Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Re: Best Platform for a New School

I love the discussion on platforms and while I agree with all that is
said below as a former Apple employee, and former one to one laptop
director, I also believe that choosing only one thing is a very sad
thing indeed. My current school runs on a Mac XServe and it
seamlessly handles both mac and pc users in our school; however as we
move forward new purchases will most likely be mac since they can run
windows very well.

Keep open to all, build a base with your seerver, then allow the
various users to dictate or even choose what they need to run their
piece of the school.


Lisa

On Jun 11, 2008, at 11:36 AM, Peter Hoopes wrote:

> A forum for independent school educators <ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU>
> on June
> 11, 2008 at 10:35 AM -0400 wrote:
>> I am going to suggest Windows PCs/Servers, even though I'm a mac
>> user at
>> h ome. You're running a high school and building it from the
>> ground up
>> soo this is your shot to get it right from the start. Macs are
>> consumer
>> PoCs and are not geared for the enterprise market at this point.
>
> With all due respect, this is an erroneous statement. Macs are alive
> and
> well and preferred in many enterprise organizations. I'm at WWDC now
> and
> I've spoken with programmers and users from IBM, Genetench, Los
> Alamos,
> etc. More and more companies are moving part or all to Mac because
> of the
> ease of use.
>
>> Also, macs will always cost double to receive the same effect you
>> can get
>> Afrom Windows PCs, no matter how creative they are with their
>> pricing.
>
> Also an erroneous statement. In fact, its the opposite. In order to
> get a
> PC *up* to the specs of a Mac, the PC usually costs more. Lastly, if
> you
> spoke with an Apple rep and put everything together into a package,
> you
> will almost definitely receive a discount. Yes, we are a mostly Mac
> school, but that's because I didn't really want to spend most of my
> time
> wrestling with Windows stupid errors (Vista anyone?). However, we have
> plenty of Windows machines (mostly running on Mac hardware)
>
> Ultimately, the real question you want to ask is: what kind of
> services do
> we want to provide to our users (students, faculty, and admin)? Are
> you
> going to provide storage for all users (home folders), are you going
> to
> provide email, etc. Different schools have different approaches, but
> instead of thinking about the platform first, think about what you
> want to
> provide and work from there. I happen to think Macs can do just about
> everything, but if you had a programmatic *need* for MS Exchange, for
> example, then that might dictate that aspect of your setup. In some
> cases,
> its what your IT Director is most comfortable with because they'll be
> managing the system.
>
> My $.02.
>
> Peter Hoopes
> Director of Technology
> St. Andrew's School
> phoopes@standrews-de.org
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thinksnow11
thinksnow11@gmail.com

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