Microsoft & EduGeek Whitepaper Feedback thread

[ZeroHour]

Please discuss the whitepaper here.

 

You can get a copy from: http://edugeek.me/article/544

 

 

Links:

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Training: https://mva.microsoft.com/en-US/training-courses/microsoft-azure-fundamentals-8391?l=BfBcAzIz_504984382

Edited July 9, 2016 by ZeroHour

[Ephelyon]

I am very troubled to see that they have left in the sentence I cautioned them most heavily against:

 

The cloud model impacts the depth and breadth of skills required within the in house IT teams as you push more of the management of the IT service back onto Microsoft to manage.

 

I was very clear that its wording suggests our profession will be "dumbed down" and their response was essentially "noted, but bear in mind this is a draft". It is quite telling that it has made it to the final version.

Edited July 8, 2016 by Ephelyon

[Ephelyon]

On a separate note, and while I completely accept the nature of "indicative figures" and "model proposals", the total cost for the kit list as presented comes to £39,332/annum. Is anyone else flabbergasted by this? Edited July 8, 2016 by Ephelyon

[elsiegee40]

While I completely accept the nature of "indicative figures" and "model proposals", the total cost for the kit list as presented comes to £39,332/annum. Is anyone else flabbergasted by this?

 

Jaw dropping. No idea how they think we'd afford that

[3s-gtech]

I think someone may have become a little confused as to the state of school IT budgets at present. I'm sure some could afford it, we certainly couldn't (and wouldn't).

[Ephelyon]

I would love to be able to say I think it's just confusion or a lack of understanding, but I think the real rationale is more sinister...

 

It's fair to say the services encompassed by that figure comprise far more than simple server/desktop licensing, but it's also true to say that Microsoft has a clear business interest in this. At the moment, we may pay money (though nowhere near that much) to cover power, hardware, licensing, VLEs, BI tools etc... but all of that money is divvied up between different vendors who get their (fair) share of public funds for the disparate services they provide. What Microsoft wants us to do is send all of that money to them - and more besides, by the looks of it. "Free" services for education? They'll be laughing all the way to the bank. This was planned.

 

As I predicted a few years ago, the decision to make Office 365 completely free for education was, is and always will be nothing more than a "hook". It's a very good business strategy, yes, but it has no place in the education sector. Full integration can be very nice indeed, but if you already have a sound setup it really isn't worth paying over five times more for (as in our case). I am furious with the DfE for getting into bed with Microsoft and leading to this fiasco, and I'm minded to put forward a plan to hold them to account for this.

 

Somewhat ironically, I would also be concerned for Microsoft in this. They've been done through a class-action lawsuit before for swatting other providers out of the market, by trying to position themselves as The One Provider that can supply everything. It looks like they haven't learned their lesson.

Edited July 8, 2016 by Ephelyon

[jmak]

Please discuss the whitepaper here.

 

You can get a copy from: http://www.edugeek.net/s/articles/544-microsoft-edugeek-school-future-whitepaper.html

 

 

Links:

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Training: https://mva.microsoft.com/en-US/training-courses/microsoft-azure-fundamentals-8391?l=BfBcAzIz_504984382

On the android app the first link takes me to a job ad ? [emoji54]

 

http://www.edugeek.net/showthread.php?t=544

[elsiegee40]

On the android app the first link takes me to a job ad ? [emoji54]

 

http://www.edugeek.net/showthread.php?t=544

 

Opening post now fixed.

[ZeroHour]

On the android app the first link takes me to a job ad ? [emoji54]

 

Senior ICT Technician & Systems Administrator - Birmingham

 

Its a bug with the app that isnt easy to resolve. I have coded a workaround using a redirect trick for now.

[nicholab]

I like the idea of Remote apping SIMS could work out better than learning gateway and SIMS app.

[jmak]

So, quite a lot of it makes sense and is a reasonable idea in some situations. However, the key paragraph for me is on page 10:

 

Based on the size of the school and the number of computers in use, this environment will likely be a single physical server running Hyper V. Although

this single on premise server presents a single point of failure, this blueprint is not leaving any mission critical workloads on premise. If your chosen interim or end state design keeps some critical workloads on premise, then multiple servers may be desired. These workloads can be protected with Azure Site Recovery if required.

 

On premise services will be limited to networking services like DHCP and DNS and Domain services. Some management tools will remain such as server patch management and operating system deployment. Printing will also remain. [/Quote]

 

Guess how many physical servers I have at the minute? I don't think our situation (for those who didn't guess - we have one server) is particularly rare for Primary Schools.

 

So unless I'm way off, I'm going to need the same amount of hardware, will have to pay massively more for licences for Windows Server and client licences, buy Azure licences that we don't need at the minute and have the extra management overhead of managing a hybrid cloud infrastructure that I don't have at the minute.

 

I know I have to value my time and that of users in terms of system changes, but for small schools this solution looks very expensive compared to the current offering. I'll certainly be trying to find an alternative to Microsoft based on this information.

[localzuk]

The very first "Design Assumption" is going to be hard for a lot of schools - "Adequate Internet Bandwidth".

 

The next thing that bothers me is "File Server" being cloud based. Fine for small office files. What about videos? Our video project in IT uses GB of storage. Imagine a class all wanting to access those videos at the same time - we'd be way beyond what we could afford for internet connectivity. What about the gigabytes of photos we store (currently have 100Gb of photos from the last 4 years on our storage server).

 

Their pricing for telephony is ridiculous too. £10k per year!? We haven't spent that on telephony in 3 years let alone 1!

