As I tell my customers when they ask, "You can't fix behavioral issues with technology." If employees want to waste time instead of working, they can surf the web or send chain emails. Take that away, they can play solitaire. Take that away, they can gab around the water cooler or stare into space and day-dream. Blocking porn and gambling sites is probably a good idea for liability purposes, but I can't see that it helps productivity.

Most frequently I'm asked to look at log files or email and tell employers things that I simply cannot know. I can tell them that an employee didn't log in to their PC until 10am, but I have no way of knowing when they actually arrived at work.

I wrote a very simple extension for my own mediawiki site that pulled in external pages as an iframe within a wiki page. I'd imagine you can do the same, Build your own wiki, with the wikipedia pages included below your own content.

Yes, there is a product, computrace makes a product that is installed at the BIOS level on a lot of corporate level laptops. Even if you replace the hard drive, it reinstalls itself.

Ditch deep freeze, microsoft has a lesser known and free substitute which is smart enough to allow windows updates or antivirus updates to work properly, but freeze the remainder of the system.

Steady State.

And yes, it is a huge pain. Much more so if you realize that most organizations who'd consider power usage as a significant amount of their bottom line probably have hundreds if not thousands of PCs.

Cisco has been quietly working towards this for a while. You can get a server module for the lowly 1800 series router.

For large networks and satellite office, you have a server or 2, a phone system, network gear, maybe some video surveillance gear. They'll walk into the CIO's office and say:
"you have all this gear from different vendors, with different support contracts and different departments finger pointing when problems arise."

"Now here is the cisco way, one box, one department, one vendor to call. Stick it in a closet and forget about it. Let us show you all our management tools which show everything in a single pane of glass"

If they do it right, it'll make for a very slick demo.

This is their attempt to do the same in the datacenter.

This pops up on slashdot every couple of months. Let me outline the reasons this is difficult from the perspective of one school. It sounds like you're trying to push forward an unfunded mandate. You're going to get a lot of pushback once people realize what you're trying to do.

- Apps. Educational software is often poorly written, and is written for mac and windows, not linux. One of the k-12 schools I work with has 350 applications, perhaps 330 which would have to be replaced under your plan. The K-5 students don't use openoffice, they use Reader Rabbit, there is no OSS substitute, and forget about making it work under wine. 6-12 use some generic office type apps, but also educational software. Keep in mind that entire curriculum and courses are sometimes tied to an app. You're not just replacing an app, you're asking teachers to re-write their curriculum. We're not just talking about typing software, we need software that keeps track of students performance and can run reports showing progress, comparing classes, etc...

- Hardware. IT budgets in schools are often small. You can get E-Rate money for some servers and network gear, but printers, digital cams, etc... are often old. Will your hardware work with Linux? What about the hardware your teachers use without your knowledge. Can you afford to replace it? If you replace old printers, you'll end up throwing away all your stock of ink, plus the ink you didn't know the teachers were hoarding. Some hardware is directly tied to an app for a class, you'll have to throw it away, you run into the same curriculum issues as with the software.

- Support. You'll need to support it. This means replacing or training your existing (unionized) staff. My experience is that schools typically employee underqualified staff. Clicking on things is rough, editing text files is really rough. If the staff can't handle the new tasks, can you replace them? This is a union and politics problem, and not an easy one.

- Training. You need to retrain teachers and staff. You'll again run into union issues, teachers are only required to do x hours of professional development per year, they simply won't take training classes, no matter how easy you make it. Keep in mind that teachers are continually asked to do more work with the same or less time/money, and you'll be asking them to relearn to do things. You might not be making any friends here.


Here how this does work, it'll take a few years...

First, do your TCO studies, show how there are no licensing issues. Licensing is a huge headache, solving that issue will win you friends it makes rolling out apps faster. Make sure the administration is onboard and working toward your goal. Doing all this is pointless if the superintendent comes back from a conference and decrees that everyone should have application X, which only works under Windows.

Modify your technology plan to require that any purchased software is web based and standards compliant. I've worked with "web based" apps that only work on IE, or require special plugins and etc... You'll end up losing a lot of functionality.

Take existing apps for which there are no good web based substitutes and see if they work with wine.

Roll out both of the above to one or two labs. Run them that way for at least a month. Make sure that your lab has an assigned lab aide, someone who takes ownership of the lab and is physically present when classes are using it. Keep on top of things, people probably won't report problems. When there are problems, solve them quickly.

The problem is that software is often written by companies who have an educational base, not a software development base. It's also often very, very old. Lets face it, your core K-6 education has changed very little. Kids still need the 3 R's. The primary app for this level of education at the school I mentioned above was last updated in 2001, and the core educational components are significantly older than that.

But, there are other factors involved. A school might have more than one app that does the same thing. Why? They get grants, and state funding, and federal funding, and a volunteer donates a couple copies. None of those people talk to each other, and even if they did, you'd end up with a committee of 2 dozen people, nothing would ever get done.

You'd think that even on the administrative side, things would be similar. But no. There are only a few companies who make software to track attendance and grading. But there is a huge amount of customization which goes into this software, because each district tracks information differently, and reports to the State differently.

You also have to keep in mind how schools buy things. If a fantastic new learning package came out that schools all over were using, each school would have to justify that purchase. There would probably be a bond initiative. You'd have to explain to voters how product X is going to replace product Y you just had them vote on 5 years ago. In the software world, 5 years is a lifetime. In the voting on a tax increase world, not so much.

You also have to remember that teachers don't like change. They're being asked to do more and more with little compensation. The NCLB act is horrible. So much time is spent teaching to pass tests instead of teaching to learn and think. You're asking them to learn something new, again. You can send them to professional development, but chances are, their contract specifies they're only required to do x hours a year (probably 40). Why should they spend 1/4 of that time re-learning things they already knew how to do instead of learning better teaching which might directly impact education.

The thing that might work is the web. With google docs and all, we're already moving that way. A lot of schools use apps like Plato or e-chalk, which are entirely web based. Get everything on the web. Make it so the school can host the software itself on appliances (capitol cost vs ongoing, e-rate, etc...). Then the client doesn't matter. You can replace your windows desktops with a linux desktop, still running firefox, and there will be little difference.

Anyway, that's my piece. It'd be nice if the problem were simple, it isn't.

One of my customers is a K-12 school. They have 10K students, and 390 different windows applications.

Most educational software simply isn't written for Linux. Most educational software is poorly written for Windows. Running as a non-admin user is always a hangup. I can't imagine trying to get all these apps to run under Wine. The chorus of "why don't we have windows" would be deafening.

The reason Windows beats Linux in schools is because the apps they need, work under windows. When the superintendent wants an application, he gets it. No matter how poorly written or insecure it is, we always end up installing it. If linux is somehow responsible for it not working, linux gets tossed, 100% of the time.