Greetings,

I hope everyone has completed their MSLN enrollment for 2011 ;-)

We had a lot of feedback on the survey and requiring the signature of
the superintendent.  While it may seem like a lot of work (especially
for those of you who have larger districts) the survey is something
that is going to help us lift Maine into the twenty-first century for
connectivity.  I wanted to thank everyone for taking it seriously and
providing useful responses.

The signature of the superintendent being required was a result of the
audit process we went through with USAC after our first year of the
Networkmaine E-rate consortium.

You can still have consultants fill out the 3 or 4 questions for you,
click the button, and print out the forms.  They just need to type the
contact information of the superintendent and have their signature on
them instead of their own.  USAC allows the paperwork to be signed by
a consultant, but it requires that we collect additional information
from the consultant and raises questions in the review process that
can be avoided by having the proper person of authority sign the
required documents.

It's a small price to pay for the thousands of dollars of funding that
is secured for your district (which I believe is about $50,000 on
average).

Now that things are winding down, I would like feedback on the overall
process and suggestions on how we can improve it next year.  The
E-rate application process is pretty complicated and we put a lot of
work into making it as easy as we can.




Now that E-rate is taking up less of our time, I've turned my
attention back to the Joebox.




The beta for the new release of Joebox software has been going well,
and is at a point where the quality of the release is measurably
better than the current software.  We may still have bugs to fix but
our turnaround is usually quick so we're pushing ahead with a release.

Starting tonight, we will be upgrading Joeboxes to the new 12.0
release (we’re now calling stable).  Upgrades will begin after 5:00 PM
but are being done one site at a time to provide us with a chance to
verify that things are configured correctly.  Everyone will be getting
upgraded over the next few weeks, but we will give priority to users
who request to be upgraded.  We will likely be able to upgrade a
maximum of 10 per night as it's a manual process and we have a
"checklist" to go through to make sure that everyone is configured
properly (we're trying to catch any mis-configurations that are out
there and potentially causing problems).

If you would like to be upgraded sooner rather than later drop us a
note.  We will handle upgrades on a FCFS basis.

If 5:00 PM is too early in the evening for your school please contact
us and let us know the preferred time.

-- 
Ray Soucy

Epic Communications Specialist

Phone: +1 (207) 561-3526

Networkmaine, a Unit of the University of Maine System
http://www.networkmaine.net/