2010 draws ever closer!

It's scary to think that it's November already! For our team, that means the Christmas rush is little more than 6 weeks away. 6 weeks to order (and get delivered) all new equipment ready for rolling out in January, ready for the new school year in February.

Since my last post, there have been some positives as far as the budget is concerned. Apple decided to drop the price of MacBook Pros by about $400 each...meaning we can fit all our purchases into the nominal capital budget. At a meeting with Apple reps on Thursday, we have also found out that Apple is offering a 4th year of warranty...looks like they're starting to take notice of what their customers are saying (finally)!!

Plans are underway for the wireless network upgrade (sort of!). Just waiting on final quotes from the electricians (who are installing the Cat-6 outlets for new WAPs) and from HP (who are doing the implementation). I still need to check the calendar to find out when students finish for the year, so I can plan the de-commissioning of the current WAPs, and get the cablers in. Hopefully all cabling can be completed before Christmas, so we can get into the wireless implementation first week back in January.

Sometime before the wireless network upgrade, I need to extract the digit and get MAC address authentication (with dynamic VLAN assignment) working on our network switches. Hmmm...might need to install Windows Server 2003 on a "spare" box during this week.

Migration to Google Mail / Apps is progressing...albeit slowly. Currently testing whether we can use our existing authentication directory (Open Directory) to provision our Google Apps domain. Hope to test this in the next day or two...if all goes well, a migration to Google Apps may be only a week or two away.

Print cost recovery system testing is going well. We're currently testing in one of our labs...so far, so good. Some minor issues, but hopefully Stan (my technician who's doing the testing) will get those resolved.

Upgrade to the Learning Management System hasn't really progressed. Studywiz people are not particularly quick at responding to questions...maybe purchasing "upgraded" levels of support will fix this!? I hope so, because we can't increase our reliance on the product if the current levels of "support" continue!

At different times over the last couple of years, we have spoken about digital video delivery for staff and students. A very popular product among schools is ClickView, which we had seriously considered implementing. However, the lack of support became a serious issue before the project even got off the ground. Since then, we have had brief investigations of QuickTime Streaming server, and using our own PVRs to record free-to-air TV. However, the lack of Mac compatibility with the PVRs made the job too difficult.

However, we have discovered a new Topfield "Masterpiece" PVR, which gives us the Macintosh connectivity we've been craving. So, using a Mac, we can download recordings from the PVR, do basic editing (cut the ads out!), and then export the recording to a QuickTime Streaming server. An added bonus is that the PVR will accept composite inputs, meaning we can also record from Austar, VHS or DVD (subject to copyright restrictions, of course!). A further added bonus, is that using the QuickTime server, we can "catalog" the videos in the Library system, complete with URL. Therefore, anybody searching a topic on the library catalog can simply click a web link to view the video.

Seems a bit strange that we keep making more work for ourselves...I suppose that's what happens when you're continually trying to improve the quality of service! :)