There’s still snow and ice on the ground, but we saw the first sign of summer in the IT Services department this week.
No, we’re not taking a departmental retreat to Florida for spring break.
Rather, yesterday our office manager Jamie Ross ordered the first two computers for our summer equipment deployment. We’ll order, receive, configure, and install nearly 300 computers before we’re done with what is traditionally our largest summer project. But it starts each year with purchasing one system each of our four standard configurations (Windows and MacOS desktop and laptop computers) to use in building standard “software images” that will be loaded on all computers we install across campus.
One of our departmental goals this year is to condense our summer equipment roll-out to May and June, rather than stretch the project throughout July and into August as we’ve done in previous years. By completing the computer roll-out earlier, faculty and staff will have more of the summer to take advantage of their new technology, and we’ll have more time later in the summer to devote to faculty and staff support.
To meet that goal we’ll need to begin pushing out systems right after commencement, and to do that, we’ll need to do more preparatory work this spring. We plan to finish our software images by the first of April. Later this month, we’ll begin surveying those faculty and staff who are up for a new computer to determine needs. We’ll wrap up our planning and place our large orders in late April, and computers should start arriving right after finals.
By then, hopefully it will start to feel like summer outside too.
