Krisitan Ipock
The Broadside

For some, like the staff in the Information Technology Services, summer term is the chance to get things done.

Forget relaxing.

Maintaining computers at Central Oregon Community College’s main campus, Redmond’s campus, and Madras’s campus takes the ITS staff all over Central Oregon.

In the summer they have focused on life-cycle management, specialty lab software images, Forefront Identity Management Systems, and many other tasks.

Each computer that a student logs on to has gone through life-cycle management. That is the ITS department wants to make sure that the students get the highest quality computers possible and that the computers are outfitted to work within the college system. Each computer has to be rotated during the years.

“Each computer that we purchase has six years with us at the college. The first few years are spent with college students in classrooms. After about three years,computers get moved to part time locations. Those are locations that will have some use but will not be used on a day-to-day basis. At five years they are almost completely done with their life cycle,”said Laura Boehme, the assistant director of IT infrastructure.

The college then sells most of their older computers via the computer surplus sale. The ITS department puts that money back into classrooms.

Along with life-cycle management the ITS department has made several new images for each of the new labs on campus. When you take an image of a hard drive, the image is an exact replica of your computer at the time the image was taken. Of course, you would want to take the image when the computer is healthy and running without any problems. This ensures that when a student logs into a CAD lab, Networking lab, SMART
lab, MATC, GIS Lab, and other type of computer on campus, it ensures that each person will have a great experience.

The ITS department has also been working on a Data Center Upgrade in preparation for upgrading our virtual server environment.

With all these upgrades and hard work of the ITS department the college provides many more services than other colleges in the same price range
as COCC.

“I have been to several other campuses all around the United States, and am still surprised by how much we offer our students.” Boehme said.

You can contact Kristain Ipockat [email protected]