The Technology Solutions Centre (TSC) helps faculty and staff select and buy technology to meet their needs. The TSC was created to establish hardware/software standards for technology, and to help faculty and staff understand and select these standards. The standards selected were established through a competitive procurement process (RFP 417) and resulted in a partnership with a local company called Microserve.
Why buy standards?
- They are stocked and pre-loaded with software at Microserve’s warehouse; this means they will be delivered 24-48 hours after you submit your WebReq and be guaranteed to use with our centrally supported enteprise information systems (e.g. Exchange Email and Calendaring, Banner, FAST)
- They include support for centrally managed antivirus and disk encryption, meaning encryption keys are securely centrally stored so you can’t accidentally lock yourself out of your data
- They include 3-years of warranty service performed by our own on-campus technicians — your computer and data will never leave campus, even if your hard drive needs to be replaced!
- The volume discounts we receive based on our competitive procurement process yield a significant cost-savings over Dell’s regular prices
Despite the benefits of the standard computers, we recognize they will not work for everybody. Per Policy AD2515, standards are mandatory for specific departments (e.g. all units reporting to the Vice-President, Finance and Operations) and optional (but strongly recommended) for all academic Faculties and Divisions. If a department mandated to use the standards wishes to use something else, they must justify the deviation using a form available on the TSC website. We use this information to understand if we need to adjust our standards to better meet client needs. If a standard won’t meet requirements, or is not mandated, we can help a client buy anything they need. In fact, our agreement with Microserve enables us to purchase anything they sell.
TSC staff are always evaluating the latest technology so that we are ready to respond to inquiries and to update our standards as technology evolves. iTSC (inside TSC) is a blog created to publish our reviews to help the campus community make informed choices about technology acquisitions. While TSC defines and maintains institutional computing standards, we’re about more than just standards!