Notes from the HER Business Meeting on April 12, 1997

The Chair, Katherine Cochrane started the meeting by asking for comments, corrections, additions to the Draft Mission/Goal Statments. Duke University had given the chair a few additions the previous day, and the whole group discussed the following issues with the resulting decisions:

1) MIT will set up a web page for the HER users group. All members can post documents to this web page by sending them to rmurray@mit.edu.

2) Should the host organization require a fee? It was agreed that the host organization should require a fee but only to cover their costs. Everyone agreed that this was fair and equitable.

3) It was agreed that we should record decisions but not take formal minutes.

4) After some discussion, it was agreed that the membership should remain the Higher Education and Research community -- for the moment. We can decide at a later time, if it seems reasonable to add the entire public sector.

5) The new Vice Chair was elected so that preparations can be made well in advance of the agreed upon meeting times. A motion was made to ask Robert Van der Werf to become the new Vice Chair, effective August, 1997. This was seconded.

6) We agreed that the HER list should not be distributed to other organizations, particularly vendors.

7) We agreed that the next meeting would be held in conjunction with the Sapphire conference to be held in Orlando, FL in late August, 1997. SAP America will help to organize facilities, food, etc.

Proposed Agenda:

• Saturday, August 23 at 6:00. - Informal discussion and get together.
• Sunday, August 24 at 9:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.
  • Presentation on HR prototype and Student Information Systems
  • Outstanding Development Requests
  • Reporting, FM
  • Other items to be determined

8) It was agreed that Prof. Andrew Duncan (current Vice Chair) should assume the Chair after the meeting in Orlando, FL. and that the University of Cape Town would assume the reponsibility of conducting the 2nd annual HER meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. This is tentatively scheduled to be held sometime between February - April, 1998.

9) There was a lively discussion on the topic of contractual arrangements with SAP. Andy Duncan presented an overview on how the University of Cape Town structured their agreement with SAP. They set up three categories of users: 1) intense users which are more or less the same thing as "named users"; 2) occasional users; and 3) student and "very occasional" users.

10) Uli Werner from SAP talked about the structure of the matrix that is being developed for the Public Sector and what SAP employee heads each section of the matrix. Uli will send a copy of this matrix to all of the HER members.

11) We then discussed the various issues surrounding TR-FM and how we might prioritize them. We agreed that all HER members that use TR-FM would do the following:

• any member who has other FM issues other than what was presented by University of Toronto, would send these items to Marlies Burkhard by April 30, and she would incorporate them into her document;
• this document would be posted on MIT's new (to be established) web page;
• each member university will get 20 votes which should be sent to Bob Murray at MIT (rmurray@mit.edu) and he will tally the votes;
• the votes will indicate the items that will be sent to SAP Germany as our requests for development in the FM module.

12) We reviewed the current working groups and revised the structure slightly. The new groups are:

• Student Information Systems - Professor Andy Duncan
• Human Resources - Ms. Marlies Burkhard
• Authorizations - John Khoeblal and Andy Duncan
• FM - Ms. Marlies Burkhard
• Electronic Commerce - MIT (to be determined)