Creative Solutions Without Big Budgets
22 Dec
Staff members come to me with all kinds of strange technical problems in my job at the elementary school. I take a lot of pride in solving those problems and the more difficult they seem the more enjoyable they usually are to solve.
There’s rarely enough money in the school budget for an ideal technological solution, which is usually to order some special software or hardware. It can be fun coming up with solutions, or even hacks, when the situation calls for it.
For example, The school library uses a piece of software to inventory all the library books and to handle checking them in and out. The software’s old, but it does its job. The librarian asked if I could set up some computers in the library for students to use to search the catalog.
I set up four spare computers that were too old to set up for anyone else but would be sufficient for simply searching the library catalog. The problem was that the library software didn’t support a network setup where user terminals could search the catalog. I called for a price quote and was told we’d have to pay $3,000 for new software if we wanted to be able to have users access the catalog through the network.
$3,000 was way out of the budget. The software was a bit old but worked just fine so I began researching an alternative solution. I discovered a free tool by Microsoft called Synctoy that lets you synchronize folders across a network. As a trial I set up a shared folder on a server and then configured Synctoy on the librarian’s PC and on the four PCs set up for catalog searches so that the original library database would be shared with each of the four computers and, to our satisfaction, it all worked flawlessly.
This simple fix saved us $3,000 and the librarian loves it. She simply runs a quick synchronization on her main computer and on the four search terminals and students can search for books much faster than with the card catalog (and can even see whether the book’s been checked out or not).
Of course, hacks like this only work in certain circumstances. There are situations that require special hardware and software (such as implementing a student information system or electronic door access) but in everyday circumstances it’s a lot of fun and a huge benefit to the organization to save a few dozen dollars by splicing together a custom cable or to save thousands of dollars and improve functionality using free software.
