Page 106 - Lakeland Catholic Technology Plan

Recommendation:
1. Each Server Closet should be secure, should be locked, and should not be
used for anything else, i.e book storage, electrical rooms, etc.
2. Every school should have a complete wiring diagram. Each wire should be labeled, measured, and documented. Any technical staff at any time should be able to look up the exact length, and layout of every cable.
12. Hardware
This section will deal with hardware both from a standardization view, and from a utilization perspective. A Diagram of the Local Area Network in Each School is provided on the previous page for reference. This is a useful reference as one goes through this section.
12.1 Printers
Another program instituted by the Director of Technology Services, which is very commendable is the standardization of hardware. Virtually every printer in the school system is a LexMark printer. This has a number of advantages:
First, most of the printers look and act the same. A user in one school can easily move to another school and utilize printing in exactly the same manner.
Second, they all take similar toner, so toner can be purchased at a larger scale, and thus the District can realize some significant cost savings.
Third, the technical support staff can become experts on one printer line, instead of having to understand the inner workings of multiple vendors products. To this end, one of the technical staff is LexMark authorized to do warranty repair, etc.
Fourth, generally the same software can be used to access the printers, and there doesn’t have to be a pile of different drivers for different printers.
When most of the LexMark printers were rolled out into the schools, it was felt that purchasing D-Link parallel network printer servers would be the best way to put them onto the network. So, instead of the printer being connected directly to the network, they are connected to the network via this printer server. The hope was to save a little bit of money. These printer servers have been a source of a great amount of grief for the technical support team, and for the users alike. For a little bit of extra money, a network card could have been installed in the printer, and it could be directly connected to the network, avoiding entirely the printer server.
Also, in some sites, the printers are connected directly to a computer, and are shared over the network via Windows 95/98 printer sharing. This has the benefit of being cheap, but it has many disadvantages as well. These include the fact that the computer has to be turned on in order for the printer to be accessible over
the network. Printing to that printer will slow the user down who is using the com- puter at the time, and, it is thus not standardized.
Diagram 1:
Diagram of the Local Area Network in Each School
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