RM CC5

[mikes]

Yeah CC4 was such a disaster for us we moved vanilla. CC3 while clunky did what it said on the tin at least - it would build PC's, install software, was easy to understand, wasn't too bloated. CC4 I remember it slowed our computers down so much they were barely usable (moving to Vista was a big part of this). It was such a disaster it pretty much cost our NM (who chose to have it) his credibility as an NM here.

Surprised there would be schools still on CC4 after all this time; there's no way in hell I'd put cc5 on for free let alone pay for it!

[garethEds]

The Tech Seminars in Cardiff were great. Was always a great lunch, plenty of coffee and chances to network with people. Wondering what the gift was at the end was fun. Also the printed docs they gave you. Dan Hooker was a great presenter, as was Dave Bate (I'm sure he is on here somewhere). Had a huge crush on Cheryl Prior LOL - she was a great welcome host.

 

Ours Sales guy James Brett was also a cracking guy.

 

What is a shame (as I've mentioned in another post) is how insignificant RM seem to have become. Their stand at this years BETT show was so small.

 

G

[foofighterjim]

It was at one of the last seminars that I attended that Ranulph Fiennes was one of the speakers. He was mainly promoting his book but it was still fascinating nonetheless, I even had the chance to have a brief chat with him at the end, definitely would never have met him otherwise.

 

Also remember attending my first seminar not long after starting in education. I went to the backup session and realised the stupidity of us keeping the backup tapes on top of the server, and at the same time the relief that 90% of everyone else in the room had been doing the same up to that point.

[HarryMonkey]

Had a huge crush on Cheryl Prior LOL - she was a great welcome host.

 

 

Didn't we all

[PotNoodleTech]

Didn't we all

 

She goes to BETT Show now too if you wanted to rekindle the old RM Romances

 

I dont get allowed out to BETT any more so the romance is gone for me

[HarryMonkey]

 

I dont get allowed out to BETT any more so the romance is gone for me

 

Same here

[IAmNotMatt]

I look at this entire thread and cry because my school is currently using RM CC4 - For now, we are moving to the cloud ASAP though. Especially with CC4 no longer being supported.

[talksr]

I look at this entire thread and cry because my school is currently using RM CC4 - For now, we are moving to the cloud ASAP though. Especially with CC4 no longer being supported.

 

I had a PM through from @ITSystems_JamesE - they are offering a CC4 Client Pack for Windows 11. Sounds very clever. Might help you out if you are not in a position to get onto the cloud as quickly as you need to.

Good luck

[IAmNotMatt]

I had a PM through from @ITSystems_JamesE - they are offering a CC4 Client Pack for Windows 11. Sounds very clever. Might help you out if you are not in a position to get onto the cloud as quickly as you need to.

Good luck

 

We've actually moved all of our primaries to the cloud already - we're just gearing up to do this one. We'll be getting it done by Summer! - Goodbye CC4!

[talksr]

Just had this email through from RM🫠.....

[6Foot3]

CC5 Demo videos

 

https://www.rm.com/community-connect-5/demo?utm_campaign=3684180_1011681 %3A CC5 round 4 - E2&utm_medium=email&utm_source=dotdigital&utm_content=BTN-CC5Demo&dm_i=71YY,26YQC,3X3DYP,6ADTT,1

[synaesthesia]

So, "Vtech/Tomy My First Intune".

Not at all surprising. Market though? MSPs would/should use more powerful tools and no school in this country should be in the position where the IT person is the same person paying people's wages, wiping bottoms in nursery and scraping gum off the underside of the desks (which is pretty much where CC3 & 4 were aimed) Not in 2025.

So what's the market for this?

Edited May 20, 2025 by synaesthesia

[PotNoodleTech]

I guess the market is poeple who cant hire IT techs for 24k/yr or it managers for 30k/yr.

 

So there's plenty of potential market judging by the state of our jobs forum.

[synaesthesia]

Good point well made

Although with my mind in it's current state, anything that happens to those schools is fully their fault if they can't hire or use a decent MSP. Actions & consequences, and everyone else will be pointing fingers when they get ransomwared.

[6Foot3]

Anyone got any costs for CC5?

Don't worry, I'm not looking at getting it, just want to see how it prices up to Intune.

