Raleigh, North Carolina, November 18-19, 1997 Notes of CPAC meeting Table of Contents Review of Action Items Meeting with the NC District Office Discussion on "Total Ownership Costs" issues DIS Status and Plans New Chair elected - Jerad Bales NWIS status Configuration Management Groups Web Application Development Workshop Support for Word and Wordperfect in report preparation Next meetings Self-examination of CPAC Action Item Summary Tuesday, November 18, 1997 ========================================================================= Introduced new Administrative Officer Representative, Kathy Miller ========================================================================= Review of completed action items * DIS report was given to Lew Wade and Jack Fisher. The input from the report was used in the reorganization analysis. Discussed with Lew Wade and Bob Hirsch the need for strong and organized centralized support in WRD. They said that other feedback has indicated that DIS has received positive feedback from HQ review teams, etc. The report has been reviewed and used to help with DIS planning. * NexWIS principles - Senior staff agreed to use the first set of principles that Bill Carswell distributed Review of action items that are not completed Alan Lumb * Concalc requirements -- Alan said that they have had problems getting users to articulate their requirements. He really wants a user group to come up with these requirements. Close this item out. See action item below. * Regional servers - Contractor has done some work on this. It is really a work in progress as part of the whole NexWis effort. Individual action item closed. * Announce software development - Draft was sent out, final version will be out in a week or two. * Software Library Design - It has fallen through the cracks since August. Greg Allord * HTML standard. Greg drafted a memo that went to CPAC last Sunday. This needs to be reviewed/approved by CPAC and submitted to the Bureau. Graig McHendrie * LAN monitoring and training. Bob Wakelee and Daphne Chinn are working on a white paper that will discuss WAN/LAN issue that will summarize monitoring techniques, hopefully by first of the year. Planning training for NCTM on this topic. They are also implementing Web analysis and management software. This software has the ability to look at and monitor the WAN and LAN and does traffic reports, etc. Bob and Daphne and Jim Morris have prepared Web pages on traffic reports at various time steps for most routers in WRD. See http://wrdnet.er.usgs.gov/mrtg/ * WinCenter systems - RCSs to monitor and encourage procurement of WinCenter systems where appropriate. This is part of the on-going inventory process. Janice Fulford * Emergency needs. Graig has agreed to prepare a draft charter for a committee to tackle this problem. * Guidelines for provisional data. Janice said that there is a need to modernize the way we do review and processing of records. We should have software for doing checking and review automatically. This was also discussed at the Web Applications Development Workshop and we agreed that this was a needed addition to NWIS. That group agreed to form a subgroup with representation from NWIS and Web Application programmers to discuss this and propose a solution. * NexWIS policy issues. Janice prepared something, but Verne and Bill have not had time to do anything with it. Tom Wood * Statistical package - Email from Jim Slack on this topic. In summary, it said that no one package is going to satisfy user requirements. Also suggested that a few simple changes to the requirements developed by the charting subgroup could result in the simultaneous selection of a statistics package (or packages). We need a reaction to this proposal from the charting group. SAS might possibly be used as our charting package. Verne Schneider * Obtain copies of WRD strategic plan for FUTCOM3 Equipment Inventory - Graig McHendrie Graig passed out example tables to the group. He hasn't received data from Central Region yet. He explained what was in the tables. We need to add info from other sites, including ORH-NR, BRR-ER, HIF, and Headquarters. Need to distinguish between Desktop and laptops, between Sun's and SGI's that are used as desktops versus servers. Gloria would like to have maintenance costs included. The Regional Computer Specialists will see that this inventory is updated annually by requesting consistent information in preparation for district program reviews. ========================================================================= North Carolina District Town Meeting DIS Report - Gloria Stiltner * Move to Netscape, computer environment for the future, * Redoing staffing plans for DIS. Contractors will be providing some support for the future. AIS Report - Isabelle * AIS 5.0 will be coming out soon * Building a prototype for a project budgeting package * New version of TNA software will be coming out in the next 6 months HASS Report - Alan Lumb * Discussed software that HASS provides and supports * Will be sending out an email describing some new features that HASS will be