Railroaded into Sharepoint

[webman]

Because of BSF? If councils get the contract for all schools, and all schools have their own VLE, it won't be easy for them!

 

However if all schools go with an LEA-hosted VLE then they have very little work to do when they take over the schools under BSF. Plus they get all the work your teachers did, for free.

[GrumbleDook]

Costs savings of around 20%? Raised baseline for all schools since we are still in the situation that some schools don't know their ... erm ... ears from their elbows and when LAs give money to schools a goodly number spend it frivolously on things like buildings and furniture, rather than on the stuff it is meant for. A better chance of collaboration between schools. That is me seeing it with the LA hat on.

 

With the school hat on the above is fine as long as schools have input into what is bought, it is complimentary to things schools already have in place and does not stifle any innovation that a school may want to do, or work they may want to do with others outside the LA / Region.

[Domino]

hmmm, I understand why (for some schools) they are doing this, but our LA is not giving us the option to go our own way - if we want any money we go with them is the approach.

 

We did a study ages ago and had a presentaion from loads of providers, and had decided that studywiz would be best for us.

 

But now the LA is looking at the RM and UniServity solutions, both of which seemed at bit lacking IMO

[alan-d]

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.

 

Not really a fair comment. Yes it may cost a little to set up a different VLE such as moodle but the long term costs for maintenance and tutoring the system are minimal compared to a large annual fee for a MS solution.

 

Don't get me wrong I have nothing against Sharepoint, we may even go that way ourselves once our LEA make their minds up I just felt that that comment gave the impression that Sharepoint was cheaper when in reality it isn't.

 

For example - we spent under 4K on a new server, which we needed anyway and installed the software ourselves. The training aspect for teaching staff was already accounted for within the budget as it would have been required no matter what system was put in place. The server also hosts our intranet, asset register etc.

 

[sahmeepee]

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.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Sharepoint does not provide email and although it links into it where required you are still paying separately for your Exchange server. Also bear in mind that the LAs have a big wodge of money from the government for providing VLEs so I would expect the cost of servers to come out of that.

 

I would say £7.5k is steep when you consider that hosted commercial implementations are available for well under £2k. In the long run overpriced offerings like these may well do damage to the overall effectiveness of VLE implementations nationwide, because like it or not a consistent VLE platform across an LA (dare I say country?) will get staff using it more effectively and will likely lead to better collaboration between schools when compared with the heterogeneous approach.

[GrumbleDook]

MOSS 2007 (the sharepoint implementation that NewOrder is talking about) does contain Exchange 2007 and Live Communications Server (soon to be Office Communication Server 2008), so you get mail, IM, shared desktop or application functionality (basically a whiteboard style sharing space) ...

 

Also remember that the commercially hosted solution (£2k? Bloody hell ... where from?) is not likely to offer training or tolls for creation of content ... and this is before you even get into pre-loaded content.

 

Also remember that costs will vary from school to school depending on what they add to the pack or what they leave off, as well as the numbers on roll.

 

I know of a few schools that are looking to use the LA portal for a year or two, to give them time to design and build their own. A chance to get some good practice sorted.

[sahmeepee]

I wasn't aware of the inclusion of Exch2007 in the MOSS license Tony, so thanks for the info. How on earth do they calculate the price if you don't just want one Sharepoint server, one Exchange and one OCS2008? I'd imagine many LAs have pretty large Exchange setups in place already.

 

Viglen (it's learning) were offering theirs even cheaper than 2k/yr back in January, but admittedly I haven't been in touch recently. As for pre-loaded content I think the real benefit there comes down to how many schools you can get to buy together as a consortium/LA rather than the technology it's loaded into.

 

Our LA are in the early stages of a single sign on project at the moment and (independently of that) are looking into an LA-wide Moodle deployment, so hopefully the two will both come to fruition and work nicely together. I'm keen for schools across the LA to team up as I think it will benefit everyone long-term. From our initial meddling with Moodle it does seem to have some limitations in its overall structure though (i.e. it doesn't seem to be well-suited to a hierarchy with LA > School > Subject > Year say)

 

Either way I'm not optimistic that they'll get their derrières in gear by Sept 2008, but I'd hope we'll get away with something usable for under 7k/year if it's being split x ways.

