Realms in Education

For you people working in or with education realize there are realms within school districts. The district itself is a realm. The campus is a realm. The individual classroom is a realm. Remember that when you walk into the various areas. The people you deal with in each location is the king or queen of their area. Recognize this. You'll save yourself a lot of grief amd frustration

Fax Over IP

We met with a Fax over IP provider as part of our VoIP project as part of our bond. This is to reduce cost in several areas, especially ongoing support. If we can get the fax service to run only on a server instead of 100 physical devices, that'll be huge. No seperate infrastructure (TDM, IP), no required FXO/FXS ports at 40 campuses...huge cost savings, both initially and ongoing. Anyone have experience with XmediusFax? My voice guy is a bit nervous about running a VM server hosting all fax servers. He'll have to get over it .He will. He wanted me to know his concern. Duly noted. We build the DR & HA into the VM and backup solution (SAN mirror or VEEAM). Remember boys and girls, introducing change, even to technical people is painful and we are guilty of not wanting to adapt, yours truly included. I'll borrow from my former boss, this is a roller coaster you are getting paid to ride. Enjoy it.

For us, the phrase that automatically introduces ridicule is "That's the way we've always done it".

RFP Pre-Writing Thoughts

So, we are looking to upgrade to an entire VoIP solution. There are various portions of this project, back-end message store (voicemail), call routing, phones, and PoE switches. We have an incumbent vendor at about 1/4 of sites for the phones, and the vendor has 100% of other pieces..It has worked well but has been pricey, especially the PoE switches. However, since we've started to meeting with our switch vendors, they can provide a very good solution. As a public servant and spending my neighbors, co-workers, and friends tax dollars (yes, I really put it in that perspective), we have to find a good solution and a good price. Now,we have to figure out how to write the RFP to make sure we are comparing Jonah golds to red delicious's. We have to avoid the cheap POS stuff that catches on fire, doesn't do some required feature sets, etc, while not forcing it to be the incumbent with a feature set we will never ever use.

As for the professional services...do I ever get frustrated by them. Often, I found by the time I've written an RFP that can adequately scale and scope a professional service engagement, either I can do it or I can send one of my staff to training, take him or her off queue for a month to test, and then they can do it. Plus my group is quite tenured (avg ~ 6+ years). I know professional services serves a purpose, but a lot of resellers that provide professional services...to be blunt suck. Just cause they carry the certification (woo..ccnp in voice -rolls eyes-), doesn't mean they can tell up from down (or is that H323 or from SIP?). Maybe someone knows a good way of evaluating these vendors. We are currently inviting a couple of the ones we've not used in to help on some 1 off projects. Gives them a foot in the door and us a chance to meet them.

Day in Review -- Geek Speak

Met with fax vendor and a switch vendor! Fun! Actually, both were very personable. Good info. It has been very cool that the two vendors which have been presenting the last 2 days had female tech people (Sales Engineer). Really cool. Girls can't be great geeks. Bullsh*t. Both knew their stuff -AND- could present. We have a white board and both go, "Can I draw". AWESOME! We have a philosophy, if you can't draw it, you can't do it. Both drew out designs, how their products worked, answered questions, and were personable. As for the vendors with male SEs, they have been very good too, knew their stuff & presented well. I guess one good thing for the downturn in the economy, the people left that I have dealt with are very good.

FYI, E911 finds a lot of mis-documented switch ports. 98-99% accuracy still means a bit of work to clean up.

Day in Review -- Administrative Overhead

Meetings, meetings and more meetings. Actually most were technical in nature. However, we are doing some renovations at some sites so we sat in the weekly construction meeting. 1st, I like the guys in this group including the architect, project manager, our facilities people, and the construction people. These meetings are about solving problems and trying to prevent expensive fubars late in the game. Unfortunately, since these projects are being done on the "cheap", some of the equipment is being donated. warning warning warning. Donated usually translates to lots of man hours and money out of my budget to install and maintain. Unfortunately teachers and campus admins don't understand that so they try to gladly accept the equipment without asking us. Puts my group in a fun spot. Had to raise the red flag there. We also covered some other stuff. Without fail, where the construction is taking place at another site is where my outside plant fiber enters the building. Well, crap. Now, we get to do some analysis..what is the cheapest & best long term to move, the addition or the fiber. I'm guessing I lose and have to move. I see a long night sometime in the fall when the splice is done.

