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?