Meeting Minutes (16 August 2012)

• Helpdesk Tickets:
  • Breakdown:
    • Total for 13A Call: 81
    • Current Status: Open (3); On Hold (12); Closed (66)
    • JIRA Tickets: 15
  • Procedure: The current procedure is for anyone who can answer a ticket to just take it. If there are problems that require software changes then these issues are sent to DanaBalser to confirm and submit a JIRA ticket if necessary. Everyone was happy with this model. It was very useful to have additional help from Socorro as many issues were related to the VLA.
  • Major Problems:
    1. Server slowness. During the day of the deadline (1 August 2012) the server was very slow in the afternoon. We rebooted Tomcat which significantly improved the performance. We think this was due to the PDF file generation problem (see below). This should now be fixed.
    2. PDF file generation. This was caused by a field in the student support page for other awards. There was no limit to this field and if it was greater than a certain size it would start sucking up resources. This probably would not have been detected by load tests. This problems was fixed but we should probably limit the size of this field. Future requirements may indicate that we convert this field to a PDF upload, but we should wait for these requirements from JeffMangum.
    3. Missing proposals. Laura Chomiuk noted during the day of the deadline (1 August 2012) that proposals started to disappear from her list and then just before the reboot there were no proposals. They came back after the reboot. It is not clear how this could happen. If there were problems like this we would have expected that the PST would have thrown an error. We will look at the logs for any additional information.
    4. Scientific justification page. There were issues uploading the scientific justification. This was caused due to the location of these files and how they were organized. This was a subtle problem that took a while to fix. Fortunately it was discovered early and not many users were affected.
    5. Print Preview. There were issues with the print preview that were fixed quickly but they did cause problems as users thought there was a problem with their proposal.
  • Other Issues:
    1. Open Sky. When should we close business with OpenSky? We think we have a pretty good handle on the software at this stage. One part that was not well understood was the PDF file generation which did cause us problems.
    2. Telescope Filter. It may be useful to have a filter for telescope in the helpdesk. It was not always clear which telescope the user was discussing. This feature can be added to the helpdesk. There was some discussion if we should change the department name to just "Proposal Submission" and then filter on telescope. The reason for the long department name is so that people do not confuse this with ALMA.
    3. Student support. There are several issues. For some proposals this section was not being displayed in the PDF (now fixed); the US institution box in the PDF is not being displayed; and the total budget numbers are different in the PST page compared to the PDF (the PDF appears correct). DanaBalser will inform JeffMangum about these issues.
    4. Security issue: There was an old helpdesk ticket that mentioned a security issue involving us sending his password via email. We did not fully understand the ticket until recently. We initially thought it was the temporary password, but this is not the case. When registering, if the user cannot find their institution they fill out a form and we then send them an email saying we will add it to our database. But for some reason we include their password. In the near term we will remove this message. There is a similar message when people register in general but this is commented out. In the long term we might was to send these messages without the password.
• Institutions:
  • Institution Requests: 118 (20 July 2012 - 01 August 2012). It was not clear to us if this was typical or not but almost half of these request were not necessary since the institution in question was included in our database. This interface should be re-worked (e.g., selecting country, state etc. to help point them to the correct institution). It was suggested that we move to the ALMA model where users can enter their institution directly. We would then need institution deduping code. Some issues:
    • When an organization is found there are two buttons (default and one that is unmarked). You have to click the unmarked one to select the institution.
    • Organizations are in the native language, including accents. Will our search code work on such text?
    • We need the same person who is dealing with the ubd-admin emails to handle the helpdesk account management department so we do not step on each others toes.
• Other Items:
  • Plan of Record: New items are starting to accumulate so we need to decide how we want to organize this information for the future.