 

Also, they list "Express Route" as £744 per year? Great, what's the price for the line its running on?

 

Finally, the model "assumes the school refreshes back end hardware every 5 years with a single, budgeted CAPEX spend"... Err, no.

[Tefters]

I like the idea of Remote apping SIMS could work out better than learning gateway and SIMS app.

 

You know you can remote app SIMS from on-site with a simple RD Server and a Gateway Server? Done it here and everyone loves it not to mention the full blown RD solution for home use and thin clients in school for admin offices that only use Office, Email and SIMS.

 

On a more sound off note, this paper is stupid which was expected. Office 365 being free was a very good move and forced thanks to Google Apps however Azure is ridiculous unless your in the business sector.

I have used a lot of cloud platforms over the years and they all suffer from the same issues, power and disk consumption costs.

SIMS = Heavy Use

File Server = Lots of space

 

With built in technologies in Windows 2012 R2 on wards such as disk deduplication disk space issues have gone bye bye with the cost of disks and servers dropping massively too.

 

Cloud technology is all a big gimmick and a very clever buzz word for outsourcing plain and simple. Of course with outsourcing comes a high cost and you still need someone on-site to manage all the outsourcing and making sure everything is running as should be.

Don't even get me started on the "don't need someone technical" section because that i horse sh*t if i've ever read it, try and have a low level tech manage Azure AD sync with Exchange off-site and Skype for Business on-premise along with hosted UM, uhuh OK Microsoft whatever you say!

 

To sum up - Its never been cheaper to stay on-site and Microsoft are scaremongering over the price hikes to get people into Azure which will ultimately cost way more than the pricing increase through loss of the Edu discount. As long as people are planning and constantly staying on top of upgrades and new solutions then overall yearly costs are cheap cheap cheap. This year I've managed to save yet another good £10k to 15k over last year through licensing and new technologies.

Edited July 28, 2016 by Tefters

[Dave_O]

Must have missed my invite. I do have to say I'm not surprised. For me this has crystallised my thinking and in turn my decision. When I analyse what people actually use on the network over the space of a year, it boils down to 96% Office productivity and 4% other. I'm sure we can sort something out for the 4%.

 

When I look back over the last 32 years in education, learning new software, trying to integrate it into the curriculum. In most cases every 3-4 years I had to do it again when the next new and great thing came out. There are some really clever people out there making a lot of money convincing us that we need this tech. The reality is we don't. Most of it is an utter waste of time and effort.

 

With that in mind, over the next 3 years we will train staff and students in the use of Google Apps and make a break at that point. Some variant of Linux and a browser will do. Actually if it was down to me it would be vi and nothing else! That will be just in time for my retirement and then it's someone else's problem.

 

Am I bitter? No, I've got all of this knowledge and experience but to what end?

[Ephelyon]

^ I think that's the kind of message Microsoft needs to hear.

 

What would you do for your MIS? Go web-based with something like Progresso?

[nicholab]

Old data in this cloud world is going to be a pain. Thing of that old mis data that parked to one side.

[Dave_O]

^ I think that's the kind of message Microsoft needs to hear.

 

What would you do for your MIS? Go web-based with something like Progresso?

VMWare Horizon using Blast

[Ephelyon]

I mean as in SIMS etc.

[Tefters]

The only thing you can do with SIMS is host it on-site and offer it out via Remote Desktop/Remote App or have it hosted via a MAT otherwise your paying ££££££ to host it in the cloud whether that's managed by you or not. SIMS is an old school app that needs a modern age overhaul which they won't do or someone to come out of the wood work with a cloud based equivalent at a realistic cost.

[Ephelyon]

... but there are SIMS equivalents that are purely web-based, however well they work, and that's part of the question.

[Dave_O]

I mean as in SIMS etc.

Yes SIMS through blast

[Tefters]

Depends on what else you utilise. Mine use Parent Call as a 3rd party module for absence messaging, Intouch for emailing/sms parents (which I think is a huge waste of money on top of call parents but hey!) then you have FMS and the bulk photo import.

 

SIMS unfortunately does offer a lot but the cost, management and running is poop.

[gshaw]

Azure AD Premium makes me laugh, instead of nice FTE licensing you get to pay per user and once you get to college level of users that's over £10k a year on its own (!)

 

At the moment we're sitting on the happy middle ground, taking advantage of the "free" offerings (Office 365 Education, Azure Rights Management, Azure AD Basic) to offload the basic services to cloud but keeping kit on-premise to run legacy apps, whilst evaluating SaaS each time a platform refresh occurs to see if it works in our favour. Thus far that's not been the case every time as some per user \ per month charges are horrific once they scale up to full head count.

[Gibson335]

I am very troubled to see that they have left in the sentence I cautioned them most heavily against:

 

 

 

I was very clear that its wording suggests our profession will be "dumbed down" and their response was essentially "noted, but bear in mind this is a draft". It is quite telling that it has made it to the final version.

 

It does say later that this will allow the on site IT staff to 'move up the value chain to work on improvement and strategic initiatives'...Hmm...I'm sure schools strapped for cash are going to love employing their previously hard-working tech staff to sit about smoking Gauloises, sipping lattes and pontificating...

[Ephelyon]

It does say later that this will allow the on site IT staff to 'move up the value chain to work on improvement and strategic initiatives'...Hmm...I'm sure schools strapped for cash are going to love employing their previously hard-working tech staff to sit about smoking Gauloises, sipping lattes and pontificating...

 

What I pointed out to them was that some of us are already there, combining both the technical and the strategic workflows, which is how I see the NM role anyway...