2010 Budget

2010 budget submissions are now complete. As I thought, it has become unaffordable for the College to continue on the 3-year replacement cycle for student computers. With the chances of getting an increased IT capital budget at zero, our only option was to keep student computers for a 4th year. However, I did manage to convince the powers-that-be that in order to revert to a 4-year life cycle, we would need to:

a) keep 5% of spare desktops (7 in total for 2010) in case computers break down
b) replace batteries in 3-year old student laptops
c) keep 10% spare student laptops in case of breakdowns

Even with the keeping of student computers for a 4th year, we are still about $50,000 over the nominal budget figure indicated by the Business Manager. So we have to hope that:

a) Apple give us a good discount on about 80 staff laptops
b) We can get more money out of the College, or
c) We have to cut some things from the budget

I have to compile a "shopping list" to send to Apple, in the hope of meeting option (a). Options (b) and (c) are largely in the hands of the Business Manager.

There are a couple of other projects that we are investigating / beginning to implement:

1) Print Cost Recovery.

Our current system sees students print to a laser printer in each computer lab (unrestricted), while all student desktops can print to our Colour Laser - which requires IT staff to enter an admin password on the client computer. Whilst technically, this system has served us pretty well, there is a lot of wasted paper in the b/w lasers in each lab, and typing the password for the Colour Laser can take quite a bit of time, especially during periods of heavy use.

To change all this, we're looking at installing PaperCut. This means that we should be able to give students access to all printers (including the Colour Laser), but "charge" them a cost per page. We would give students an allowance for printing each year...once they've used up their credit, they can purchase more from the Accounts Office. In theory, this should make students somewhat accountable for their printing, and enable us to recover some of the costs of student printing. Time will tell...

2) Move to Google Mail (and Apps)

Ever since we upgraded our Email server to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Server (a change that was forced on us by the purchase of new hardware) our server has been unreliable. Almost every day of late, we have to restart the mail server because of currupted accounts or "zombie" server processes. We looked at other solutions (such as Kerio Mail), but at about $32,000 they were a bit out of our reach.

Then, thanks to St Brendan-Shaw College (Devonport), we discovered that Google offer free email and apps to Education customers. After a bit of testing, I have recommended that this is the way we should provide email to staff and students. Now I just have to come up with an implementation plan - and time is running out before the end of the year! An added bonus is that the current email server can be re-deployed as a PaperCut print server...win/win!

3) Upgraded Learning Management System

Currently, our LMS (Studywiz) will support up to 800 client connections. Thanks to the DER, we can expect more than 1100 computers on campus in the next couple of years. Therefore, we plan to use some of our "on cost" funding to purchase additional servers for Studywiz, to the point where we will have separate Web, Application and Database servers (all 3 roles are performed by one box currently).

Doing this should also give us some additional advantages...currently, our Head of eLearning wants the Studywiz server to directly connect to our Student Records database to get updated data on students, teachers and subjects. Not a good idea, in my opinion, for a server accessible to the entire Internet to have access to our Student Records database. Under our new Studywiz architecture though, I should be able to host the Studywiz database server inside the network, from where it can (securely) connect to our Student Records database. Fingers crossed that this is how it pans out.

Of course, to cope with Google Apps usage, and to enable students to access Studywiz from home, we will need to improve our Internet connection speed. Getting pricing out of Telstra is like pulling teeth, so I don't think we'll be looking at anything faster than our current ADSL2 connection (10Mbit/1Mbit)...the pricing will be waaaaaay out of our league. Instead, we'll possibly be looking at aggregating several ADSL2 links to deliver higher bandwidth, at a fraction of the cost. A further advantage of this scenario is that if we use different ISPs for our aggregated links, an outage of 1 ISP will not kill our connection entirely. This plan is still in its very early stages...so watch this space.