Education IT Services recommendations

[itinerant]

Apologies if this is the wrong place to post this!

 

I used to work in a school IT department, but recently moved on to a different sector. The place that I'm now working at is trying to help out a few schools across the country with their IT needs, so we're trying to find them a managed service provider. Does anybody have some good recommendations (outside of RM ) for companies that deal with IT services in schools?

 

Thanks in advance!

[mavhc]

What area of the planet?

[itinerant]

Sorry, UK.

[CHiLL]

What area of the UK?

[itinerant]

Ideally, across the whole of the UK. At the moment, we're talking about a couple of schools in the Yorkshire area, and a couple in the London area.

[CHiLL]

Ideally, across the whole of the UK. At the moment, we're talking about a couple of schools in the Yorkshire area, and a couple in the London area.

Makes sense, sometimes people don't want to deal with a company that's several hundred miles away (for example, I have a support contract with a company in Coventry, which is fairly local).

 

What sort of managed services would you want included? Some companies offer support agreements and some offer complete solutions.

 

Companies like Stone, VeryPC, Proband all offer some form of solution options, though I can't comment on pricing.

[itinerant]

Sorry, I realise that I'm not offering up much information for you to work with. I've been asked to do a quick bit of investigation with not a lot of information myself!

 

A couple of the schools use G Suite for Education, and would probably just want day to day support and perhaps some help with future hardware purchases. The other schools I'm not sure about yet. There's a possibility of other schools being added over time, and they'll probably have different requirements, so I guess having a company that's fairly flexible would help.

[paulkerton]

A couple of the schools use G Suite for Education, and would probably just want day to day support and perhaps some help with future hardware purchases.

 

For G Suite for Education support:

Vitalize - Disclosure : Used to work for them.

C-Learning

XMA

Levett Consultancy

Prowise

Getech - Not the vaccuum people.

 

It all depends on the level of support you're after, really

Some of them are really good value, some of them are less so. Some will want a multi-year purchasing agreement, some won't. Some will be expensive and you won't hear off them proactively, some will be cheap and they'll break their backs to help.

Some won't be the cheapest but will hope you'll go with them as a partnership rather than just using them like a box-shifting company. Some will be very cheap for devices, but will be because they're hoping you go for repeat business and they'll nickel and dime you later. Nearly all of them will take exception at you buying devices and managemnet from other places, but then using their support to get them setup and operating.

 

You need to speak to them all, and the schools they reference as partners to get an idea of how the partnership between your schools and them will operate.

What they'll all want is to operate a partnership. None of them will be overly happy if you pick and choose support from one place, management licenses from another, devices from a third.

Edited April 22, 2020 by paulkerton

[itinerant]

OK, that's great. We'll have a word with some of these and see what happens. Thanks for the help everyone

[DavidLong]

If you want a full managed service I have inherited a site that use a company called Agilisys.