[torledo]

MOSS 2007 (the sharepoint implementation that NewOrder is talking about) does contain Exchange 2007 and Live Communications Server (soon to be Office Communication Server 2008), so you get mail, IM, shared desktop or application functionality (basically a whiteboard style sharing space) ...

 

Also remember that the commercially hosted solution (£2k? Bloody hell ... where from?) is not likely to offer training or tolls for creation of content ... and this is before you even get into pre-loaded content.

 

Also remember that costs will vary from school to school depending on what they add to the pack or what they leave off, as well as the numbers on roll.

 

I know of a few schools that are looking to use the LA portal for a year or two, to give them time to design and build their own. A chance to get some good practice sorted.

 

Do you mean the Microsoft Learning Gateway when referring to MOSS, Exc, LCS and ISA when 'packaged' as a solution. I know a lot of solutions providers provide this as part of a VLE implementation in so far as they develop the VLE using and incorporating these technologies and provide the hosting.

 

But I wasn't aware the MLG was available as an actual packaged product

merely a VLE framework. After all without Class Server / SLK it really isn't a VLE-specific solution. MOSS can be whatever you tailor it to be the SLK provides the education specific components.

[GrumbleDook]

When suppliers talk about a MOSS 2007 Learning Platform they are talking about MSLG, but like to say MOSS 2007 so you know you are getting the latest version.

 

Most providers work on SPLA for their licences so there are some providers that you have to be careful that they don't remove the Exchange / Live Comms (or OCS) bits when quoting reduced prices.

 

I do know that the MSLG implementation that NewOrder is talking about does include it all *unless* your school / LA opts out of sections.

 

There is a nice SLK wrapper for the Teacher client of Class Server that still gives you the creation tools. You just then use SLK within MOSS to deploy or assign to students.

 

I am also playing with Reload too ... and some of these tools are way to complicated for most staff.

[sahmeepee]

 

I am also playing with Reload too ... and some of these tools are way to complicated for most staff.

 

I also played with Reload way back when it came out and found it way too complicated for me! I couldn't even get it to compile a valid SCORM resource back then. Since then they have released a wizard add-on for it which does make it a lot easier to use, but from a quick play with exe it seems to be much better suited to teachers.

 

When we had classserver (3/4) the best thing about it was the content creation tool. It's just a shame that microsoft put so little effort into the back end. :?

[ninjabeaver]

We only had the first part of the training last Monday Week. Jon did a sterling job, but Norfolk CC ICT Solutions broadband service let him and the traning session down badly. Kept crashing, losing connection. From what I saw of it, and I stayed to the end, MOSS 2007 looks amazing.

 

And that leads onto my question. I REALLY want to get stuck into this before it is rolled out to the schools in Norfolk. Can someone, maybe Jon, point me in a direction so I can start getting a few books and a server to play and learn on? I honestly just don't know where to start, but I can see a future with this pushing the school that little bit further, but it needs to be done right first time.

 

Thanks, and thanks to Jon for the training last Monday as well.

[GrumbleDook]

One of the Denizens of CertForums has written a very nice book that is highly recommended.

 

Mine is christmas present so I can't touch it yet. I am tempted to get my Safari subscription going again at O'Reilly.com to make a start on it.

[beeswax]

You can also visit the SUG (Sharepoint User Group). It's mainly business orientated but they're very helpful.

 

There's an update of Nottingham University's content creation tool, Xerte, available for free here

[plexer]

Ninja: you can download an evaluation from MS which I tried to do last week but couldn't get past the registration form.

 

Ben

[GrumbleDook]

If you are downloading the evaluation please remember that WSS and MOSS are part of the same stable ... but different beasties. One is a lightweight pack horse that will happily pull the plough and the cart ... the other is a team of chargers that will pull everything from the guns to a royal carriage.

 

They need looking after in slightly different ways too.

[ninjabeaver]

Cheers guys.