Agriculture Information Technology

Advisory Group (AITAG)

Date:   December 22, 2006

To:       Dr. D.C. Coston and Dr. Jeffery Gerst

Re:       Agriculture Information Technology Advisory Group (AITAG) Report

Fr:        Randy Mehlhoff, AITAG Chair

Greetings, colleagues! This report is for the October 2006 through December 2006 time period. AITAG continues to meet frequently to assess the needs of North Dakota State University (NDSU) ag constituents and monitor the effort to streamline service between Ag Communication and Information Technology Services (ITS).

Considerable time was devoted to discussion on a content management system (CMS) that would help to standardize Web page development for NDSU Ag. ITS had evaluated four CMSs and TYPO3 was the selected open-source software. After close evaluation, AITAG committee members voted in favor of recommending to Ag administration that Ag Web pages move to the TYPO3 CMS. Implementation of this recommendation would be the responsibility of Dr. D.C. Coston, Dr. Ken Grafton and Mr. Duane Hauck.  

Another important issue is the on-going e-mail conversion from the @ndsuext.nodak.edu to the @ndsu.edu extension. Currently, personal e-mail conversions are nearly 100 percent completed. AITAG began discussions on converting non-personal e-mails to the @ndsu.edu extension. AITAG recommends continuing non-personal e-mail addresses for Ag offices. However, some addresses will change since more than eight letters are now allowed. For example, barnes@ndsuext.nodak.edu will become barnes@ndsu.edu but grandfor@ndsuext.nodak.edu will become grandforks@ndsu.edu and lrec@ndsuext.nodak.edu will become langdonrec@ndsu.edu. AITAG recommends this change be made as soon as possible.

AITAG also discussed e-mail lists. There are currently 173 majordomo e-mail lists used within NDSU Ag. AITAG recommends to NDSU Ag administration that e-mail lists convert from the @ndsuext.nodak.edu majordomo system to the @ndsu.edu listserv system as soon as possible.

In response to Dr. D.C Coston’s and Dr. Jeffery Gerst’s request, AITAG initiated a second survey designed to evaluate customer satisfaction. The survey included the same questions as the first survey in 2005 to better compare progress. The survey results are in and AITAG is in the process of studying constituent’s feedback for discussion and possible recommendations at future AITAG meetings.

Finally, AITAG continues to monitor IT changes in software and hardware to keep the baselines up to date. There was discussion on including a baseline for digital projectors. The main issue was including USB ports as a requirement for projectors. Though this feature was added to the baseline earlier without much research,  AITAG now recommends not including a USB port on the computer projector baseline because the USB port only plays jpeg files and not Power Point. In addition, computer projectors with a USB port do not come with the recommended three year warranty.

The next AITAG report will be at the end of March 2007.  

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