Microsoft to move out of the education market?

[caffrey]

It's been looking that way for a while ,I rumbled on about this a while back http://www.edugeek.net/forums/general-chat/108761-domains-slowly-becoming-thing-past.html

[gshaw]

Trouble is not all cloud products are created equal.

 

W10 will go subscription at some point as a local wrapper for other services as Nadella even mentioned himself that Windows isn't how MS see their future.

 

Not all cloud products are better than local versions, especially if said "cloud" offering is just a hosted version of a legacy product. All you get there is slower processing on shared infrastructure, tougher integration (no APIs) and the fear of losing the service if renewal isn't paid.

 

Good cloud products, great

Bad cloud products, run away!

 

The challenge is explaining the difference to the business and peering behind the curtain of the sales veil to see what's really being offered.

[Ephelyon]

they are the masters at copying others

 

 

Just gonna leave that here...

[CyberNerd]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]36756[/ATTACH]

 

Just gonna leave that here...

 

ok with that exception, their attempts at copying ios with windows phone didn't exactly work out well.

[mavhc]

Agreed, but it's not that different than the continual upgrade cycle we currently enjoy: Need to upgrade the O/S for security, Need to upgrade PC's to run the O/S, need to upgrade the apps to run on the O/S.

 

The big advantage here is that most cloud apps are O/S and hardware neutral (HTML5) so you make savings on the PC and O/S upgrades.

 

Except we don't much any more. OS updates are free, linux is free. Hardware isn't moving much. Apps are websites, browsers are free. Problem for Microsoft is it's already good enough, no reason to upgrade. Well, it's not really, but they never fix the real bugs as that would break everything, or redesign MS Office to not suck

[Arthur]

I'd trust Google/Microsoft to have backups of backups of backups way more than

What about a company like Salesforce with a market capitalization of $51.96 billion?

 

Salesforce loses hours of customer data after prolonged service degradation

 

After going offline for almost a full day, Salesforce has had to break some unfortunate news to customers of its popular Sales-as-a-Service cloud product.

 

In the original announcement published on the Salesforce Trust site, the company notified customers using services housed on its NA14 instance. The report read:

 

The service disruption was caused by a database failure on the NA14 instance, which introduced a file integrity issue in the NA14 database. The issue was resolved by restoring NA14 from a prior backup, which was not impacted by the file integrity issues. We have determined that data written to the NA14 instance between 9:53 UTC and 14:53 UTC on May 10, 2016 could not be restored.

This meant that customers had originally lost up to five hours of data dependent upon their use of the service during the affected period. However, Salesforce followed up with an update revising its original estimated data loss:

 

After further analysis, we have determined that data written to the NA14 instance between 9:53 UTC and 13:29 UTC on May 10, 2016 can not (sic) be restored.

 

[...]

 

Salesforce has advised that it will provide its investigative findings to impacted customers once information becomes available. In the meantime, the Twitter account of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been responding to numerous concerned customers inviting in order to arrange support phone calls. No doubt, many of those calls will involve discussions around compensation provided customers have appropriate service level agreements in place.

 

Salesforce.com crash caused DATA LOSS

 

Whatever the cause of the problem, it appears clear that Salesforce's recovery point objectives may need to be reviewed.

 

The company's Master Subscription Agreement (PDF) pledges, at Section 3.1, to “use commercially reasonable efforts to make the online Services available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week” unless acts of God, government action, natural disasters, ISP SNAFUs, civil unrest or DDOS attacks intervene.

 

At Section 3.2 the document promises “We will maintain administrative, physical, and technical safeguards for protection of the security, confidentiality and integrity of Your Data”.

 

The Register suspects folks with sharper legal minds than ours are currently poring over the fine print of that document, and Salesforce's other contracts, to figure out what users should do next if their data proves utterly irretrievable.

[Ephelyon]

Another point there: I trust myself to have "backups of backups" - or, in this case, both on-site D2D backups going back a fair while and nightly off-site replication of the entire system (at a cost of £0) - because I know I do. I don't need trust, because it's managed and delivered in-house, by me.

 

The only thing better than the strongest trust is the lack of need for it.

[CyberNerd]

Another point there: I trust myself to have "backups of backups" - or, in this case, both on-site D2D backups going back a fair while and nightly off-site replication of the entire system (at a cost of £0) - because I know I do. I don't need trust, because it's managed and delivered in-house, by me.

