been slow as AA has had various challenges given budget cuts.
perMIT is now a project under Identity Services. Our timeline has changed some to address the retirement plans for Jim Repa. We have spent time understanding performance and capability issues of MySQL 5.4 and we are continuing down this path - it looks like we will not need to consider other DB technology. We met with the architect at NIH and continue to work with others at NIH to help the understand the capabilities of perMIT. They remain interested. We presented our plans (adjusted for Jim's departure) to TAP and received some comments - overall positive and constructive discussion and no complications.
Unfortunately, others in IS&T continue to roll out new services based on MIT certificates only and appear not to consider the use of Touchstone.
Mobility
MIT Mobile Web 2.0 has been successfully deployed. This brought about some new features along with architectural changes in support of future
applications along with a new WURFL engine. During Q1 we have been working to transition from the use of contractors to internal staff. We have 2 staff allocated 20% time to work on the integration aspects of Mobile and at least 1 FTE from CCS on UI. Now that we have no contractors we
need to concentrate on developing the iMobileU community effort to better utilize the collective efforts in higher ed toward a common goal of
usable Mobile infrastructure in support of emerging Mobile apps. Andrew Yu will be leading this effort. Interest has been expressed by a number of institutions.
We also used some students to help develop an iPhone application in concert with MIT Mobile. This was done because Terribly Clever was
purchased by Blackboard and we have been unable to achieve agreement on IPR issues involved in the product and process - much like Blackboard CMS. In 6 weeks we were able to develop an effective prototype and this will be incorporated into MIT Mobile going forward.
We continued to work with TLO to address licensing and collaboration concerns on MIT Mobile and iMobileU. Our last meeting is promising and should yield a useful framework for collaboration on this and other software. We expect an October release of the open source version of MIT Mobile 2.0.
The MIT SMS service is real - although not yet "production". MITEDU (or 648338) short code for SMS provides a text message based version of
MIT Mobile.
SWRT
We have 2 IS&T top priority release projects for Q1+Q2. MacOS 10.6 led by Patrick McNeal and Win7 by Alex Kozlov. These are significant
undertakings occupying nearly 100% staff time. We continue to work with others to properly utilize the project teams to coordinate communications and responsibility for deployment. This appears to be a cultural and/or political struggle but we endeavor to develop and then communicate a better release process for the software SWRT will be responsible. We in process of understanding which software SWRT should be handling and what items would be best served and deployed by more appropriate teams within IS&T.
A top priority is to fill the currently designated Deployment Specialist position. We hope to have this position filled and productive during
Q2.
SWRT seriously needs a name change to help communicate the new position it occupies for software release. We have begun socializing the
problem of SWRT staff being divested by the work has not been divested. We think for some this will be difficult to appreciate. Communicating this situation and developing paths forward will take time and care at many levels to resolve but this remains a high priority issue for DSPS.
Athena
Work continues, as it always has, on Athena - now debAthena. History has shown staff allocated time to work on Athena but not advanced planning of staff resources on Athena so we can plan time allocations and understand the impact of the work on Athena. Q2 will see better planning efforts which should yield better allocation of staff resources for Athena as well as other efforts.
April through June 2009
This quarter saw significant changes in personnel with layoffs early
in the quarter. These layoffs have caused significant impact on how
our regular work gets done - in some cases doing more work and in other
cases we have had process improvements. Team morale has been fragile
given staffing changes but it is improving. Promised changes at the
highest level have had impact by keeping fever, uncertainty and doubt
at a reasonably high level. Given the events of the last year, this
appears to be a new normal, unfortunately.
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