reverse_atomic_roger

Hi Guys, It's been a while. I wrote a strategy but then it was decided we'd wait until people on the teaching side had a T&L plan worked out. In the mean time the bursar has asked me for a simple spreadsheet of urgent projects with costs. Stuff like replacing the servers before they die. I realised there is quite a lot of sensitive stuff in the strategy I did write, especially since we haven't had much of a focus on IT in the past, so some is quite critical. Here is my table of contents though to give you an idea of what I went with. I hope its useful... Contents -Strategy --Introduction --Resilience ---Where we are now ---Where we aim to be --Security ---Where we are now ---Where we aim to be --Student Experience ---Where we are now ---Where we aim to be --Staff Experience ---Where we are now ---Where we aim to be -5 Year Plan --Introduction --Year 1 – Academic Year to August 2016 ---Wi-Fi ---Network Core Redundancy ---Office 365 ---ISP Contract Renewal and Additional Services --Year 2 – September 2016 to August 2017 ---Staff Inset and Password Policy ---Backup ---Workstations ---VLE and SLG ---Technical Training ---Wi-Fi --Year 3 – September 2017 to August 2018 ---Servers and Storage Area Networks (SANs) ---Technical Training ---VLANs and DMZ ---Workstations ---Upgrade Windows --Year 4 – September 2018 to August 2019 ---Printing Managed Service renewal ---ISP Contract Renewal ---UPS ---Tablets ---Workstations ---Projector Replacement ---Technical Training --Year 5 – September 2019 to August 2020 ---Security/Penetration Testing ---Technical Training ---Access Control ---CCTV ---IP Phones ---Workstations -Appendix 1 - Risk Register --Introduction --Likelihood --Severity --Security Breach --Backup Device Failure --Server Failure --Network Segment Failure --Core Network Device Failure --Workstation Failure --Power Failure -Appendix 2 – Wi-Fi deployment details -Appendix 3 – Wi-Fi options -Appendix 4 – Standard Classroom Configuration -Appendix 5 – Technology Refresh Programme --Workstations --Servers --Network Storage --Switches --WAPs --Projectors --CCTV

Wow! My thread took off. I'm still reading as much as I can and working on my document(s). At the moment I'm writing it as two docs (executive summary and technical details) but I'm bundling them into one big word file so the executives can read the summary and skim the rest, but they can check the numbers if they want to. We did a questionnaire last year, which I'm leaning on quite a bit, and I met with the science faculty a couple of weeks ago to discuss their needs. Once I have a first draft finished I'll take out all the sensitive bits and post it up here. Good luck all!

Thanks guys. I definitely feel a bit less overwhelmed now. I asked to see the whole school strategy that mine would be supporting, but its not finished :/ So I suppose I'll start writing about some stuff I'd do anyway. I will definitely be talking to teachers and faculty heads, and doing a questionnaire. Your advice is much appreciated.

Hi All, I've just been promoted (yay!) and I have to write an IT strategy with no experience or help (boo!) I've been at my current school for 9 years as assistant network manager. We've never been asked for any sort of long term plan, and anything we've offered has generally been ignored. Now, in a 6 month period, we have a new Head, a new Bursar, and most recently, the Network Manager moved over to full time teaching, and I'm now the network manager. The new senior leaders want to do things properly, and that means getting an IT strategy/5 year plan type thing in place. There are *lots* of things I want to do in the background to do with backups, SANs, WiFi, and a bunch of other stuff. They also want academic side strategy as well, which I'm less sure of, having never done any teaching. Mostly, I'm not sure on the structure of the document. How much detail should I go into, since nobody else reading it is technical (the whole technical IT team is me!)? Does anybody have a sample they don't mind sharing (it could be an old one. I'm looking for structure/layout, not technical ideas), or some links to good examples online? Any advice on tone or layout would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance

Hi All, We have Eclipse.net hosted, and a Sophos WS1100 filtering proxy appliance at my school. Up until recently, everything was going swimmingly, but now (most) book cover images aren't loading when we view the front page. It does seem to work for some students, but not for staff. (we have very few staff and student specific policies, almost everything is globally blocked or globally allowed. Nothing seems like it would match the eclipse site). It does work from an IP that is exempt from filtering so I'm 99% sure it is the Sophos appliance that's blocking things. The problem is I can't figure out why. Everything else on the page loads. In fact the image that says "No book cover image available" loads. I've tagged microlibrarian.net and microlib.co.uk as Globally allowed sites, and set the category to "trusted." We had the same issue a few weeks ago. The Eclipse support folk said it was a problem with our filtering, but after a few days it sorted itself out without intervention at our end. Now the problem has come back, even though we've changed nothing. If anyone has any ideas of settings we could change, or even just has a similar experience, I'd love to know. Thanks

Yup, thats exactly what we were looking for. I was obviously using the wrong search terms in google. Thanks

Hi All, Hope this is the right place. Not technically a netbook... We're planning to buy a set of Lenovo Thinkpad Twists to use as a flexible IT resource. One of the things I've been asked to look at is charging. I think the HP elitepad has a 10 unit charger, and we'd like to have something similar for the Lenovo, but I don't know if it exists. Google searches have just lead me to normal docking stations, so I hoped someone here might have heard of something like this. Or if you have any other thoughts beyond a stack of shelves, with the power cords plugged in behind, that'd be great too... Thanks