About Sunny Arbor
Sunny Arbor was founded in 2001 by Jim and Carol Ingram as a small sideline business intended to market home-grown processed food products and native Nebraska craft products. Ultimately food regulations and poor market return from both product lines brought them to an end. Sometime prior to their withdrawal, a third product line was introduced, based on Jim's technology skills from his full-time occupation.
Jim served 34 years in the Broken Bow Public Schools, first as a classroom teacher and later as the District's full-time Technology Coordinator. Jim was responsible for the introduction of the first personal computer in the classroom in 1978, before the Apple IIe was even in the marketplace. The summer of 1978 was spent soldering components onto circuit boards to bring that first computer to life, a Heathkit H-8 computer. In a very short time more computers such as the Sinclair ZX were added to the stable. In 1982 the District's first computer lab was created, a network that used Novell Netware 1.5. By 1984 the District had purchased an IBM System 36 and a dozen IBM PC-XT's that connected to it using Token Ring network cards and Type 2 cable.
Over the ensuing years Jim engineered transitions from DOS-based systems to Windows-based systems, from Windows 3 to Windows 9x to Windows 2000 to Windows XP to Windows 7, oversaw the introduction of the Internet into the educational environment, worked with increasing network speeds from 2Mbps to 10Mbps to 100Mbps to Gigabit, and served as webmaster for the District's websites. Other responsibilities included linking the District's three building sites with District-owned fiber, management of network accounts and services, management of the District's Student Information Systems, and implementation of wireless networking when the only wireless standard in existence was 802.11b.
In 2007 the Federal No Child Left Behind legislation resulted in placing onerous data reporting burdens on public education, which mandated the adoption of a new Student Management System. BBPS adopted Infinite Campus, which provided Jim with the need to learn SQL. In 2009 a year of planning came to fulfillment in the adoption of a new technology-based learning paradigm that included laptop computers for all Juniors and Seniors, a WiFi network capable of handling the traffic load, an on-line Learning Management System (Angel), and several other smaller software packages necessary to the new learning environment. As the District SQL programmer, Jim developed automated SQL processes that kept the Angel LMS synchronized with the authoritative class schedule information in Infinite Campus.
In the Spring of 2011 it became apparent that Jim's workload for the District had become unmanageable, stress levels had been running high for many years, and a philosophical division was growing between Jim and the District. Jim opted to take early retirement from the Nebraska Public Employees Retirement System, take some time for stress relief, and ultimately seek other avenues of full-time employment until full retirement age. This has been the momentum behind a full restructuring of the purpose and strategies of Sunny Arbor Web Development Services.
Jim's long-standing experience as a classroom teacher and a technologist, dating back to the earliest days of personal computers, and forward to the latest concepts of virtualization and "cloud computing", is now available to you on any scale and any schedule. Do you want to put a WiFi hot-spot in your restaurant? We can do that. Do you need help managing an Active Directory network with several thousand users? We can do that. Do you want to install video projectors and interactive whiteboards in conference rooms? We can help you. Do you want on-call support while your employees learn the ins and outs of Office 2010? We're available. Do you need to develop an internal database for a special purpose? We can do that for you. Do you want to make that database accessible over the Internet? That's right up our alley. We could go on like this for quite a while, but presume you already got the point!
While Jim will continue to support existing Sunny Arbor Web Development customers and take on new ones, he also is open to full-time employment, preferably as a work-from-home technology advisor or specialist. Prospective full-time or part-time employers who are interested in Jim's services should download a copy of Jim's professional resume.