Railroaded into Sharepoint

[plexer]

Well our group of schools that were working on getting a VLE have been railroaded into a Sharepoint 2007 one because the LEA has stumped up the money for the first year but after that we have to pay something like £7.5k a year for it.

 

FFS!

 

Ben

[torledo]

Well our group of schools that were working on getting a VLE have been railroaded into a Sharepoint 2007 one because the LEA has stumped up the money for the first year but after that we have to pay something like £7.5k a year for it.

 

FFS!

 

Ben

 

Could have been worse, you could have been lumbered with RM or Netmedia.

[GrumbleDook]

@plexer

A company or an LEA in-house version?

[KarlGoddard]

oooo painful...

 

I looked into integrating Sharepoint with a VLE / VLEs and it looked a pretty tough job. Is it Classserver based?

 

Luckily we're using an LEA wide Moodle install - a collective sigh of relief was had when we heard that news.

[CyberNerd]

I know for fact that 50% of Secondary schools in our LA are happily using Moodle (There may be more but I don't know about them)

We are to be pushed into Kalidos or Uniservity.... Becta approved

[webman]

Due to political reasons and possible legal action, I have withdrawn my opinions regarding the DLG. PM me for details.

[plexer]

Grumble: LP+ so company provided one, supposed to be moving to shiboleth auth to it as well eventually.

 

God knows what the LEA get up to.

 

Ben

[TechMonkey]

I know for fact that 50% of Secondary schools in our LA are happily using Moodle (There may be more but I don't know about them)

We are to be pushed into Kalidos or Uniservity.... Becta approved

 

Not East Sussex are you? As thats the 2 choices we have come down to. Apparently the 3rd option was the Viglen one and teachers seemed to love it but was knocked out due to not enough user base in the UK (something like that!). What we can't understand is that we are now being told that they will whittle it down to one and then discuss money. We ahve all said we want to know the cost first as that surely has to be part of the decision and tht way you can play them off each other to get a better deal. Other wise they know they are the only tender left so can charge relativly what they want!

 

Never understand these things.

[beeswax]

Never understand these things.

 

Oh I don't know, you seem to have a good grasp of negotiating tactics.

[GrumbleDook]

Grumble: LP+ so company provided one, supposed to be moving to shiboleth auth to it as well eventually.

 

God knows what the LEA get up to.

 

Ben

 

The folks over there are a good bunch.

 

They plan to work with a number of RBCs for federating into the Regional IDP over the next 12 - 18 months.

 

Northants is also LP+ but the design and implementation will be heavily influenced by your LA. Make sure you have representation.

[zag]

We use sharepoint and could not be happier, but we use it in our school and the server is run from inside the school.

 

Its a brilliant VLE as far as I can see.

 

I also thought sharepoint licenses were free to schools? The only thing we pay for is the video streaming webpart.

[webman]

From what I understand, Sharepoint is free, but not Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS)

[sahmeepee]

... Apparently the 3rd option was the Viglen one and teachers seemed to love it but was knocked out due to not enough user base in the UK (something like that!). ...

 

The Viglen one ("it's learning") is actually quite nice from what I've seen of it. We had a demo account and it did seem pretty teacher-friendly. It is all hosted from one location at the moment though, where it originated in Norway, which is something they would probably need to change or at least beef up if they want to get a chunk of the UK market.

 

If I couldn't get Moodle, it's learning would be my 2nd choice. After spending a lifetime of effort setting up older versions of classserver - probably the worst-supported microsoft product ever produced - I wouldn't touch it now with a brown sticky thing.

[GrumbleDook]

From what I understand, Sharepoint is free, but not Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS)

 

Other way round.

 

WSS v3 (Windows Sharepoint Services version3) is free and is pretty spot on.

 

SPS 2003 (Sharepoint Portal Server 2003) has now been upgraded to MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007) and include a heap more functions (including email via exchange, IM via Live Communication Server ... shortly to be upgraded to Office Communication Server 2008, and so on ... more details on the MS site).

 

It is possible to integrate it very easily in an in-house solution but not with an external one.

 

The basic idea behind SSO with an eternally hosted MOSS 2007 build goes something like this.

 

Your RBC holds the Regional IDP ... the master Directory Services. This can then be hooked into by schools for SSO (shibboleth, yada, yada, yada) and this is nice and funky, giving user lever access to resources within the RBC including web filters, etc. YOu then get 3rd party companies that federate into the RBC's Regional IDP. So, you get a straight through connection .. sort of.

 

This is going to take some work on the side of all parties.

 

I'll hopefully explain more after a meeting on Monday.

[webman]

Ah, my mistake then. Either way Moodle trumps any MS offerings in the V(T)LE department

[meastaugh1]

We use sharepoint and could not be happier, but we use it in our school and the server is run from inside the school.

