Do you have admin rights on your machine? Humor me here... :)

[Lesley Heizman]

Hey everyone-taking a poll here. We currently have some teachers that have admin rights to their machine and can download software, and some that do not. One of our concerns is the time it is taking our IT department to weed through the software requests as we currently package all the software that our teachers might use...for example Smartboard or CPS software. Because we are so understaffed, our packaging is way behind and we are not able to push out the latest versions of some of this software until several months after it is released. This is a bummer when bugs are fixed or we call about a problem and they tell us to upgrade the software.

I'm wondering what other districts/colleges/etc. are doing on this front...are you allowed to download your own software? If not, do you get a timely response when you log a request? Would also be interested in those who work on the IT side if you have a good process you could recommend.

We want to keep people's machines safe from malware but give people freedom to incorporate the newest apps that they want as well...it is a fine line between the two!

Thanks in advance-

[Aaron Sumner]

I'm at a research center and not an academic department, so others' situations at KU are likely different--but most of our staff are not allowed to install their own software. They must put in a request with the IT staff. A handful of us are excepted from this policy and handle our own installations.

I haven't done systems management-type work in several years, and I'm sure the technology supporting it has been improved over time--is there a way to implement a whitelist/blacklist type of approach? Or can teachers be allowed to update apps that are already installed, but have new installations go through a security screen? That might not solve every issue, but it could help with some of them.

[Tracey A Gould]

We are a little bit of both. I work for a very small school district as a Middle School Computer teacher. There are some things that I can't do without having Admin privledges on the computers in the lab. So I have set myself as an admin on them and my teacher computer. I think part of the reason for that being necessary is because we are so short staffed technology wise, one guy for the district, that it wouldn't be realistic to expect him to keep up. And , like I said, there have been instances where I had to have those right in order to prepare the computers for the students. We recently got new laptops for the teachers, and on some the tech person didn't finish setting up, or putting the teachers on as admin. When I tried to download basic programs, like flash and adobe reader, I couldn't until they were added as admin on their computer.

[Alicia Pennington]

Lesley,
I don't work at a school. I work for a hospital corporation with nearly 3,000 employees. I do have admin rights on my computer. That being said, we have a big firewall that does prevent me from downloading some things. I have had a great relationship with our IT dept over the 7 years I've been with the company, and my husband used to work in our IT dept several years ago. I have "proven" myself as someone who is careful with computers and knows what I'm doing. If I do have something I need downloaded, like my Google toolbar and bookmarks, I get about a 24 hour turn around time.
Alicia