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Report on IT Infrastructure and Tools IPAC'17

Speaker: Johan Olander (European Spallation Source)

Strategy

Choosing a sound strategy that fits your team is paramount, the IPAC'17 consisted of the IT Manager doing all the prepatory work and one (deputy) presentation manager. As a reference IPAC'15 had a much bigger Local IT team and could provide lots more services that IPAC'17 could. This was very similar to IPAC'16. Reflect on your capabilities and be realistic.

Renting vs. Buying

Initially it was believed that we could purchase machines at the same the C would happen. With the current IT landscape this became pretty obvious that this would not happen at ESS. Since the conference was situated in another country, this also introduced some issues with potential insurance claims etc.

Services

Quite a few services are required for these conferences, very likely it will be assigned to IT if it blinks. The IPAC'17 team managed these things under the IT Role:

• Auditoriums - technical review
• Internet cafe
• Digital signage
• Proceedings office
• Preconference setups

Auditoriums

Two main auditoriums were used, as per standard. There were two technicians from the venue running the tech for audio and slides. They had a direct link with the PM in case there were any issues. On top of that we had a camera crew to capture the speakers, this was also recorded for personal consumption by the speakers.

Equipment:

• 2pcs Projector Panasonic DZ21 20000 ANSI
• Lightpackage, equipment
• Sound system, Line Array
• Mixer Allan & Heath Q32 DIGITAL
• Microphone wireless, headset (5pcs)
• Microphone wireless, handheld (4pcs)
• Dsan Perfect Cue - slide advancer
• Projection screen wide - 1600x550cm Truss
• LimiTimer speaker timer system 1.00 pcs.
• 1 camera from the back of the room. 1 cameras close to stag
• Seamless switcher - Analog Way Next Age 16 1.00 pcs.

Temporary stages

There was one of these stages built for the Sunday reception, again the setup was rented from the venue for simplicity.

• Soundrack 2x400W amp, Mixer, Eq, CD , 1 x wireless
• Amplifier 2x700W
• Speaker ElctroVoice
• 2,3 kW power supply

Wifi & Internet

Wifi for delegates was the venue standard one, there was no complains on this. However the layout made it really hard to block wifi in the auditoriums. A decision was made to not further try to block this out.

A 100/100mbps connection was rented for the PO. A dedicated network was rented for PM and Auditoriums. A dedicated 10/10 connection was used for the Paper Café

Unfortunately the venue was unable to provide usage data for these connections, our recommendation is that you make such an arrangement before your conference.

Displays and digital signage

A few of these were utilised during IPAC'17.

• Dotboard
• Statusboard in Proceedings office
• Infomercial from Elettra
• Fireside talk display

Preconference setup

The IPAC'17 team covered these areas within the IT role, again your team will likely vary but these items need to be considered

• Domain registration
• Website
• Event management integrations
• SPMS setup
• Fileserver
• Auditoriums

Software & Licenses

We rented the machines which including operating system and Microsoft Office 2010 licenses. On top of that the no longer supported software bundle was used. Pitstop 12 was utilised with the Trial-style activation. Adobe 9 team license was used as well.

The recommendation is still Adobe DC, but until this has been more actively implemented we choose a more conservative path. However Windows 10 was used.

How to install machines

There are two base types of machines needed, for editors and for the auditoriums. IPAC'17 did prepare the editor machines with a base image and the software installation. This was shipped as a 'Golden Master' for cloning by the venue. If your conference has access to the option it is highly recommended to consider.

IPAC'17 Editors workstation:

Base installation:

1. Installed windows 10 english 64-bit. Make sure to apply all updates.
2. Installed Jacow Software package
3. Installed Office 2010 (32-bit). Make sure to apply all updates.
4. Uninstalled PP10 and installed PP13_Update2
5. Installed Barcode font

Adobe:

• Added DotJavascript
• Set javascript execution enabled
• Followed http://www.jacow.org/uploads/Editors/Acrobat9PitStop10.pdf
• Enabled rule grid

Word:

• Options -> Print -> Disable scaling of documents
• Options -> Save -> Embed fonts (all documents)

Tex: This did not work with the old software bundle provided. Just made a manual installation. The TEX people are generally used to these tools, however that's no excuse to not be diligent.

Printer: The driver was embedded in the system installation, this worked satisfactory in our case.

Proceedings office

Speaker preparation & Author reception

Internet Cafe

Auditoriums

Routines & briefings

Our IT/core team came in on the Wednesday, be prepared to coordinate the work from the start.

• Keep a visible To-do list
• Communicate who does what

This enables the team to collective check off work thats being done, very many of the senior team members are very self sufficient, make sure you get some

Problems

First day the internet connection was not setup. Also access to the PO was delayed

Suggestions for improvement

• Have a fixed plan for seating, C-N-I schema would be much a big improvement. Its natural when parts of the team come in early that they gravitate towards sitting together. To mitigate newcomer downtime when their closest experienced editor is unavailable the schema of Core-Newcomer-IT would be a big improvement.