Back in The Game
It’s been a long time since I posted, but no shortage of things happening. In both personal and business lives, it has been an insane few months.
Over the summer I received approximately 200 Macbooks in addition to the 100+ I already had. We also purchased some carts so they can be mobile. I tried to incorporate them into our existing network infrastructure. The previous Macbooks had been integrated into the Active Directory domain. Over the summer, the AD server decided to randomly change all of the mobile account user ids to a string of numbers that did not correlate to anything. If users could log in, they had no permission to view anything. So as if there wasn’t enough work, add this to the mix, fixing every machine.
I researched this extensively, and had no logical explanation. At ISTE I listed to a session by the Maine IT people that are behind the MLTI and they take a completely serverless approach. So since I was having to touch every machine to fix Microsoft’s epic failure, I decided this is a good approach for our district. The model fits to the way our users use, and things like a down server no longer take the entire workforce with it.
Add printers into this mix, with local print queues and it was a big project. As school started and I saw the ratio of macs to PC labs in our district, it occurred to me that we were going about it backwards. We have almost 3 times as many macs as PCs yet we’re trying to force the macs to work with the haphazard configuration of the PC network. I made the decision to make the PCs work with the Macs instead. This has caused some stress and lots of work, but in the end it will be worth it.
During this I also had the opportunity to participate in some professional development sessions sponsored by Apple and it has certainly encouraged me for the year. I am proud of the work we’ve done and I know we will continue to do more.