Second Layer of It Infrastructure in Ashesi If It Was to Handle 10000 Students

Applications

The school uses Outlook 365 as its email client. The license the school currently has is free for an unlimited number of students but not free for staff. Therefore, charges are there for staff accounts. All workstations run the office suite and support other outlook tools such as Yammer, Sway and Onedrive. The Microsoft offices consists of MS Word, MS Powerpoint, and MS Excel just to name a few. The advantages to this is scalability. These tools are available to every student since it is connected to their school email. Since it can support infinite number of students, there will be no problems accessing your account once an internet connection is established. Another advantage is security. Since all data is stored on Outlook’s servers, we are assured that no one can access sensitive mails in the case that they break into the school’s network. These will work for both campus as the only cos we will incur is that of the staff.

The school currently uses web resources such as Papercut and Student Information Services SIS. Papercut enables system administrators to track all printing activity, secure multifunction printers, track paper usage and eliminate paper waste. The Papercut package currently being used is Papercut MF which supports up to 500,000 users, meaning it can be used on both campuses. There main issue with Papercut is the current license supports very few document types. They are however other ways to print such documents and since no major alarm has been raised about this, license will still be default mode. Also, no request has been made in to include more services and the school has no need for them. This is very helpful since the school is trying to reduce its reduce its impact to the destruction of the environment and its carbon footprint. The papercut environment currently uses one server with the default license. It will be reviewed from one servers to two servers for the Berekuso campus and four servers for the Bibiani campus. The cost for scaling to 5000 and 10000 students will have to be negotiated.

The main role of the school is to educate and the main business specific application that aids this currently are the SIS. These include focus, records and courseware. The problem with the current SIS services is that they slow down when there are a lot of users at the same time on the resources. Due to an increase in school population, focus and courseware will be replaced with CAMU. CAMU is said to be able to handle 5000+ students and hence we will have no problem using it. The current issue is how to migrate data safely from the SIS services to CAMU without losing data integrity.

The financial management application being used currently is Quickbook and it facilitates scaling since it is a cloud service so there will be no problem using it once the staff number grows. We will increase user accommodation from 5 users to 25+ users for both campuses. This would cost $62/per in total. For payroll and human resource management, the school currently uses Sage, which also facilitates scaling. Sage provides unlimited payroll processing and manages benefit plans. These applications are just for staff use and hence does not incur as much cost. They will be maintained for use on both campuses.