[DrCheese]

I'd imagine you'd have to pay for intune on top of this, as it looks like it's using that underneath. So yeah essentially like the crazy £40 per device they used to want for CC4.

& yeah I like the "My first intune" quote above - I used to call CC3 "Fisher price AD" back in the day 😛 

 

Thing is - Fisher price intune already exists. If you go to the education management console on intune you get.. a super simple version of it already.

 

 

I think what's probably happened is the previous RM management decided to just let CC customers drift off, but then someone new has come in, realised that they'd lose X money and is now knee jerking a replacement without bothering to look at the state of the education market nowadays. The world's moved on, but RM haven't - In truth, they've still not recovered from the loss of BSF back in the day as they bet the market on being able to take on big fat MSP contracts

 

[mikes]

We all know how bad CC4 was, for us our head/SMT had no idea what "CC3" even was, there was no need for them to know as it basically did what it needed to do,  but CC4 caused us so many problems it cost our NM who pushed to get it his role, and our SMT  who different members have now moved to many different schools in their career paths know it was so bad, probably every single school in our county wouldn't touch it by now. 

 

If someone at a school they work at said "There's this RM CC5 it can simplify network management, we should look into it" the response would be "We had CC4 and we had no printers, mapped drives, our PC's were 5 times slower and took 20 mins to boot, don't go near it"

 

And the fact our CC4 fell over a few months after we had it and totally stopped working, and RM basically said we'd have to pay full price to have it re-installed from scratch (they also blamed our switches but had no problems offering to sell us a re-install...) I ended up stripping it out and going vanilla and funnily enough all our problems went away.

 

They've soured the brand that much, hell even if it was a good product that worked as well as mature CC3 did, what's the point?  Back then you needed CC3 for software management etc.  Not now though.

[talksr]

3 hours ago, DrCheese said:

I'd imagine you'd have to pay for intune on top of this, as it looks like it's using that underneath. So yeah essentially like the crazy £40 per device they used to want for CC4.

& yeah I like the "My first intune" quote above - I used to call CC3 "Fisher price AD" back in the day 😛 

 

 

 

 

I was thinking the same in terms of the realisation 'oh god, we've lost a lot of customers, we better do something quick', though this is all so shambolically late in the day. October is getting ever-closer and there is only really one proper holiday (summer) for schools to sort their systems out before the Windows 10 deadline is here! 

[6Foot3]

RM CC5 is now a free upgrade for CC4 customers

[PotNoodleTech]

Well that is useful for schools that are CC4 and are totally cash strapped.

 

Win win for RM as they get to look like they're doing you a favour whilst they lock you in to £££ support contracts for another 5 + years

[howartp]

"Oh dear, everyone is leaving us, what do we do?"

[APMerry]

17 minutes ago, alordcharlie said:

RM CC5 is now a free upgrade for CC4 customers

I think this has always been the case. RM charge a Community Connect License, so that license just carried over to CC5, it's not free. I'd be very surprised if you didn't still have to pay for the Microsoft Licensing for Intune (assuming that's what it's built on?).

[PotNoodleTech]

29 minutes ago, APMerry said:

I think this has always been the case. RM charge a Community Connect License, so that license just carried over to CC5, it's not free. I'd be very surprised if you didn't still have to pay for the Microsoft Licensing for Intune (assuming that's what it's built on?).

Nah in the old days you had to buy all new licences and support contracts etc or pay for upgrade licences when you wanted to go to a totally new version e.g. C2 to CC3 to CC4.

[mikes]

yeah we had to pay £30,000  to go from CC3 to CC4  and when it fell over a few months later they wanted us to pay the installation fees all again! Paid £30,000 for our network to get worse. They will have to make this upgrade free or the Win 10 - Win 11  people will likely just move to a vanilla system.

[David44]

It would solve so many problems for us (and probably RM) if they just released a Windows 11 client pack for CC4 like that have done for every other OS update.

Instead we are stuck battling with Microsoft Configuration Manager which just seems a lot more fragile and too complex for what a single school with one site requires. CC4 was far from perfect but it built PCs, installed packages and managed users which is all we need. MCM may do that too in theory but it seems like a full time job just to manage it's various issues and dependencies.

 

CC4 hid most of the Microsoft nonsense from us and I don't think I had appreciated how bad it had become until I tried to do anything even basic like build a PC without CC4.