Terralyn Vandetta, Sean SanRomani, Keith Olsen, Sharon Clarke, Michael Guzy, Dave Hockman-Wert, Jennifer Swenson, Matt Gregory, Kelly Christiansen, Sean Healey
The plotter training that was planned for May 15 was postponed. Date TBA - probably late June or July.
ArcSDE was upgraded to version 8.3 on Rocky, the SQL server. This was a prerequisite for ArcIMS to be upgraded to version 4.01, which will likely happen by the end of the month. ESRI didn't make the upgrade process easy; many of the associated hardware and software pieces used to run ArcIMS needed to be changed for the upgrade.
Terralyn will be setting up a new machine (Steve Garman's former computer) to act as the "proof of concept" server after ArcIMS is upgraded to version 4.01. This server will be the space that people can use to build ArcIMS applications and test them prior to launching them on to the Web. See last month's meeting notes for more information (http://www.fsl.orst.edu/sdmg/sdmg0403.htm).
Theresa suggested inviting the regional ESRI representative, John Sharrard, to come to OSU to talk with ESRI software users about what new plans and developments are in the works re: ESRI software. We tentatively decided to invite him to the July 17 Spatial Data Management Group meeting.
Theresa got the okay to have a student help put all of the digital orthophoto quads (DOQs) on to the new terabyte server. But she is now exploring the possibility of using ArcSDE to serve them. This would be faster, but possibly less accessible. Stay tuned…
The group is still in the formation stage. A number of people have expressed interest in meeting, but a meeting date has not yet been set.
7. Yang has created a Web-based interface for the Forestry Sciences Research Network Spatial Database. (This is the MS Access database that contains simplified metadata for the shared spatial data located in /data/fordata.) Theresa wants to put the database in ArcCatalog. She will probably wait until the upgraded Metadata Explorer is ready.
8. Sean Healey is looking for forest ownership spatial data for Oregon and Washington, specific enough to identify small woodland parcels owned by individuals as well as industrial forestland. If you have access to such a dataset, please contact him.
9. We had a significant discussion about Forestry computing resources, the general decline in UNIX usage, and associated cost issues. Approximately 10 UNIX machines are being dropped by the end of June, which reduces fee income by $38,000. Somehow costs need to be reduced to balance this loss of revenue, especially since the network database fees have already been set for this year (and can't be increased to offset the shift away from UNIX). One suggestion was to remove the hardware maintenance agreements for most of the UNIX boxes (but not the servers). This would save approximately $30,000. The implications are that response time in dealing with UNIX hardware crashes would be longer than it is at present. And any needed repairs would be individually quite costly. However, this service has not been used very frequently in recent years.
Michael made a pitch for the value of staying with UNIX, especially if using complex scientific modeling software. It can take a lot of labor to force fit these software programs on to PCs. These employee time costs may offset any potential cost savings that PCs have over UNIX.
Terralyn will send out an email outlining some options to address the cost concerns.