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About LinkBacksHi All,
We are looking at a full infrastructure upgrade at present over the next summer and companies we are looking at include Ramesys and Ergo. Has anyone used these before for full system solutions and what have you found them to be like?
Dave.
Hi All,
We are looking at a full infrastructure upgrade at present over the next summer and companies we are looking at include Ramesys and Ergo. Has anyone used these before for full system solutions and what have you found them to be like?
Dave.
Personaly if you are looking at a whole infrastructure upgrade then I would look at people who are local to your area, or those that are known to be small but reliable.
At least that way when you have a problem you know the person that you will be talking to.
Just My Thoughts.
^ Seconded
What is it your having done btw?
@dave-a: When you say a 'full infrastructure upgrade' what precisely are you after?
IIRC I heard a couple of stories about some odd AD configurations from Ramesys and maybe something about Ergo. I cannot be 100% sure and they weren't major problems... simply odd configurations.
The reason I ask what exactly you mean is because IMHO it is better to choose companies that specialise in different aspects - e.g. Ramesys for licensing, your local cable company for your cabling and switches, etc.
My advice would be do it yourself. Ask other local techies to give you a hand in the holidays I think most would be happy to lend a hand with there schools permission just for the kudos. I have never trusted third parties to do a decent job and thats from working as a contractor and being on the recieving end. My focus is to do the best job as I can for my School A Contractor's is to make money. There are good contractor's out there but they still need to make money.
When I said full infrastructure upgrade what I meant was we are moving from are current viglen 2000 network to a whole new system, including the purchase of up to seven new servers running server 2003, all system software upgrade eg Exchange 2000 to 2003, sql 2000 to 2003.. ect. Having a ISA setup to manage internet access. The inclusion of a VLE. New software to manage users, printers, backups ect. So we are basically looking at a whole new network build. Some of the software mentioned to be included in the new build are
Print manager plus
Microsoft learning gateway
Inteliguard
Smartscreen
Netsupport schools
I have had a look around and they all seem to do the job that a school would ask of them, who do people find these to work thathave them in use within there schools.
Dave
What I would do is hire the services of a Network Guru and build it yourself with a Vanilla Network with Ranger as the additional security...
I managed a migration fromRM Connect 2.4 to Citrix over a summer (with a little help from Dos_Box). This involved the set up of 10 new servers - including ISA and Exchange.
I would go for PyKota over PMP (after having used PMP for over 2 years) - you will find a guide in the *nix forum.
NetSupport Manager is better than NetSupport School - has a few extra features that make it nicer to use from a network management point of view. You also get the school interface chucked inEither way, NetSupport is easy to deploy.
Printers can be managed with my scripts in the scripts forum
Personally, I would also consider using SchoolGuardian from Smoothwall over ISA with a plugin - considerably cheaper!
I'm a big Ranger fan too. Well worth the cash IMO if not the optional yearly product maintainance. Also they have Ranger print manager which I think is a rebadged version of print manager but dont quote me on that.Originally Posted by Grommit
You could always go with RM CC3 or wait for CC4
So you are basically after a domain rebuild to move away from Viglen Classlink.
There are a number of companies that can do this and put in a Vanilla system including Ergo and Ramesys. Dell will also do this for a price and most HP/Compaq partners too ...
The first place you are meant to look is the Becta Infrastructure Framework. This is a list of companies that have dotted the 'i's and crossed the 't's and have shown they can do it.
Most companies that are MS gold partners can do it too (but make sure they have educationexperience) ...
As already pointed out there are a number of people that would just do it in hose ... it all depends on the amount of time you have, the level of expertise and playing it off against the cost of someone else doing it and the benefits of having an SLA with a company to use to hit them with.
Some will say to use Ranger for the middleware ... others are happy with RM ... other say not to use middleware at all ... some will tell you to use Macs or Linux ...
It is whatever works for your school.
Back to your original question ... my experience with Ergo is with their laptops ... knocking them back twice because they were not good enough and the fact the the account manager was useless (we have a budget of £600 per unit ... stop sending us eval units of £900!!!) and brief chats with engineers abotu setting them up in certain ways ... not overly impressed.
Ramesys ... not heard anything bad yet, and the guys I spoke with seemed very switched on and quite open to suggestions.
As for case sites from both of them ... and then get someone else to ring up to ask them probing questions!
Agree with the others, look at doing it yourself with on-site assistance from individuals (companies, contractors or peers) as opposed to a 'one size fits all' install. TBH most people who would do that would not be on this forum asking for comment.
IMO is it a good idea to try and do all the things at once? EG Microsoft Learning Gateway could be added after it is 'live', just to break the task into chunks.
For the record, Ranger Print Manager is not re-badged Print Manager Plus. However, not much between any of these apps.
We moved from Viglen Classlink 2000 last summer, though on a much smaller scale (one 2k3 server). We got advice from a local secondary school network manager on our server spec, and sent out quite detailed info on what we currently had and what we wanted to at least 6 companies, some big, some small. It was interesting to receive a wide variety of responses back - some had obviously given us their off-the-shelf one-size-fits-all response. Some had redefined our server spec. Ergo was one of these; although we were open to listening to them as to why their server spec was better than ours, this one didn't make sense to us and they seemed to have underestimated the number of clients we would be running despite the details we had given them. On the other hand, unlike Grumbledook, we have had good experiences with laptops from Ergo, and a good account manager for that to date. No experience of Ramyses, I'm afraid.
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