Software Alternatives

[Hightower]

About Impero - I had a ballpark of about £3k for the first year, and about £1k per year after. Does this sound about right for a school with around 300 machines?

[clarky2k3]

Print Management --> Papercut (best software we have ever bought!)
RM SmartCache --> Smoothwall
Software Deployment --> GPO or WPKG
RM Tutor --> ABTutor (Just pay per management machine - unlimited clients)

[Timmay2606]

About Impero - I had a ballpark of about £3k for the first year, and about £1k per year after. Does this sound about right for a school with around 300 machines?

Sounds in the right region. I know it works on an RM network so I would suggest downloading it and having a play. One of the Impero salesguys will probably follow it up, so be sure to mention Edugeek!

[edutech4schools]

RM causes you way more issues than Vanilla. I logged loads of calls with RM when we had it but since moving have had very few issues and can find all the info I need on the net (edugeek).

RM also restricts how you work and once free you won't look back.

[morganw]

I'd recommend LanSchool as a replacement for RM tutor. It uses the idea of 'channels' that can be configured through group policy or scripting so you'll never get people remote controlling the wrong room. The user interface also seemed the easiest to use from those I tested. I think the pricing structure was similar to AB TutorControl, free for clients, pay for each teacher licence.

[Hightower]

RM causes you way more issues than Vanilla. I logged loads of calls with RM when we had it but since moving have had very few issues and can find all the info I need on the net (edugeek).

RM also restricts how you work and once free you won't look back.

There's plenty of RM bashing threads. This is not one of them.

[sadams1980]

I know a lot of people don't like RM, but it has been a god send to me. I am the only technician at our school and the Network Manager is a full-time teacher. So to be able to just go to RM if there is problem is great.

Don't get me wrong if I had half the chance I would like to go Vanilla but being on my own its not feasible, not because I don't like RM but the fact that I'd get more freedom in how I wanted to run our network.

I have ditched most of the RM Software mind:
RMVP - Sophos
RM Printer Credits - Pcounter
RM Audit - Spiceworks

I am currently looking into dropping RM Easymail and going with Live@edu. Why pay for something when you can get it for free.

PS - Also when there is a problem, being able to tell teachers that I have had to pass it to RM saves so much hassle.

[MK-2]

I know a lot of people don't like RM, but it has been a god send to me. I am the only technician at our school and the Network Manager is a full-time teacher. So to be able to just go to RM if there is problem is great.

Don't get me wrong if I had half the chance I would like to go Vanilla but being on my own its not feasible, not because I don't like RM but the fact that I'd get more freedom in how I wanted to run our network.

I have ditched most of the RM Software mind:
RMVP - Sophos
RM Printer Credits - Pcounter
RM Audit - Spiceworks

I am currently looking into dropping RM Easymail and going with Live@edu. Why pay for something when you can get it for free.

PS - Also when there is a problem, being able to tell teachers that I have had to pass it to RM saves so much hassle.

in certain circumstances, such as yours, i can understand why the school chooses RM. It (allegedly) makes your life easier with certain tasks. The problem comes when you are still the only person on site, and there is a problem. Blaming RM will only get you so far before staff get annoyed with there being a problem and if it is an RM specific problem, chances are you don't know how to fix it so have to just sit patiently twiddling thumbs (or sending event logs etc) until RM come up with a resolution. In the mean time it means weathering the storm of staff wanting to know when it will be fixed.

[Flakes]

RM Tutor is a rebranded Netsupport a program which i would recommend certaintly the newer v10.

[edutech4schools]

Don't get me wrong if I had half the chance I would like to go Vanilla but being on my own its not feasible

I am on my own and look after 4 schools (I used to look after 13 but had new born baby to think about a few years back so cut down) and manage just fine. Having vanilla keeps things nice and simple.

There's plenty of RM bashing threads. This is not one of them.

Not trying to bash RM but if all my schools had RM servers I would not be able to support all the schools that I do currently. The reason is - over a 1 year period of using a RM server in a school I had accumulated a vast amount of logged calls to RM. Even very basic faults that would be simple to fix for a vanilla setup become a problem that needed to get logged with RM. You cant do standard fix's as this then causes issues with the RM layer so you end up logging painfully silly issues.
I like RM as a company but my own experiences with the server software products have left a sting.

[mac_shinobi]

Also ABTutor for classroom/network control

Impero

Impero - Classroom and Computer Lab Management Software

All features or a majority of them listed on the link above

[David_PCN]

RM now supplies Pcounter for advanced print control - not sure if CC4 has the original "print Credits" option still though!