Morning peeps , quick intro

[StevenEdgar]

I manage the SIMS support team for Oxfordshire County Council and come from a fairly technical background in LA's and the private sector so I am a sad case in many ways !!!

We have spent a awful lot of time and effort getting a centrally hosted system running for almost all our schools and currently host 270 school databases (inc secondary schools) plus the same number of FMS databases. All the schools have at their end is a PC with IE installed, an active x control for a package called screwdrivers (to cut down on printer issues) plus their OCN (Oxfordshire Community Network private broadband connection). This means schools no longer have backups or upgrades to do and network technicians can find far more interesting things to do !! Seems to work really well here and we are now looking at setting up a bank of 20 training databases so we can do training anywhere in the county rather than just being stuck in our fixed training rooms.

THis does mean that we can upgrade all our hosted schools in a day !!

You may be able to tell that I am fairly keen on this ...

[ChrisH]

Sounds like a nice system if it works as well as you say :P .

[StevenEdgar]

we don't get many problems other than the odd server playing up but we use load balancing with plenty of redundancy to cut down the chances of major issues. The one obious area where you can have a problem is with your comms. It has to be reliable and robust. People have to trust it. If you lose that then your are dead in the water.

I won't say that this is easy to implement - it has taken time and a lot of effort but it really does work well