 

The only thing better than the strongest trust is the lack of need for it.

 

I am intrigued. please post your ISO 27001 certs.

[Ephelyon]

Fundamentally, the point of ISO certification is to put your mind at ease when you trust someone else. I don't have to trust someone else. I know whether a backup or replication run has completed successfully. I know whether one of my storage arrays has a failing/failed disk. I know that you could drop a bomb on this site tonight and we could merrily (or perhaps not so much) prance up the road tomorrow to work on last night's system, live, at no cost.

 

I iz not needin' dem certs. I doez my own stuff.

[CyberNerd]

@Ephelyon

 

respect

[nicholab]

One thing we not costed is the power used by on site stuff? Also an on site pue is likely to be 2.0.

[nicholab]

Does anyone use a StorSimple which use azure cloud might be nice if there was some talk about this from MS.

[nathan]

This last page of posts has all gone a bit fanboyish haha

[AlanD]

I don't see a long term future for school ICT technical departments. I think onsite managed servers will disappear. Schools will just buy into a service - albeit one with a 1Gb leased line. MIS systems will be in the cloud only. Office will only be in the cloud. This won't be cheaper for schools - and probably not as flexible or as creative. I think RM can see this coming - and products like Unify are clearly there to give RM a position in that market - but there may be no place for them at all. You can begin to see what its like with apple - so that when you buy an Ipad its instantly registered into your deployment area and you just click boxes on line and apps just appear like magic on your devices. Yes, I hear you asking what will happen with teacher X as a problem with this or that? Switch it off, reboot and it will work is the vision....not sure about the reality though!

[kennysarmy]

I don't see a long term future for school ICT technical departments. I think onsite managed servers will disappear. Schools will just buy into a service - albeit one with a 1Gb leased line. MIS systems will be in the cloud only. Office will only be in the cloud. This won't be cheaper for schools - and probably not as flexible or as creative. I think RM can see this coming - and products like Unify are clearly there to give RM a position in that market - but there may be no place for them at all. You can begin to see what its like with apple - so that when you buy an Ipad its instantly registered into your deployment area and you just click boxes on line and apps just appear like magic on your devices. Yes, I hear you asking what will happen with teacher X as a problem with this or that? Switch it off, reboot and it will work is the vision....not sure about the reality though!

 

Do you think there will be paper-less offices too.....??

[JRowley]

Do you think there will be paper-less offices too.....??

 

We wont have schools in the future nevermind paper-less offices, teachers will teach students from home.

[psydii]

For schools that are larger than 500 seats, there will, for at least another 15 years be a place for the continuous presence of on site technical support and leadership.

 

Things will change a bit. But with each new advance that makes it easier, the work shifts up the stack a bit. With two exceptions:

The boxes in users hands - these cannot be supported properly by remote only model, and a part time model is the number one complaint of any user who is subjected to it.

The network itself. Layers 1-6 have not gotten any easier to manage in the last 15 years, and nothing about the cloud solves that.

 

The changes will be an extension of those brought on by Virtualisation: less managing servers, more managing services. Generally solving peoples' problems through clever use Layer 7.

 

With each 'simplification' / 'dumbing down' / 'redundancy' of the technician role comes additional tasks that are required, and complexity rapidly re-appears requiring dedicated specialists to configure, monitor and maintain.

 

By way of example, consider:

i

• pad management
  
• the abject failure of many BSF IT managed services
  
• the job adverts over the last 12 months as Academy chains realise the fully centralised, remote approach is flawed.
  

 

Technology evolves, and so does the role of those who support it, but this is not an extinction event.

[Ephelyon]

Generally solving peoples' problems through clever use Layer 7.

 

Well, in the absence of a clever Layer 8...

[mavhc]

For schools that are larger than 500 seats, there will, for at least another 15 years be a place for the continuous presence of on site technical support and leadership.

 

Things will change a bit. But with each new advance that makes it easier, the work shifts up the stack a bit. With two exceptions:

The boxes in users hands - these cannot be supported properly by remote only model, and a part time model is the number one complaint of any user who is subjected to it.

The network itself. Layers 1-6 have not gotten any easier to manage in the last 15 years, and nothing about the cloud solves that.