 

Its a brilliant VLE as far as I can see.

 

Can you tell me which third party web parts, if any, you use to turn sharepoint into a VLE. We use it (WSS) for collaboration, but not sure how it could be used as a VLE, compared to the likes of Moodle and others.

[Norphy]

As long as you have WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007, you can use the Sharepoint Learning Kit

[meastaugh1]

I've had a look, but it doesn't seem to work particularly well.

[srochford]

From what I understand, Sharepoint is free, but not Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS)

 

Other way round - Windows Sharepoint Services is free; Sharepoint Server costs (and quite a lot of money).

 

You can do lots with WSS and you can have multiple WSS sites on 1 server (eg 1 for Maths, 1 for English etc) but they are separate sites - you can't get any kind of easy linking between them, searching across them etc - that's when you need the full server product.

[ThatBoringBloke]

Laughing @ webman!

 

coz I know the internal politice of it all! 8)

[meastaugh1]

You can do lots with WSS and you can have multiple WSS sites on 1 server (eg 1 for Maths, 1 for English etc) but they are separate sites - you can't get any kind of easy linking between them, searching across them etc - that's when you need the full server product.

 

Not sure if I've misunderstood your point, but if you have a subsite for each subject within a site collection, then you can search across them from the root site.

[NewOrder]

Firstly before I say too much I must declare my interest as its only fair. For the last 4 years I have been heavily involved with Microsoft Learning Gateway which is based on Sharepoint. I actually project managed the second install of MLG in the UK. I built up a system that supports over 100 schools and partners with another hosting company to provide a Learning Environment for over 500 schools. Growing by the week.

 

I think sharepoint and MLG is a robust product, it is moving in the right direction. It links well with other Microsoft products.

 

To compare Moodle with MLG is not fair. I have no issue with Moodle being a learning system but MLG is more than that. It intergrates with exchange, live communications and media server. It has its own learning system ' sharepoint learning kit.' scorm 2004 compliant.

 

The issue for a number of you on the forum is that more and more schools are looking at hosted solutions where the technology is taken away and the whats left is a system which supports learning, is used by teachers, staff, parents and students. In someways it takes your control away and sadly schools are not very good at explaining what the role of Network Mangers and technicians is. Many schools rely on you, give you work and responsibilty that clearly is not in your job grading. Then they make decisions based on a cost and education basis which takes away some of your responsibility. I can understand why you feel excluded.

 

I have had lots of discussions with people over the cost of moodle. Yes its free to a point but if you add email, other services, training, cost of servers, backup, contingency, content and technicians salary you will realise that £7500 is not a bad price.

 

A few years ago I met a head teacher who told me the costs we charged for a hosted solution of M L G was too expensive. They used Moodle, students only had access at school, there was no school wide email. A deputy headteacher was responsible for Moodle it took up half his time. I'll let you work out the rest.

 

You need to compare like for like, build in contingency, what happens if you are not there, what is you response time, can you give pedagogic advice to teachers on how best to use a learning Environment in T & L.

 

A couple of things 2007 has some excellent features mobile sites, anonymous sites, setting permissions is easier. We have also started to use Silverlight with 2007.

 

Last and probably I should have said it first. I trained a number of schools in Norfolk last week and I'm back on Monday look forward to meeting you !

[GrumbleDook]

Good to see a response Jon

 

One thing I would say that it is possible to get pretty much all the same functionality that you get in MSLG by using different things together ... and there are some bits in Moodle/Plone/ELGG that don't appear in MSLG ...

 

But, and I say this with tongue in cheek, the Learning Platform is not about the technology behind it but about the tools that are used ... blogs, wikis, SCORM resources, structured document library to enable independent learning ... if you want to use a bit of MSLG, a bit of Moodle, Wordpress for other bits ... it is up to you and what fits in.

 

The benefits of having everything in one place is a reduction in administrative costs, training costs, technical overhead ... easy collaboration between clusters of schools (or even within each school!), a single portal that can be used to link many other VLEs or resources together ...

 

But I suppose the most important things is how it can be used ... and I truly do think that no matter what you put in front of students ... they will use it. The stumbling block is how you get the teachers to change their mindset to make the most of it ... and at this point I have to admit that the good practice I have seen in a variety of schools and other groups makes me believe that whilst small centres of excellent are fantastic for driving innovation, the wholescale push from LA based platforms is likely to do more benefit in the long run ... as long as we don't lose those pockets of innovation.

[bossman]

Removed for legal reasons:

[zag]

I think its madness all these centralised solutions councils keep trying to push on individual schools. Its an expensive, slow and over complicated solution.

 

Why not let schools decide and locally host their VLE's? Especially in the secondary area.