Knowledge sharing for centralised administration

Small organisations are in practice dependent on individuals and therefore vulnerable if someone leaves. A thorough and quality assured system administration handbook is therefore essential to ensure stability and continuity in operating practices. The Program for Digital Literacy has the primary objective of developing a set of recommended operating solutions, with guidelines that provide schools and educational institutions with stability and predictability so that computers, networks and basic services function properly.

The ITIL book contains guidelines based on "best practices", adapted for municipalities using free software like Skolelinux to run centralized networks across multiple schools. These guidelines are adapted for municipal and regional administrative centres. Many municipalities have only one part-time position for ICT operations in schools. In Norway there are more than 300 small and medium sized municipalities; usually they have 1-4 persons working full time with ICT in each municipality. Therefore, sharing expertise and experience between operating organizations is essential for all.

License

This document is written under the GNU General Public License version 3. It means that you have:

These freedoms are explained on Wikipedia. Torgeir Kielland at the University of Bergen's Faculty of Law has analysed the GNU license or terms of Copyleft. He states that the GNU license is copyright relevant. In short, you can use everything in this documentation as appropriate. You must ensure that your contributions also receive a General Public License.

Thanks

Many have contributed to the documentation. Essentially it was written by Knut Yrvin and Andreas Johansen with many contributions from Klaus Ade Johnstad. Halvor Dahl, Skolelinux Drift AS is on the committee, and has made several contributions to structure and form, and content. In addition, there are contributions Snorre Løvås, UNINETT ABC, Finn-Arne Johansen from BzzWare AS, Ragnar Wissløff from LinuxLabs AS, and the reference group who participated in writing the documentation. The following participated in the reference group:

This documentation is maintained in a wiki. This is to ensure that operations staff can easily search for solutions to problems, update configurations, and so on.

[http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html ]

Background

The Program for Digital Competence is the Norwegian Ministry of Education's ICT plan from 2004 to 2008. One objective is to develop a set of recommended operating solutions and appropriate guidelines. It will provide schools and educational facilities with stability and predictability, so that computers, networks and basic services function properly. Operating solutions must be adapted to the institutions' size and needs.

This documentation contains guidelines based on practices customised for ICT-services within municipalities and counties. It is also applicable for commercial operators. Many municipalities have only one part-time position for computer networking operations within the schools. Overall just 13% of the municipalities in Norway have more than 20,000 inhabitants; 73 % have less than 10,000. Usually 1-4 people work full time in ICT within the municipal administration. When it comes to schools, there is often only one part-time ICT position, which can cover approximately 500-800 client computers at 5-10 schools, with around 1700-3200 students and teachers using the system.

The documentation is also suitable for larger organisations. It is based on the ISO 20000 standard for ICT operations, also known as the ICT Infrastructure Library. See Wikipedia for more information about the standard itself: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL ]

The first edition of this document was finished 19th July 2006.

The document is maintained in a wiki and can be updated at [https://wiki.debian.org/!DebianEdu/Documentation/nb/ITIL ]. The previous version is available from [http://developer.skolelinux.no/itil/oldindex.html ]

The document will be translated into English using [https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/itil-revitalization/ ] from March 2015.