Ensate

Its nice to here of someone with a positive experience with RM. I agree that having RM doesn't necessarily mean you are of lower skill. I to have been down the Microsoft cert route, as have both my technicians. Our main motivation for moving off RM is: 1) The amount of down time directly attributable to the RM system, which would almost definitely not have happened otherwise. 2) Performance. In our experience vanilla windows is faster and requires less resources than RM. (which goes without saying since RM sits on top of windows). 3) It no longer fits our needs, and is (to borrow your words) "long in the tooth". 4) Business continuation. The school has no faith in RM support and recognises that it is far easier to get replacement staff with Microsoft training/experience than it is to find an RM experienced member of staff. 5) Incompatibility with quite a log of software. I realise this is a subjective thing as the majority of software works fine. However when you find software that doesn't work. It become an issue for you. I am not for one minute suggesting that vanilla windows is problem free. It has its own plus and minuses. At the end of the day it comes down to preference. Yes RM is more expensive, Yes Vanilla will take more initial time to setup the way you want. The choice is there. People pick your poison.

Hi everyone. My first post on edugeek! I have had two experiences of RM at two schools: My previous post used RM connect 2.4 in a primary school. As many on here have stated connect 2.x was a dogs dinner, both reliability wise, and performance wise. The school asked me to migrate them off it within 8 weeks of starting there. My current post (5.5 years so far) Is in a large high school. I joined the school just as it was nearly doubled in size, and had a lot of new building's and computer equipment installed. We basically rebuilt the whole system to connect 3. The purchasing decision was made prior to my starting so I was in effect stuck with the decision. After 5 years I can say there has been positives and negatives, but on balance more negatives. I would have to say that the majority of negatives have surrounded the fact that the system doesn't fit our needs as a school, and we are definitely one of those establishments which is on the edge of the targe audience for cc3. There are 3 techy staff at the school, and we all universally want to move the school away from cc3 to vanilla windows as we feel we would have more control and a better ability to deliver a system that more closely fits the schools varying needs. I would agree that for smaller establishments, or even places where technical support isnt well invested in RM can make a lot of sense. However it does impose a one size fits all restriction to your network and users. It also insists that things are done the "RM way". For some places this is fine, in my experience a lot of schools no longer fit that way. I know for many people, RM's technical support is a strong point. I have to say that over 5 years Ive had some extremely varying levels of support. Some of it very good, and some of it very bad. It is unfurtunate that most of the bad experiences were often when we needed their support most. This has resulted on numerous occaisions with the majority (if not all) of our core Domain controllers being taken down for literally days at a time. The technical support guys did their best, and are great to talk to on the phone, however I got the impression their hands were tied (possibly by a large workload). in short: do I regret the RM purchase? On balance untill about 2-3 years in, it was good. After the schools needs expanded, it has out lived its usefulness. Would I recommend them? No. The fact remains, despite the claims otherwise, that RM software does not negate the need for quality technical staff. If you have the staff anyway, it does somewhat negate the need for RM.