* The technology conference beside the Astrodome
Houston was the first stop on the ITEC 2007 conference tour and we arrived to find surprisingly mild temperatures and smooth driving on the normally congested highways. ITEC held the conference in the Reliant Center, the convention space beside the Reliant Park football stadium and the Astrodome.
Each ITEC show has a personality, and this one leaned strongly toward small and midsize business services offered by local resellers supported by representatives from national vendors. Research In Motion had a big BlackBerry booth, one I hadn’t seen at the shows last fall, Verizon had a big display, and Microsoft rolled its demonstration RV into the exhibit area, but the majority of vendors were local companies servicing local customers.
I talked about Unitrend’s Disk to Disk (D2D) backup with the factory rep and the local reseller Jennifer Wright of Wright Business Technologies, learned about point-to-point radio broadband products from RAD (up to 50 miles between ends), and heard what Cap5 does to introduce Web 2.0 features for it customers to increase the value of their Web sites.
Something new this year at the ITEC shows, the “How to Fix IT” panel of experts, gave attendees a chance to ask me and several vendors questions about anything they wanted. I moderated the panel staffed by Kim Brand of FileEngine, Scott Lukes of eSoft, and Tony Hodgson of the aforementioned Cap5.
Questions touched on common business problems for companies small and large. One person with about 50 servers and multiple locations wanted a better way to back up open files and move data around for redundancy. An IT person from a local small college wanted help deciding the best way to provide 9,000 students college-sponsored e-mail accounts. Others wanted security help, tricks on managing employee access to the Internet during office hours, and, of course, how to do all this for less money.
The college e-mail question generated the widest range of solutions, all different but all excellent choices. The solution for 9,000 users applies to companies with 90 users as well. That seems contradictory, but not when we dig a little deeper.
Large companies usually host their own e-mail servers and amortize the cost of server hardware, software and manpower over a large number of users. A college with 9,000 students can certainly follow that path.
Small companies should (at least in my opinion) work with hosted e-mail providers because they can’t amortize their own server and support personnel over enough users to make it financially intelligent. Paying a couple of dollars per user per month avoids the high initial investment, which is good. Having security professionals protect your hosted e-mail server, applying patches and monitoring threats, is even better.
But e-mail hosting services can be attractive to large companies as well, including schools of various sizes. Google made news about its partnership with Arizona State University last October as Google became the e-mail provider for 65,000 students. The school gets its own domain name and Google does the heavy mail server lifting on its end. Google does the same for tiny companies too, offering Google Apps and home pages with private domain names and Web portals.
What’s the right answer for the school with 9,000 students? It depends on how the money breaks down, and how much the college wants to control its own e-mail system. Those same questions come into play with companies looking to support 200 e-mail users, as well. While it may seem a copout to say the answer depends on the needs of the customer, that’s really a great answer. More choices for e-mail, or backup or remote access tools, means companies can choose a solution they like from many options.
ITEC asked me to address “Technology Is Broken in Education” based on my series of columns about Open Source Software in Education last year. What’s broken in education? To me, students need more teacher time and less technology. Kids today too often turn on a screen and turn off their brains, watching TV, playing video games and perusing MySpace and other sinkholes. Putting another screen in front of them at school just worsens the problem. As reader Tim said in an e-mail last year, putting computers in front of young students too often turns them into “click monkeys” instead of learners.
My suggestions are to use technology to reach out to parents and the community, and keep students noses in books and pen and paper. I wonder if the ITEC Education folks will let me harangue educators in any more shows.
