To: Michael Green
From: Steve Rippl
Date: November 4, 2022
RE: Tech Department Report
The flood of the start-of-year tech help requests has died down and we’ve caught up with the backlog, so our department is back to operating on a more regular basis as the schools are finding their own stride too. This has allowed us to start deploying our next round of replacement staff computers, something we didn’t get time to do this summer.
These are the custom desktops that we’ve built ourselves at approximately half the cost of what our Lenovo desktops had risen to, using practically the same components. There are two potential disadvantages to this approach, the time taken to put machines together and the lack of a warranty. But there are always quieter periods of our year here in the department, so the guys generally have time at some point to build the machines, and the dramatically cheaper price means we can absorb the one or two failures we might get here and there.
We’ve made good progress with our new phone system. Our department is now using it as well, and the guys are on the phones all the time, so it’s a great test of the system. We realized that the default settings for which audio codecs were being used in calls were not ideal, adjusting this and one or two other things has greatly improved the call quality situation. We still have more things to work out (like failover connections for 911 calls, group alerts for when 911 calls go out and connecting to our various paging systems), but these are all things the system is capable of. Once we have all the pieces in place we’ll look at the timing of our transition.
Finally, there are always improvements and adjustments being made to the various applications we support. TEAM has changed their procedures slightly around student academic contracts (for kids not keeping up the progress they should be), and so the learning plan and progress tracking in Sips have been modified to accommodate this. And we’re in the process of streamlining the process the KWRL shop uses to track maintenance records and time on task for the mechanics, so their record keeping can be quicker, more efficient, and yield more useful data for decision making.