supporting, including things such as user registration to receive email notices about package changes and updates, a problem-tracking system (GNATS), information on software development efforts currently underway NWIS Report - Alan Lumb * NWIS conversion has gone well. Port seems to be functioning well * Working on updates to NWIS. A beta release will go out in January. This will include bug fixes, a peak flow database, interactive editing of unit values, QW output tables. Future releases will deal with GWSI. * NexWIS or Next NWIS planning is underway. Working with a contractor to develop a strategy for the next NWIS system. Working on re-evaluating the NWIS-2 requirements and a report will be prepared for Senior Staff. We will be defining architectures and software, but will focus on incremental migration to this new system. Questions from North Carolina personnel * What is the future of Ingres? Answer: We will continue to use Ingres on the DG platform. We are not sure about Ingres for other platforms. * How long before we can interact directly with the database rather than having to use specialized programs to interact with the DB. Answer: We are evaluating this as a part of the NexWIS planning process. User groups are dealing with this issue. * Is there a person on CPAC who deals with serving Arc/Info over the Web? Answer: We should have a process in place in about 2 weeks about how to publish a dataset/database. This has been a long time coming. There are many issues that we need to deal with in regards to archival and access. * One person expressed the desire to create clickable image maps from ARC databases on the fly. * Who should we contact about Web issues. Answer: In the reorganization, Web related activities have been divided into Webmaster type functions (common look and feel) and serving data. Ken Lanfear is in charge of the former. Illinois and Kevin Oberg will be the main contact for Web data serving applications. * Are Mac's still the tool of choice for publications work? Answer: In general, yes. However, many vendors have released versions of commonly used pubs software for the Windows environment. There have been a number of advances in publishing capabilities in Windows (95 and NT) software in the past year. Additionally, Apple Computers role as the clearly defined leader in this area has somewhat eroded. Several, but not all, of the fundamental publishing software upgrades are being relesed concurrently for both Windows and Apple systems. The current and projected roles of Windows and Apple operating systems in support of publishing will be included in the FUTCOM3 report to be prepared in February 1998. This report will include a section regarding the level of parity between these operating systems. At the moment it is still recommened that publications units, especially those with an investment in Apple Macintosh systems, stay with the Macintosh operating system. * What is the Division doing about centralized support of field computers, including standardized configurations? Answer: ICOM and NWIS are working on this. A group has been formed to define requirements. This group is sponsored by ICOM. * Will Arc/Info requirements be considered in the NT-TAC group? Answer: Yes, but not initially. The first meeting and work in Illinois will not focus on this issue, but it will be a factor in what the group does in the future. * We are supposed to be storing datum in NAD83, but most of the datums are stored in NAD27. What are we doing? Answer: We hope to address this issue in release XXX of NWIS. This release is tentatively targeted for January or February 1998. CPAC comments on Town Meeting * The NWIS database question was about database structure, not tools for access. The current NWIS data structure does not make it possible to do straightforward extractions of many values from the database. * There is a need to better research and understand the NT-GIS issues - and it probably needs to be different from the NT-TAC group. * Suggest that NWIS refer to releases by version number rather than 'fall' and 'spring'. ========================================================================= Total Cost of Ownership - Steve Brady * A sample TCO study was done using data from AIS from 1993 to 1997. The results were inconclusive. Steve developed an SQL query that he used to pull the data from AIS and that could be used at other sites, but the way the original data were entered and classified would cause consistency problems across the country. * It seems that we should probably not spend a lot of effort on doing a national TCO analysis. Graig recommended that we spend our effort on investigating ways to reduce known system management costs, such as desktop management software. ========================================================================= DIS report - Gloria Stiltner * Gloria discussed a proposed DIS staffing plan, including field support funding. * Richard discussed the work that the NT-TAC team will be doing in Illinois during the week of December 2, 1997. Wednesday, November 19, 1997 ========================================================================= Election of new chairperson * CPAC elected Jerad Bales as the new chairperson for CPAC ========================================================================= NWIS Status report - Verne Schneider/Alan Lumb * There will be a new release of NWIS in January or February ========================================================================= Configuration Management Groups - Alan Lumb * Alan went over a presentation on CMG's that was given to Senior Staff. Instead of having fixed configuration management boards for each corporate application, there would be a large feeder group of 20-30 people who all had "stakes" in a good product/process, and who would then be pulled in to small, short-lived action groups for specific topics/problems. ========================================================================= Web Application Development Workshop - Kevin Oberg * Kevin presented a summary of highlights, action items * NC District personnel mentioned the need for HQ support and possibly even funds * See notes of Web Application Development Workshop for more details. They are available at http://www-il.usgs.gov/~gdfast/conference/ ========================================================================= Support for Word and Wordperfect in report preparation - Gloria Stiltner * Gloria proposed a possible memo on the use of Word or Wordperfect for preparing reports. A memo discussing FrameMaker and the word processor versus reports preparation will be issued by DIS. ========================================================================= Next meeting * Next meeting will be February 10-12 in Austin, Texas. Second quarter meeting: * The meeting will be May 12 (8:30) to May 13 (4pm), * The meeting will tentatively be held in Madison, Wisconsin * Bill Carswell will be the notekeeper for that meeting ========================================================================= Self-examination of CPAC * We discussed the role and relevance of CPAC, including such things as how effective the committee interacts with Senior Staff, frequency of meetings, charter, etc. ========================================================================= Action Items: * Jon Scott will forward his email to CPAC on a proposed methodology for determining what software DIS should support. * Alan and Verne will meet with Tom Yorke to discuss the formation of a user group for surface water including sediment transport, data, and modeling. * Pat Rael will provide to CPAC a reaction from the charting group to the proposal to include statistics capability as part of the charting requirements. * Gloria will request that the charting group complete a final report including a business analysis for the charting requirements be completed by the next CPAC meeting. * The Regions will issue a statement that encourages computer planning and review in District offices. This statement will include examples from such Districts as Nevada and Kansas. * Gloria Stiltner will establish a mechanism that is similar to the data collection and planning part of District Program Review process for units that report to Headquarters * Verne will look into developing a search engine for internal USGS Web pages * Steve Brady will investigate with NWIS staff the ability to run NWIS as a remote client and will report back to CPAC * DIS will constitute a small group to investigate desktop management tools and establish a recommended approach for the Division * DIS will put out a memo to the District Chiefs telling them that District's will be required to have browsers installed that will support the HTML 3.2 standard. The memo will include information on how to serve Netscape to District users from platforms such as Sun's, SGI's, Linux, and PC's. * Verne will see that a business analysis will be prepared to evaluate moving NWIS from the DG platform * Verne will prepare a memo announcing the creation of a Web Application Development Center in the Illinois District. This memo should summarize the plans for Web Application Development during the next 6-12 months. It should include references to a Web page developed to summarize these efforts. The memo should also include a recommendation/options on Web server hardware, software, OS, httpd, programming languages and what District personnel requirements might be. * Prepare an annual report to Senior Staff on CPAC accomplishments. The second annual report will be prepared by Graig McHendrie for review by CPAC by December 19. Responses will be due to Graig by January 9. Graig will then present this to Senior Staff at the January meeting * Jerad Bales and Graig McHendrie will attend the January Senior Staff meeting discussions on NWIS and will report back to CPAC. * CPAC will review the CPAC charter at the February meeting. The CPAC chair will then present the charter to Senior Staff in April and discuss CPAC and solicit feedback from Senior Staff on the role and relevance of CPAC. * Bill Carswell will follow up with Regional Hydrologists on the selection of new members to CPAC at the next HRMC meeting.