CentraStage

[Jose]

there seems to be a lot of newly registered users with only 1-3 posts supporting this product.

[Rawns]

I noticed this too! SMBC-Damian's post reads like an advert!

[AyatollahPies]

This sounds rather Deja-Vu esq.

Wasn't there a similar thread a year or 2 ago about Centrastor, and a few "new" posters raved about madly?

Edit: ?

[RinSewand]

There's a lot of tips of icebergs in here too...

RwD

[SMBC-Damian]

There seems to be quite a lot of us starting to use this service and trying out it's features, I was hoping from Posting that I would get some idea of how successful other users had been and possible start off a few.....

.... "We did this project and it worked really well...." or even some "We tried this and this didn't quite work as well as we had hoped.."

I would welcome other users of CentraStages comments, by PM if not on the forum. It goes against the grain to re-invent the wheel, so if I can skip straight onto the 'real time savers' that would be great!!

Regards,
D.

[rh91uk]

We will be using CentraStage soon in our LEA too so would be greatful for the comments!

[Rawns]

As of yet, we have not used CentraStage for any "major" projects as such. The "biggest" thing we have used it for to date is the SIMS and FMS backup process.

Originally, each school had a scheduled task on it's servers to action a SIMS backup, FMS backup and a tidy routine on a daily basis. Since Capita removed compression, we have had to rethink and create a new backup, compression and checking process that runs against each school every night. We have doe this and push it out on CentraStage. It's only been running for a couple of weeks against around 270 school servers but seems to be on average about 99% successful. Using the post-definitions in the CentraStage job, we have set up error checking so we can see why a task failed. In most failure cases up to now, it's usually down to a drive space issue or a power cut at school overnight. Overall, we are very pleased with how it's working out.

We are currently looking at automating the SIMS and FMS upgrade process now using CentraStage, and also will be looking at the SQL Migration too. I'll keep you posted.

[dude10028]

Hi All

@Jose, Rawns, AyatollahPies, RinSewand
Looking at the posts I can see what you mean. Can't speak for the others but i have used edugeek to get information for some time - when i saw a post about something i have some experience with i thought i would post - no conspiracy here. Maybe the posts are actually positive because it genuinly is a good product for education networks?

Sure it's not without problems. One issue we experienced was with domain users being members of local admins. This meant that they were able to access the centrastage client settings. In the end we just had to put up with this since removing users from local admins caused issues with the older curric software. Another is that there is no support for Linux clients (but being based on Windows WMI this is no great surprise).

Still, even with a few issues, it's still a good product. Sure it does not provide anything that cannot be achieved (for a lot less cost) using separate systems i.e. RDP/VNC for remote control, WSUS for M$ patches, logon scripts and GPO's for software installation and updates, WMI based logon scripts for device audit etc. Anyone who has actually used GPO's for software installs knows this is not without issues too! Plus with centrastage you do get all the features in one centrally managed interface. As someone who used separate solutions for several years to support over 200 schools i can say that centrastage made my life somuch easier.

PS. The fact that BETT is aproaching fast and redstor/centrastage have alcholic refreshments has no bearing on my comments at all

@Rawns
Hands up - i might be a little biast since i was the one that originally installed and configured centrastage in Somerset and then left before you got it rolled out to all clients. Still, it's a hellofa lot better than Tivolli which is what you'd have (eventually!) ended up with otherwise.

Andy

[ful56_uk]

we use centrastage here on our server I think we paid £10 per machine and got it from Ergo. Love it. As well as for ur server I bought licences for our feeder primarys to look after there servers as well.

[Rawns]

Hi All

@Jose, Rawns, AyatollahPies, RinSewand
Looking at the posts I can see what you mean. Can't speak for the others but i have used edugeek to get information for some time - when i saw a post about something i have some experience with i thought i would post - no conspiracy here. Maybe the posts are actually positive because it genuinly is a good product for education networks?

I guess we can be rather suspicious sometimes. Apologies if any of you were offended!

@Rawns
Hands up - i might be a little biast since i was the one that originally installed and configured centrastage in Somerset and then left before you got it rolled out to all clients. Still, it's a hellofa lot better than Tivolli which is what you'd have (eventually!) ended up with otherwise.

Well I think its a quality product so far! One or Two small teething problems, and I can see a few areas that can be improved/added to but I'm sure that CentraStage will make the product even better as time goes on!

[PiqueABoo]

Having made something like this myself, I'm a bit of a world expert on this kind of thing. Didn't know this product existed until recently but if you're doing the same things over and over again on boxes, CS works as advertised and doesn't break the bank, then it ought to be a Good Thing[tm] for your organisation.

But having quickly skimmed the manual/forums/personal-account-functionality, CS looks a bit spread thin to me i.e. it has a lot of features, but there's just not enough depth in the areas I care about most.