InterOp Las Vegas was awesome. I learned so much and brought back a ton of ideas for Okoboji Community School District.

I thoroughly enjoyed talking with the sales people and, more so, the engineers that were there pushing their products. VMWare has some very enticing things coming down the pipe in the area of desktop virtualization. This could prove extremely useful to us here at Okoboji. We are currently utilizing some thin client solutions, but VMWare's solutions seem to have many advantaged over what we are doing currently.

I also found Riverbed's WAN optimization intriguing. Okoboji has a slow wireless point to point between our middle school and the rest of the network including the Internet connection. Although there are multiple solution to solve this issue, optimizing that link with Riverbed's Steelhead appliance could be a very affordable one. I sat through a presentation on it and some other WAN optimizers that were there and Riverbed seems to have the most cost-effective solution for us.

I also did much research on different solutions for our web filtering and anti-virus needs. Our current solution is not functioning as we would like and our current anti-virus is too expensive for us. So, my main purpose for going to InterOp was to find us a new solution, and I came back with several ideas all of which I will research further and come up with the solution best for Okoboji. LightSpeed Total Traffic Control is still a front runner, but I think a close competitor is Marshal 8e6. I like LightSpeed's reporting, but Marshal 8e6 is not far behind in that department. I have a lot of work ahead of me this summer to make the right decisions for Okoboji Community School District.