 

The changes will be an extension of those brought on by Virtualisation: less managing servers, more managing services. Generally solving peoples' problems through clever use Layer 7.

 

With each 'simplification' / 'dumbing down' / 'redundancy' of the technician role comes additional tasks that are required, and complexity rapidly re-appears requiring dedicated specialists to configure, monitor and maintain.

 

By way of example, consider:

i

• pad management
  
• the abject failure of many BSF IT managed services
  
• the job adverts over the last 12 months as Academy chains realise the fully centralised, remote approach is flawed.
  

 

Technology evolves, and so does the role of those who support it, but this is not an extinction event.

 

Except: Win 10 is designed to not need a deployment to configure as a work machine, auto join to azure AD etc.

 

Chromebook's model is: hw broken? no time cost to switch to spare machine

 

Layer 1 is mostly WiFi now, so a bit easier. There's some automation of L2/3 with https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831353(v=ws.11).aspx and also

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/wmf/networkswitch_overview

 

Hopefully the new model of primary school IT being run by the parent secondary Academy will help. Need to ensure those technicians in the primary school have the same training and opportunities as those in the secondary school though.

[Ephelyon]

We've been known to just provide RemoteApp / full desktop session access to a non-joined device (usually when an SEN comes along with a County-provided - i.e. terrible - laptop)... but then, coming back to the cloud-first model of nothing fancy on-premise, you're looking at extra hardware to keep a beefy enough Remote Desktop service going... Edited May 16, 2016 by Ephelyon

[psydii]

I stand by the 15 year minimum horizon, and will re-evaluate in 10 years.

 

Microsoft certified switches? Nice idea. What motivation would switch makers have to commoditize their platforms? They are already having their lunch eaten by the datacentre/cloud providers building their own. Besides, managing the basics with powershell is not really any different to managing the basics with IOS or Provision etc.

 

We are in effect specialised power users. We look after the tin (swapping out machines, managing assets and lifecycle etc) and provide user support. At some levels this may be reduced by simplification UI and hardware for the end user, but feature-creep will re-introduce complexity again and our particular specialities will evolve to meet the need. At a higher level, we understand 'business processes' and re-factor them to take advantage of the tools available. Whether this is clever scripting between cloud platforms, or showing people how to complete tasks more efficiently, our purpose viewed from the highest level remains unchanged.

 

Obviously some people will think they can do away with us. Some may even try. But we'll be back, because the "specialisation of role" operational paradigm demands it.

Edited May 16, 2016 by psydii
spag

[Homer]

I stand by the 15 year minimum horizon, and will re-evaluate in 10 years.

 

Microsoft certified switches? Nice idea. What motivation would switch makers have to commoditize their platforms? They are already having their lunch eaten by the datacentre/cloud providers building their own. Besides managing the basics with powershell, is not really any different to managing the basics with IOS or Provision etc.

 

We are in effect specialised power users. We look after the tin (swapping out machines, managing assets and lifecycle etc) and provide user support. At some levels this may be reduced by simplification UI and hardware for the end user, but feature-creep will re-introduce complexity again and our particular specialities will evolve to meet the need. At a higher level, we understand 'business processes' and re-factor them to take advantage of the tools available. Whether this is clever scripting between cloud platforms, or showing people how to complete tasks more efficiently, our purpose viewed from the highest level remains unchanged.

 

Obviously some people will think they can do away with us. Some may even try. But we'll be back, because "specialisation of role" operational paradigm demands it.

 

And because somebody will need a projector setting up.

[sted]

We've been known to just provide RemoteApp / full desktop session access to a non-joined device (usually when an SEN comes along with a County-provided - i.e. terrible - laptop)... but then, coming back to the cloud-first model of nothing fancy on-premise, you're looking at extra hardware to keep a beefy enough Remote Desktop service going...

i think thats the short to medium term solution run the few programs that need windows on rds server(s) and give people access to them via rdweb/give em a shortcut for their "windows device" longer term applications look like migrating to the cloud going back to mainframe/dumb terminal model where your device is basically a dumb web browser that gets a server to run stuff and does minimal computing itself

[ZeroHour]

I have got the powerpoint from the webcast. You can download it here: https://edugeeknet-static.s3.amazonaws.com/fls/Edugeek-MoU-Call-270416-Final.pptx

[Ephelyon]

PowerPoint says the file is damaged... :/