Ask Slashdot: Best Practices For Maintaining IT Policy In K-12 Public Education? 208
First time accepted submitter El Fantasmo writes "I work in public education, K-12, for a small, economically shaky, low performing school district. What are some good or effective tactics for getting budget controllers to stop bypassing the IT boss/department? We sometimes we end up with LOW end MS Win 7 Home laptops, that basically can't get on our network (internet only) or be managed. The purchaser refuses to return them for proper setups. Unfortunately, IT is currently under the 'asst. superintendent of curriculum and instruction,' who has no useful understanding of maintaining and acquiring IT resources and lets others make poor IT purchasing decisions, by bypassing the IT department, and dips into IT funds when their pet project budgets run low. How can this be reversed when you get commands like 'make it work' and the budget is effectively $0?"
licensing Microsoft School Enrollment (Score:4, Informative)
You need to have the licensing right for the software that you have.
http://www.microsoft.com/education/en-us/buy/licensing/Pages/schoolenrollment.aspx [microsoft.com]
But right now you need to tell the people who say 'make it work' how big the fine is for not have the licensing right.
CYA (Score:5, Informative)
That way, when the shit inevitably hits the fan and your bureaucratic slave-driver comes looking for a fall guy, you have documentation that shows you tried your ass off to get them to change their idiotic ways, but they staunchly refused.
Been there, done that; still got screwed, but at least by documenting everything I managed to take the asshat who wouldn't listen down with me.
Re:Is Linux an option? (Score:2, Informative)
We have done this on about 250 out of 650 systems. For the most part it works very well, as the students are not yet brainwashed into the "I can only blow my nose on a kleenex" mindset when it comes to product choice. That happens when we become adults.
You do, however run into problems with short-sighted vendors who only support windows and grudgingly support mac. And despite the relatively short path to porting most mac stuff to linux most vendors are loathe to do so. For the most part this is kind of warped economics, as they fear they will have to start supporting Linux. No dude. That's what WE'RE here for.
You will also need to prevent your curriculum "experts" from getting starry-eyed from the shiny BS spun by the sales reps. On a broader note, even though they may have a "cloudy" spin on their web-based stuff to get the suits all moist, it damn well better integrate with the SIS, and not charge extra for the privilege. Unfortunately you have to get the powers that be to see past all the cutesy graphics and crap to the underlying mechanisms (or lack thereof).
LDAP integration for auth, and NOT just AD. Support for groups in separate OUs. The list goes on.
Re:I work for a public school district (Score:5, Informative)
Several solutions (Score:5, Informative)
I have worked in EDU for quite a few years now, I was involved with a K-12 before (consulting) and have been at two higher ed jobs (one in central IT, one in research)
a) Go open source and simply tell them: no more Windows because your licensing doesn't check out (licensing for small-to-mid schools is mighty expensive even if you get all the discounts). You have to not only get your licensing for your machines (which are ridiculously low to pull in your non-technical staff at a low point sometimes $10 or $20 for Professional versions or bundles with Office and Windows licenses) but a heap load of servers and CAL's to get everything on the Microsoft-side to work together (which ended up in one of the negotiations I was in averaging $25/FTE/service (Exchange, Sharepoint, Forefront and AD (the standard suite) was thus $100/FTE) + several $100's per server (~$300 for W2K3 Standard back then).
b) Spec a lot higher than you need. Sure, someone (you) can go to Dell/HP and spec out a $500 machine but you should budget for that machine to cost $1500, your purchasing department (if there is one) will balk and negotiate you down to $1000 and you'll get a decent machine. I have to do this all the time in research because computer gear is the first thing that gets axed out of the budgets. For ballpark figures in research: budget your workstations at 2x the actual cost, servers at 3x the actual cost, storage at 4x the actual cost and you'll usually barely be able to afford what you need.
c) If you really need MS Office or a 'commercial' offering because the manager/purchasing/principal wants someone to yell at when it breaks down talk to an Apple rep and have them spec out your environment including all software licensing, they're pretty honest about it unlike Microsoft as the client is simple and included in your hardware cost (no 'upgrade' or 'enterprise' required), Server is unlimited clients and cheap (and again, your organization qualifies regardless), no CAL's, no FTE calculations, no hidden fees, no need for extra licenses or site licenses just to evade their auditing department (I'm your customer Microsoft, not your serf), you'll get a rep that has experience with K-12, free seminars and classes. They're great and easy to manage and integrate well with Windows even though they may require an overhaul of your entrenched Windows admins that got hired because they're the friend of the cousin of the principal.
d) Get better negotiation skills and set up vendors against each other. Dell for example will RAISE their prices or remove their cheapest offerings for K-12 (especially existing customers) unless you can pit two sales people against each other. They can sometimes go to great lengths to reduce their cost. Alternatively, I have found that if you need a boatload of generic computers, you might even be cheaper getting a local company to custom build you a boatload of your specced out computers. I have worked with a company that custom builds laptops and desktops (if you need more than 50) and they have local, free customer and technical service whenever it breaks down and they're cheaper than the Dell/HP offerings and they build only to what you need. I needed for example specific workstations (2 nVidia cards with at least 1GB VRAM, Xeon CPU's, 16GB ECC RAM) and HP would sell me machines that came with the choice of Quadro ($$$) or an empty slot while Dell would in the same lineup have 1 month a shipment of nVidia cards and the next a shipment with ATI (now AMD) cards and then all of a sudden they would send me a machine with ECC RAM but the motherboard didn't support the ECC functionality.
e) Look elsewhere to cut your budget. Do you really need Cisco gear? How about HP or Netgear even? Do you really need service plans? Do you really need Microsoft software on your server? LDAP is free, Samba is free and both are just as easy to manage as AD with the proper tools. And for the whiners that say "how about Global Policies" - do you really use that crap? In an educational environment you want to be
Sense of privilege (Score:3, Informative)
Having previously worked in several educational settings, I'd have to say that teachers (and more-so school admins) are often some of the most self-entitled irresponsible clients you could have in IT.
It's not necessarily that the IT dept sucks, but rather that the staff get in their mind that they want something right now and must have it - standards/rules be damned - and that they know better than any slob in the IT department.
To them, there's no reason why they can't go buy the cheapest laptop possible and then have IT get it to work on the school network (despite lacking PXE or fitting into the standard imaging scheme) with all the standard software.
Alternately, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to go out and buy a bunch of Macs in a PC environment (or PC's in a Mac environment).
There's no reason not to share out their password with the class to install software X... after all why should the class wait for IT to vet+install software that they decided yesterday is absolutely necessary.
You can't tell them they're wrong, because they're educators. They're used to telling students what's correct, so how dare some lowly IT peon tell them they're wrong.
*Disclaimer: I have worked in 3 school districts as well as various other public/private entities not related to education. The above reflects many of my experiences with teachers. Not *all* teachers are like this - more are not - and happily the newer generations of teachers seem to be less self-entitled. However, even a few rogues can certainly make an IT Dept's life miserable, and generally detracts from the quality a district receives overall due to IT being tied up fixing their crud. I don't see as much of this in non-educational settings, possibly because a rogue employee is an expense.