[vox] [OT] Budget Surplus - How Do I Spend It?

[joseph estevao arruda]

On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 08:42, Marc Elliot Hall wrote:
> So, My boss's boss called me into a meeting yesterday to announce that
> our organization has found $200k remaining in the fiscal year budget. 
> That means it must be spent before June 30, or we lose it. The funds
> must be spent on training, software, or consulting - No hardware or
> other capital equipment.

Well, for starters (if you are using M/UMPS) you could contact Dick
Walters at the UCD Comp Sci dept and hire him to do consultancy/training
for M.  I know it is one of the most common languages used with many
hospitals and there is a Linux toolchain for it now

http://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane/source/compiler.html
http://www.mumps.org

Otherwise, as far as training goes, does capital equipment include
books?  If it doesn't it certainly would ot hurt to get a small
O'Reilly/New Riders/No Starch reference library out of those funds.

Moving down the line, there are a lot of vendors offering various
training options:

Sun Services (which I used to work for back in the late 90s) -
www.sun.com  Other vendors like HP, Oracle, and IBM offer training as
well, and I am sure in areas of interest.

There is the Linux Professional Institute - www.lpi.org

there is some general info here - http://lintraining.com/m/d/

Delivery may be impossible under your time constraints for this, but
look at the UC Extension course catalogs or Stanfords open courses.

> This brings me to my question: given these facts and criteria, what
> recommendations for training, software, and consulting (with an emphasis
> on open source and Free software, wherever possible) would you have for
> our organization? Suggestions of specific vendors and programs are
> welcome, although direct sales inquiries are *NOT*. 

z