ronanian

Thanks for the help, everyone. I now have a better idea about what's expected of me. I'm not responsible for the whole budget. I'm just supposed to provide ballpark figures for any major projects I might want to do. It turns out that I won't have to worry about the budget for consumables, projector bulbs, or hardware replacements. torledo: Yes, that's MA as in Massachusetts. So, I'm thinking of asking for money for software license renewals, upgrading our spam filter software, a few tools, and some sort of a backup system. Any recommendation for a cross-platform (Windows and Linux) backup system good for a couple terabytes (and maybe some expansion later)? I'm thinking something like a simple RAID 5 NAS that I can mount on Windows and Linux...uses standard hardware and is accessed as a standard share.

I've recently started my job as Network Administrator at a small college, and my boss (the CIO) wants a budget, or maybe just budget input so he can do the budget right. I have no clue how to do a budget. Most stuff seems to be functioning fine here, and the rest just looks like work I need to do to myself. However, I suspect that if I don't ask for much this year, I'll be required to work with even less next year. Isn't that how budgets work? Where can I read about budgeting for a small college IT department? What kind of things should I worry about having to spend money on? I've never worked in academia before, and never been in such a high-ranking position... It just occured to me that I should look at past budget info from my predecessor.