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[Paul Cory <paulwcory AT yahoo.com>]

> > As an example, the Wake County  Schools
> > (27th largest school district in the country, 2nd largest in NC) has
> > something like 16,500 desktop/laptop computers now. How many computers
> > per TriLUG member is that? :-)
>
> A lot, but given a managed changeover during summer vacation, it's
> do-able.
A point for your consideration, at least in regards to school systems 
like Wake that have a large number of year-round schools. Summer 
vacation is only 6 weeks long. :-) While not an impossibly hurdle to 
overcome, it does make the enterprise more difficult.
> Plus we have tricks to configure multiple machines
> simultaneously with near-identical configurations *grin*. Three TriLUG
> members (Mike Johnson, Jon Carnes, Hunter Mathews) have some serious
> experience configuring large numbers of machines quickly and efficently.
> Given the goal, I bet they'd have something that could be done
> school-by-school by a much smaller group than you project.
Interesting.
> The hardest part would be organizing. This would have to go beyond
> TriLUG, and I, for one, would solicit volunteers from the entire area if
> I could. It would also be time consuming, but it's do-able. more
> importantly, if we used one or two schools to train a subset of the
> systems IS staff, they could do it themselves for an even bigger
> savings. Plus they'd be ready to support the new systems, and could pass
> the training on to other staff members.
Here again we hit the staff rub - no the IT staff, but the general 
staff. They'll need some training as well. Plans will have to be made to 
get them up to speed: space located, classes scheduled, trainers found, 
materials made, duplicated and distributed. This is a LOT of work: as an 
example, we are attempting to train our teachers to use the new NC WISE 
system which we plan to have active in every school this year: training 
just about every workday and running our qualified trainers into the 
ground and using almost all of the available training labs, it's going 
to take us 9 months to get all our teachers trained. Implementing Linux 
would take a similar training effort.
> > The problem is procurement policies and other regulations that state
> > that M$ software is required for compliance.
> While that makes sense from your prospective, what idiot wrote into law
> that a particular software package and not general skills would be in a
> test of that nature?
Didn't say it made sense from my perspective, although knowing just what 
a hole DPI is in in terms of manpower, I can understand the rationale 
behind it. :-) Dealing wth this means getting into a debate over the 
state of computer training in this state, and I don't have the energy 
for that right now. I'll just say that you wouldn't ask a C++ programmer 
to write and administer a test for English competency and expect it to 
be very good, would you?

The point is not the silliness of the tes, but that local school systems 
have to work with mandates from further up the political chain, and 
sometimes those mandates don't allow for a non-M$ or an Open Source 
option.
> I agree with both points. Not only is there a lot of waste on the System
> Administrative level, there's also a lot that could be done to run a
> school more efficiently at the School level that's prohibited or just
> not-doable at this time. Cutting IT costs are the least of the worries,
> when waste in other places would be better addressed. And unless M$
> decides to go after one of the local school systems, this issue won't be
> addressed with out a lot of effort on the part of interested parties -
> like myself. *grin*
Yep. And constructive criticism is always appreciated (if not always 
followed or followable).  :-)

Paul



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