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Media Production
Service-Oriented Disc Duplication at Penn State
11/29/2007
Customer service in higher education comes in a multitude of offerings, from grand and glorious, such as student lifecycle initiatives involving complex six-figure CRM software, to small, narrow and--well--round, such as providing disc duplication services where a dime will buy a student all the data that can fit on a blank CD.Pennsylvania State University's Entrepreneurial Services addresses the latter category. According to system administrator Jeff Badger, the four-person team fills in gaps in the IT services provided to the university, and it does so on a cost-recovery basis. Currently, services take three forms. First, through an online site called The Computer Store, Penn State sells hardware, software, peripherals and accessories at academic prices, available to every member of the campus community. Second, the group provides long distance and cellphone programs. Third, it offers Web and media design services.
CD duplication fits into that third category. With two dozen campuses spread around the state, a student enrollment of 85,600 and a full-time faculty and staff totaling 22,500, it's easy to see why the school duplicates a quarter of a million CDs and DVDs a year.
"We'll burn 10 or 15 for a small class," said Badger, "400 for a conference, 30,000 for a back to school event." That includes requests from a campus sorority or fraternity that wants to make club materials available, professors who want to distribute course materials and an on campus gathering of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
Each summer, the team produces 30,000 CDs for ResCom, the Penn State Housing's residential computing program, which provides people living on campus with access to the Internet. The disc includes the Firefox Web browser, the Thunderbird e-mail client, and Symantec AntiVirus. These are handed out to all students for free at the beginning of the school year to help get first-year residents connected.
As part of its Computer Store operations, the group also duplicates licensed software. As Badger explained, "We negotiate software contracts with Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, SAS--all those companies that educators want to be a part of. They don't send copies of Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite. They send us a master and then we've got to duplicate that and keep track of sales and monitor the condition of the contract--and in many cases keep track of keys and licenses." The advantage, of course, is that the school can offer commonly used software at a reduced price.
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