Link2ICT subscription charges

[Tricky_Dicky]

Hi all,

Have been told that the charges for Link2ICT should be available by the end of next week (w/e 11/2/2011).

Just thinking it might be worth having a good look at these because with the Harnessing Technology grant ending the price will probably increase quite dramatically.

Let me know how bad it gets...

Rich

[Trapper]

I had a letter through eBriefing.

 

Apparantly they are going to charge a small fee for their hosted webspace and.... Zimbra. Imagine having to pay for that! Seems like an better way to push through a migration to LiveEdu

[Little-Miss]

Eugh, i havent read anything yet.....not looking forward to that!

[Tricky_Dicky]

Totally with you on Live@edu. I was thinking of waiting till office 365 arrived just because of the easier dir sync but will probably just move with it now.

Will see how much Moodle is to see if we bring it in house and already talking to Virgin Media and Serco about going direct. Anyone fancy forming a soft partnership to improve prices?

[Little-Miss]

wow, ok...that sucks...

[chippo]

Can't wait, I think schools may seriously start looking at going direct.

I see there's a conference in March & they are trying to flog us the Open Hive Learning Platform, so Zimbra & Moodle might have been a waste of time!

[Tricky_Dicky]

Can't wait, I think schools may seriously start looking at going direct.

I see there's a conference in March & they are trying to flog us the Open Hive Learning Platform, so Zimbra & Moodle might have been a waste of time!

Open hive is a different product all together. It is basically an online storage area to share resources around the school in a very basic file type structure. From what I recall the original intention was that schools would start sharing resources with each other but it is a pig to use and pretty pointless from what I can remember.

[Little-Miss]

Yeah, there was that and bloody Single sign on or whatever its called....

[Tricky_Dicky]

Yeah, there was that and bloody Single sign on or whatever its called....

Is that the one provided through RM?

I can't really see the point of 1 single massive single sign on solution when each part can be made to work together anyway if you have a decent AD setup. I have Moodle pointing to our LDAP happily and with the new Office 365 it is just a case of setting up dirSync and a couple of other things and that will work. SSO can be purchased directly from Serco for CMIS and after that I can't think of anything else you would need.

[GrumbleDook]

Open hive is a different product all together. It is basically an online storage area to share resources around the school in a very basic file type structure. From what I recall the original intention was that schools would start sharing resources with each other but it is a pig to use and pretty pointless from what I can remember.

 

Open Hive is a sharepoint based platform with a heap more tools than just online storage. It is a bit like saying that Moodle allows you to runs quizzes.

[Tricky_Dicky]

Open Hive is a sharepoint based platform with a heap more tools than just online storage. It is a bit like saying that Moodle allows you to runs quizzes.

 

The implementation that we were shown by Link2ICt purely showed a web based file storage system. I've no doubt it can do a lot more but that isn't how it's been setup here.

[limbo]

Link to Ebriefing

 

One of the other headlines is that 10Mb lease cost is going up, but 100Mb is staying the same and they are investigating a 50Mb option for those that have outgrown 10Mb but cannot stretch to 100Mb.

[Mattkirk]

I agree that we cant let Service Birmingham tell us what and how much we pay for services. I look after 4 Birmingham schools and will join a soft partnership. Five walsall schools are looking to break away and they have already looked at an alternative broadband supplier who can save them £1500 per year and still give them filtering etc..

[owen1978]

Well i was taken aback by the 6k for the BGFL ISP? Would it be better to go direct with Virgin instead?

It says it includes firewall, anti virus and spam filtering, URL Filtering, DNS Hosting

& Local Cache (squid server???)

 

Going to pay it this year but will investigate into alternatives for next year.

 

One thing however is that im not paying £754 for remote backup of the admin server.

Im sure I can get something similar for BOTH servers cheaper!

[chippo]

Looks like a few of us will be looking at some cost cutting, next weeks meeting with Link2ICT will be interesting noticed Virgin will be there I think they'll be asked about going direct by a few people!

[PiqueABoo]

Zimbra. Imagine having to pay for that!

 

Imagine having to pay people to look after a school network! ;b

 

That something is "free" (please let's skip the when is/isn't Zimbra free debate) doesn't disappear the need for resources to host, configure, manage and support it... and probably ditto for added industrial strength de-spamming/AV etc.

 

Edugeeks don't often seem to factor in the cost of their time for doing things like Live@Edu/Google Apps/Whatever. One tentative conclusion you *could* draw: They have lots of time to spare and the "hard, perpetually busy" talk we frequently hear, is in fact a crock.

[john]

In terms of time to manage free systems, such as Live@Edu, the initial setup time can be quite high, as it is with any high end server product, but on-going maintance and support is usually minimal, as with cloud services (if were picking them for this point) you don't have any server patching, product updates, anti-virus, backups etc to worry about, in the case of cloud e-mail it seems to be just manage accounts, mailing lists etc, and these can be Active Directory integrated in many cases so you make a new user they get a mailbox, you delete a user they loose the mailbox, so they time taken can be much less longer term.

 

I don't really spend much time on my Exchange server now its up and running, its really does look after itself, the same with my SQL box, Home Access+ etc...

[owen1978]

Have faxed over the completed form...

 

Getting rid of moodle as I wasnt impressed by it! Saving £809.50

 

Getting rid of the admin remote backup which they were charging £754 and instead using

a company called Gigasoft to backup 50GB's worth of data on both curric AND admin servers for £540 Saving £214

 

Migrating form Zimbra to Live@Edu Saving £565.65

 

Total Saving £1,589.15

 

Next year im going to look into getting down the price on the BGFL ISP Subscription which is approx £6000

Edited March 10, 2011 by owen1978

[Trapper]

WIth Gigasoft do you know where you data is being held? Is it in the EU?

 

At least with the L2ICT remote backup you know where it is and can hold of it quickly if there's a problem. L2ICT use Redstor and tend to underquote them for their own product!

 

I do want to move to Live@Edu but I've only just got my SLT using a shared Zimbra calendar. None of the teaching staff use email. It's not a politically good time to switch sadly. Six months down the line probably.

 

Was anyone else at the conference today? I loved the 100% up time of the L2ICT internet line? So what happened with that power cut two weeks ago? You can't really try and hoodwink people that that!

 

£500 for Zimbra? I'm only paying £160 odd, that's why I didn't try and push LiveEdu in a couple of weeks.

[owen1978]

Secured Data UK Centre

 

We moved to Zimbra start of the year lol... now moving again!...

[ChrisJ]

Was anyone else at the conference today?

 

Yeah, I was there on behalf of my team.

 

I loved the 100% up time of the L2ICT internet line? So what happened with that power cut two weeks ago?

 

I believe the uptime is regarding the actual line connectivity. So whilst you may not be able to get out to the rest of the world other services such as remote support or backup would still be functional.

 

Not that would be of any use to other users attempting to do real work online