Lab Update 2009
Initial email
The labs that are in-scope for this project are all the Scenario Group Rooms, Wallace Wurth G2/G4 , 106, 107, 108, the new 110, M210, 202/204; Samuels Museum G05 and Student PCs on level 3 (and St Vincents Walter McGrath Library may also be included).
I am writing to inform you about two significant changes these teaching PC labs and, if you teach in these labs, to ask you to be involved in some testing to ensure they will be ready for the start of session 1.
These changes are part of the UNSW IT Change Program and will act as a pilot project for the rest of Medicine.
1. Individual Logins for lab PCs.
The first and most visible change is that we will be moving to individual logins for all the labs listed above. This login will be a new UNSW account that will primarily be supported by the ServiceDesk and will be used for a range of new cross-campus shared IT services. This account will eventually replace or be tightly synchronized with the Unipass account that we are familiar with (it is not Unipass) and like Unipass will be based on our staff/student number (but will have a Z prefix for all, staff and students). The current name for this account is zPass.
We understand that this will be a major change to the lab environments which have historically used the generic “medstudent” and similar accounts. Medicine IT will work closely with the ServiceDesk and the IT Change Program to support the initial transition to zPass to minimise the impact on teaching activities, particularly in the first couple of weeks. I will be sending you more information on this soon.
Initially the students will be able to use zPass to login to any PCs in Medicine labs. Over the following months and into next year this account will give them access to a greater range of machines on campus and to a file directory service (that has both class and personal folders) and better access to cross campus print services. zPass is already being used in a range of sites on campus and has been well supported through the ServiceDesk. I am confident that it will not be overly complex for the students to cope with a new login.
For staff members who teach in these labs and SG rooms, we anticipate using a combination of zPass and some emergency generic accounts in the first half of the year (for the lectern machines).
As the campus becomes more engaged with the IT Change Program we will start moving Medicine staff members onto the new UNSW Desktop services and the new staff shared file/print/email systems. At the moment, I see this happening in the second half of the year and so consider this lab project to be a pilot for the full staff services in Medicine.
For this reason, it will make sense for those of us who use the teaching labs regularly to use zPass from the start, as these accounts will end up being our primary logins on our staff machines also. For visiting staff, and staff who use the labs only infrequently, we will make some emergency accounts available.
As our staff move onto the new shared services we will be able to access our file shares and other shared resources from any of the teaching machines just by logging on. Moving some key teaching staff onto zPass for the lab environment early on will help us better understand how to transition the rest of the us later this year.
2. Lab PCs to use New Desktop Management Tool.
The other, less visible, change is that the lab PCs themselves will be configured and supported in a new way.
We will be using a new Desktop Management Tool and cross-campus lab support processes to deploy applications and, when needed, rebuild the PCs. We are confident that this will make it much easier to quickly install new applications on request onto the lab machines and also help us to more easily support these machines remotely.
This is also a pilot of how well this tool will be able to be used to support our staff machines when we move staff to the new UNSW shared IT services later this year.
3. Rebuilding and Testing the changes.
As a result of these changes we are going to be rebuilding our base configuration for the lab computers over the next few weeks.
We will try to ensure that the new build is as similar as possible with the same base set of applications and class menus.
If you are involved in teaching in the labs I would like you to take a moment and think through how you use the teaching labs.
What applications do you use regularly? Have you contacted us in the past to fix/customize/modify any of the applications you use. Please do not assume that we will have remembered all of these changes so if you have any special requirements for your applications then contact me with your requirements.
The main area that we are currently concerned about is applications with specialized hardware requirement (eg: data acquisition cards) and some of the custom/specialized software that we use.
I will also be asking some of you to be formally involved in some User Acceptance Testing (UAT) of the new lab machines. Noted in the application list below are those we still need help testing. However, I would encourage any of you that are involved in teaching in the labs to familiarize yourselves with the new setup before session starts.
Please send me an email if you want to be involved in testing your applications or if you think you will want a zPass account.
If you have any other questions about this project then please contact me directly.
The applications identified for installation onto the Medicine Labs are listed below.
| Application | Version | Vendor | Notes |
| Adobe Reader 8 | 8.1.2 | Adobe | Upgraded - Needs more testing |
| An@tomedia | 2008 | Anatomedia P/L |  |
| BrainStorm | 3.61 | Elizabeth Tancred and Gary Coppa | Needs more testing |
| Browse Control Client | 3.2 | BrowseControl | |
| CA DMM 12.1 | 12.1 | Computer Associates | |
| Chart | 5.5.6 | ADInstruments | Needs more testing |
| Class Menu | | | |
| Digital EM | 1.0.0 | University of Kentucky Medical Center | Needs more testing |
| Endnote X | X.0.2 [Bld 2283] | Thomson Research | |
| Flash Player | 9.0.47.0 | Adobe | |
| Food Works | | | |
| Images of Disease | 2.0.0 | UNSW | |
| Internet Explorer | 7.0.5730.11 | Microsoft | |
| Java 2 SRE | 5.0.11 | Sun Software | Needs more testing |
| Jo-The Bionic Woman | | | |
| Labview Runtime 5.0 | 5 | National Instruments | Needs more testing |
| Labview Runtime 6.02 | 6.02 | National Instruments | Needs more testing |
| Labview Runtime 7.1 | 7.1 | National Instruments | |
| Medicine Desktop Background | 1 | UNSW Faculty of Medicine | |
| Microsoft Office 2003 | 2003 (11.8169.8172) SP3 | MIcrosoft | |
| Microsoft Powerpoint Viewer 97 | | Microsoft | |
| Mozilla Firefox | 2.0.0.7 | Mozilla | |
| Neurons in Actions | 2.0.0 | Sinauer | |
| Pathology for Phase 3 Medicine 2009 | 2009 | UNSW | |
| Pathology of Phase 3 Medicine | 1.5 | UNSW | |
| Perceptions Secure Browser | | QuestionMark | |
| Quicktime Player | 7.2.0.240 | Apple | |
| Scope | 3.8.9 | ADInstruments | Needs more testing |
| Scooter Beyond Compare | 1.9d | | Needs more testing |
| Shockwave Player | 10.2r23 | Adobe | |
| SPSS 17 (+ addons) | 17 | SPSS | |
| SPSS legacy Viewer | 17 | SPSS | |
| Symantec Endpoint Protection | 11 | Symantec | |
| SynchronEyes | 7 | Smart Technologies | |
| Toolbook 1.5 | | SumTotal | Needs more testing |
| Toolbook 3.0 | | SumTotal | Needs more testing |
| Toolbook 4.0 | | SumTotal | Needs more testing |
| Toolbook 5.0 | | SumTotal | Needs more testing |
| Windows Defender | | Microsoft | |
| Windows Media Player | 11.0.5721.5230 | Microsoft | |
| Windows XP | SP 3 + patches | Microsoft | |
Luc Betbeder BA MPH CLP
IT Manager
Faculty of Medicine
University of New South Wales
SYDNEY NSW 2052
Phone: 02 9385 1216
CRICOS Provider Code 00098G