Soulfish

It's SQL reporting services, so in this case the crappy software company are Microsoft themselves

Was wondering yesterday afternoon/evening why my phone wasn't working. Only when I got home and read the BBC news website (although that seems to be having problems as well!) that I found out about the O2 outage. Still having issues!

Windows doesn't handle bonding - it relies on the network driver to do it. Native bonding is one of the new Server 2k12 features

I ordered mine from RS at the EG Conf (I was sitting listening to the Pi talk at the time, so it seemed apt ). No sign of it yet though :'(

EMC storage is very very nice. But not without its quirks either . I did like when EMC specced something for me, delivered it, came to install it then realised they'd specced a size of drive they didn't support in the device they were configuring. Mind you when it was running it was pretty damm fast

I'm just waiting for our new line install to be finalised in the next couple of weeks. Then I'll be posting a speedtest

I've got a big pile of Autodesk stuff sitting next to me. Have a look at the "Academy" range of AutoDesk suites. It's a bit like the various Adobe collections, but they're aimed at different parts of the curriculum. We've got AutoDesk Design Academy and that includes inventor. We also have AutoDesk Animation academy for our IT/Media departments

According to Intel® Ethernet X520 Server Adapters the DA2 is the direct attached version so comes with those bits. However Intel® Server Adapters — Which SFP+ modules, SFP modules, and cables can I use with the X520 Series? also indicates that the only real difference between the cards is the optics they're coming with, and you can mix and match to your hearts content

One of the reasons we've just bought a batch of dedicated laptops and MP3 players. After reading through the JCQ regs with our exam officer we decided easiest solution for us was to have a batch of laptops that was configured with locked down user accounts with no spell check etc with the network/wireless cards actively disabled/drivers not installed. Our exams officer looks after the laptops during exam season, we look after them the rest of the year . Also trying to find MP3 players for A-Level MFL exams was difficult! Finding something that wasn't cost prohibitive, while meeting the JCQ requirement of not being too small (it says that in the guidelines!) AND being easy enough that our students wouldn't struggle to use them was an interesting challenge.

Looking good

Have to say other than Dell sales (where it seems impossible to get a good account manager, or keep a good account manager for longer than a month!) I've never had problems with Dell. Dell servers I've always found worked well, with their version of iLO (iDRAC) nice and easy to use. Support was always good (even the indian call centers once you figured out that email/instant messaging was just as easy ) and prompt and their enterprise tech center was good for deploying things via SCCM etc.

This one has been rumoured for a while. Given Quests wide range of tools across the virtualisation space (and others) it seemed a logical choice for Dell since they're on a buying spree! Question is where do they now have gaps in their product portfolio?

50k seems about right to be honest. Remember this is enterprise level kit your buying. If you were buying a load of Cisco 3750's, Juniper EX3200/4200 or HP 2910's you'd expect to be paying a fair whack - this really isn't that much different

Our finance director had it at her last place and liked it. However she opted to buy PSFinancials for us here as she found that for the same price it just offered a better reporting package. Something she said was very handy when she was preparing for auditors/preparing end of year accounts/management accounts/vat returns etc.

1) I presume you will use a managed WIFI system, do you limit each mobile users bandwidth so that they do not hog bandwidth? We use a managed wifi system, but we don't limit bandwidth. Guest users and students do connect to a different set of SSIDs from staff which have a lower priority however 2) how do you get around PAT devices that are brought in? PAT testing? Whats that? 3) do you get the MAC address of all your mobile devices and only let those devices that have registered onto the system? No. We use private-psk for staff (for their own devices) which limits them to a set number of devices they can use the key on. For guests we use a guest login system which again limits the number of devices. We don't record the MAC address, but the wireless system manages it all. 4) have you found that standard desktop purchasing has fallen due to mobile devices? Our system was designed to complement our desktop infrastructure, not replace it. 5) is WIFI really that expensive?? Yes. If you want to do it properly . Our system cost around £60k (+ cabling etc) for 80 access points within 1 building with 4 floors. This gives us site wide wireless, with the wireless specified to cope with 5,000 simultaneous wireless devices.

Voted

Not at the price we were paying . At normal pricing I'd agree 110%. For most a stack of EX4200/4500's will give what's needed...but I think we're a bit OT now

Mac OSX counts as an upgradable operating system for Windows. This means that you can use your windows upgrade licenses included within your EES agreement. 99.9999% sure the same applies for MS Office for Mac. It's simply an additional version of office that your entitled to within EES.

The issue you face if you agree to a move to LGfL 2.0 is that you are then tied into a 5 year contract. Unfortunately if they're unwilling to change the policies etc at that point you'll have to stick it out until the end of the 5 years!

We've moved to Impero from Netsupport and couldn't be happier. Great product and great team behind it (once you're done dodging them at BETT ).

They are expensive, but unfortunately the best normally is . I have found however that they are willing to work with you on price if that is the only remaining sticking point. Something to bear in mind if you're interested in them!

We're just in the process of buying a couple of Palo-Alto firewalls from @Net-Ctrl Currently got one in as a demo unit and I have to say I'm very very impressed with it. Amazing product, but it certainly isn't cheap. Unfortunately (as we've found) if you want IPS/App filtering/Content filtering (and possibly AV) at 1gig guaranteed speeds then you're going to need to spend some £££. We did look at the roll your own route with pFsense/Untangle but decided once we factored into account decent hardware (server grade) and a support contract (they both offer them) we may as well go with a commercial vendor. Certainly a commercial vendor is the safer option. From my research/testing (looked at Cisco, Fortinet, Juniper, Palo Alto, Watchguard) Palo were light years ahead of everyone else when it came to the "next-gen" app control functionality and to be honest it just worked. Very easy to setup and get my head around as well which always helps .

I do miss my twin EX8200's :'( The cisco 4500's just aren't comparable :'(. Having two EX8200's linked with VRRP was very very cool. Being able to reboot one and watch everything failover to the alternative with perhaps 1 or 2 loss of pings was great . Did have a few 0's in the price, but not as many as you may think with the discounts we got given

More looking for a good design house than one specifically for education (although educational experience is a bonus). No preference on CMS at the moment, and finally about the only thing we're currently looking to tie into is the school calendar although that may change once we've had the various stakeholder meetings and seen exactly what everyone wants. With regards to the upgrade issue we're perfectly willing to pay a yearly support/update fee to ensure that issues around new versions are handled. A few of us here have had bad experiences with being tied into proprietary CMS systems and moving away being very expensive. At least with an existing CMS the thinking is that we can up sticks and move to another provider to support us if needed.

Hi Everyone, We're looking at getting our website totally redesigned from the ground up and we're looking at a few companies to work with. What we don't want is a website that follows the same design/template as a large number of schools out there. We're looking for something a bit special, and we want to incorporate video/audio etc into the design. What we're after is a company to work with us, carrying out the various research and initial concept development meetings and then designing us a site together with all SEO/Artwork/photography/copywriting etc. Finally the finished product has got to have an easy to use CMS that we can allow staff members access to. We're also looking at companies that don't tie us into propriety CMS systems or their hosting. We'd much rather have flexability to move etc without having to get the whole site redesigned from scratch! So the question is - does anyone have any recommendations?