[aklug] Re: Zangle info

Well, who knows who has what configured how, but zangle is now at the
center of everything but SpEd records, and sped filemaker systems
(multiple independent servers by age, believe it or not) don't
integrate with zangle at all.

The tech BRT which included registrars, librarians, software devs,,
sysadmin, etc pitched consideration of open software (there were two
apps, one php and one perl based that were promising) but discovered
that selection process had essentially specifically excluded almost
anything other than a monster commercial boondoggle. I personally
promoted an XML based store and forward multitier architecture to
avoid relying on one remote intel server.... And argued for the
adoption of a top level data domain first (asd's concept was to buy a
bunch of disparate commercial apps and then to spend millions more
trying to figure out how to data mine and/or integrate.)

Last board election (I ran so there R sour grapes) resulted in
confirmation of status quo-nothing is going to change.

The BRT did recommend that it's role remain in place but admins and
brd certainly didn't want the criticism and asd will likely not return
to BRT process (it's embarrassing.)

ASD claims it can't retain IT staff. I wonder why, lol. Maybe someone
else on the list might have insight ;) Suffice it to say that when I
volunteered to do EdTech someone with no real experience was hired
instead-lmao. When they interviewed for a unix sysadmin at the end of
interview they gave you a test on MS SQL and C#. For a "db" position
at assessment it turned out they wanted someone to massage excel
spreadsheets and didn't know what a db was... When I told them I could
automate what they were concerned with and reduce workload to 4 hours
per week you can guess at their response ;)

While at West I ran a Suse server and IT was in a constant tizzy (more
reliable than Mac servers they had configured-lol-and offered squid
for computer labs as well as netatalk, smb, local mail stores, X11
apps, wolfram apps, etc.) All gone now....

Anyway, point is that ASD has a top down lockdown mindset as opposed
to focus on safely supporting users, and nothing there will change
quickly. Biggest budget increases I hazard to guess are at headshed,
and you will see teachers let go before anything there is cut. And
smart boards solve all educational problems don't you know...

Btw, UA (the real university in Fairbanks, right chris...) has made
the jump to google apps. While ASD was nudged into a google app domain
they are still doing exchange WITHOUT a cluster

OK- nuff vinegar-lol

On Feb 1, 2010, at 10:54 PM, bryanm@acsalaska.net wrote:

> On Thu, January 28, 2010 2:19 pm, Marc Grober wrote:
>> Zangle is a proprietary offering of C-innovations
>> see, http://www.cinnov.com/products_overview.htm
>> It was purchased after the ASD IT Budget Review Team objected and
>> after
>> members of the BRT refuted the claims of the consultants then hired
>> to
>> address the BRT's objections. See http://asdtech.wik.is
>
> So is it Zangle that prints up the student transcripts? I was
> wondering why they looked different (worse).
>
> --
> Bryan Medsker
> bryanm@acsalaska.net
>
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Received on Tue Feb 2 07:46:21 2010