The school year is coming to a close for a lot of schools, so it’s time for all of the IT departments to head out for a long overdue vacation, right?
WRONG!
Summer break is an extremely busy time of year for IT departments in education. Unlike regular businesses, we get a “do over” each summer. We get a chance to have extended time in the building without having to worry about interrupting classrooms and teachers. It’s a great time to catch up on maintenance of equipment, firmware updates, and OS updates. How are you spending your summer vacation? Here is what I am doing:
OS X Yosemite
Apple’s annual release cycle really comes at an awkward time for schools. With the new Mac OS coming in the fall, this is a busy time of year for schools. We didn’t get updated printer drivers until January of this year, so at that point, I knew I’d wait until summer to start applying the update. Yosemite is on its 10.10.3 update, so it’s really becoming a stable OS at this point. My Caching Server already has it loaded, so updates should happen fairly fast. I’ll probably try to do 10 machines a day and knock it out in a few weeks. Once I get the OS upgraded, I’ll clear out any leftover student files as well. Of course, Apple will likely announce the next version of OS X over the summer, so I’ll be repeating this task next year.
Database maintenance
We use a product called Renweb to manage our student data. This includes family information, health alerts, grandparent information, etc. During the summer, I have to move our database to the next school year. This includes archiving report cards, finalizing all outstanding lunch charges, and doing general address information clean up. I try to wait until July to do this. Once I move to the next year, our outgoing students will no longer have access to any of their data. The staff can still get to it, but outgoing students are considered “alumni” at that point.
Switch and AP firmware updates
The summer is when I also make sure my networking equipment is on the most recent firmware updates. I typically leave this equipment alone during the school year unless there is an update that is a big security patch or fixes an issue I am having. When it comes to my network and updates during the year, I take the 'if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it' approach.
Website clean up
I also take the summer break and go through each page of our website to look for outdated information. Our website is our single greatest marketing effort. We think it’s extremely important to keep our content current and frequently updated. With 30+ pages, I’ll usually try to read 4–5 a day in order to keep my eyes fresh.
Those are a few of the tasks that I am doing this summer. What are you doing? I try to do as much as I can in the early part of the summer so that I can focus on working with teachers when they return. This will be a fairly quiet summer for me, but next summer is already looking busy. We are going into the last year of our lease with Apple, so it will be time to do another equipment refresh.