Emergencies at 5 minutes before people head home suck. It is always interesting to see our 2nd in command have to "jump". Watch. Observe. Learn. Help. Also, get to see who really cares about the success of the district and those who are punching the clock. As for the cause of the emergency, I hope the students are ok. Best wishes to them.

Day in Review -- Geek Speak

We are doing a bond project for wireless and voice upgrades. We have the strong possibility of upgrading some of our edge devices to PoE. We also will file eRate. So we have to make sure the bid is truly open, so we must include equivalents. We were meeting with the team from one of the "equivalents". It went really well. Good AM, SE and data center talks. One of the few times  the SE is brilliant, well-spoken, and straightforward. Nice to know the nuts and bolts and also get feedback that she would not recommend going a certain direction, but they do sell the items. The meeting was 3 hours...felt like 1. Good thing.

Got a request about filters from a collegue in another district. Made me start thinking if there would be a value to a web-site/database that districts that could fill out and then search. Sometimes, just knowing who uses what is good information, especially among your peers. Yeah, we can call or email each other too, but how many of us would rather do a look-up?

Items I thought to gather...The items I've seen on some of the state reports...well, aren't always useful nor important to IT support staff. Number of PCs per students...who cares in support. I know it helps the state & district for educational numbers, but for support personnel, meh. Thoughts?

• District Info
• Name
• Enrollment
• Campuses & types (HS, MS, ES, Admins)
• Support Personnel
• Campus based techs
• District based techs
• Help desk personnel
• Network admins (this may be overall broken down for some & too general for others)
• DBAs
• Route/Switch
• Firewall/security
• Programmers
• Trained monkeys
• Number & Type of PCs, Macs, laptops, & handhelds
• Desktop management software
• Number of physical servers
• Vendor
• Virtualization
• Vendor & Number of servers - real and virtual
• Storage
• Vendor
• Connectivity (iSCSI/Fibre Channel)
• Capacity
• SIS & BIS Systems
• Firewall
• Filter
• Internet
• Email
• Virus/Malware (Desktop & email & Internet)
• Traffic Shaping Product/Vendor
• Route/Switch Vendor
• Wireless Vendor & Mgmt Tools
• Connectivity
• Intra-campus connectivity & speeds (privately owned fiber, gigaman, carrier pigeon)
• Internet speeds & vendors
• Device monitoring system (Nagios, Whatsup Gold, Insight Manager, CiscoWorks, whatever)
• Inventory management (spreadsheet, part of BIS system, KACE, yeah right...?)

It could keep going, but smartboards, printers,  projectors, document cameras, & onward could be added later. I know I get tired of filling things out after a while. secondary issue would be...keeping it up to date. Moore's law changes causes all the answers to change. The goal would be to keep the information to the districts' IT staffs. Many of the people in similar roles are already too popular with resellers & vendors.

I'm sure I did something productive this afternoon, but I can't recall. Does pondering how to write-up a RFP count? More of the structure and how many RFPs to write?

Day in Review -- Admin Overhead

Doing interviews is always interesting and fun. Especially when it isn't for a position in my direct group, but on the "other" side of the house. I get to people read and evaluate answers. One of the interviewees was very good. It was great to see someone prepared, energized, and wanting to join our team.

Had a quick budget meeting aboutt closing out the books on one account and how it was previously done. Good advice and direction was given. Also had a refreshing information that we -don't- have to spend all the money in another account as it'll roll forward and nor should we try. Refreshing to hear. I always look at it as I'm spending money from the people I work with. About 1/2 of them live in district, so I'm spending their tax dollars.