Soulfish

Our lines with M247 are just going in. Been a great bunch to deal with so far, so just waiting on Virgin/TalkTalk to finish their bits and pieces and get access to our new shinny connection

Planning on rolling out SCCM2012 this summer. Wonder if we'll be on SP3 by then already... Or possibly SCCM 2012 R2 SP1.5?

I've used Citrix XenServer extensively (I helped write the Citrix certification exam) as well as VMWare, Virtualbox, Hyper-V etc. They all have their various positives and negatives. VMWare is certainly the most advanced with lots of very nice powerful features, but most schools don't need the all singing all dancing functionality that VMWare Enterprise Plus licensing provides. Both VMWare and Ctirix have quite active forums so you can normally find information on any problems your having their, while Hyper-V has the technet forums. If your mainly using Windows VMs then Hyper-V is excellent, but Linux/Unix support is a little lacking. To be honest the main reason for using Citrix over VMWare is normally cost, or because your running a XenDesktop/XenApp farm. As glennda says take a look at the entire ecosystem that has been built up around the various products. Veeam is an excellent back up tool (we use it here), but I'm also told that PHDVirtual works well for XenServer.

We currently have an internet connection, spam filtering and antivirus licensing from our RBC. We're currently in the process of moving away from them for all three due to better pricing/support being available elsewhere. For instance we're moving to M247 for our internet (better price, support, performance etc), and MS for our spam/av. We don't use any of the other services provided (such as VLE and additional resources) although they are included in our current costs.

Just bought myself a Sony BDP-S490. Supposed to have been delivered today (thanks to Amazon Prime including Saturday delivery for free ), but unfortunately HDNL have once again proven themselves to be the worlds worst delivery service. From the reviews I've read it's got one of the better feature sets at this price point. Was tempted by the LG your looking at or the the Panasonic DMP-BDT220, but the Sony seemed to have the slightly better interface. Can let you know what it's like next week when it eventually turns up

My mum uses giffgaff. Don't think she's had any problems with them. They're actually owned by O2 so pretty safe to be honest!

I'm coming! However this year I'm getting the train rather than driving, so who fancies giving me a lift to the conf venue from the hotel?

Well I'm sure you know what I look like Si . But just in case you've forgotten here's some pics from the EG flickr stream (all taken by Ric I believe!) for you! First one of me and a polar bear.. http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7035/6781453005_686bc37dc0.jpg And then me spectacularly failing to find my mouth with a bottle of beer... http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7166/6781417905_0afb997294.jpg

I've got a whole tender pack that I put together for my last place for a tender for equipment over £100k in value that was fully compliant with all EU regs etc so that if we wanted we could go over EU tender thresholds (although you have to advertise it in the OJEC as well if you do that!). If you want I can talk you through the process . Much easier however is to use a pre-tended framework and run a mini-competition off of that. One of the ones I use quite a bit (and I know @john has used it as well after I mentioned it ) is the Government Procurement Service (used to be Office of Government Commerce/Buying Solutions) mini-competition tool. Nice and easy - register with them as a public sector body and they'll give you access to it. Add your requirements and what you want, what your timescales (can be as aquick as a couple of days) and away you go. Any questions are handled through the site and at the end you've got your list of bids. It's very cost effective as well since I find most companies give pricing better than normal through the tool to try and undercut the competition a little. Certainly saves any dutch auctions!

FOPE is included in the enterprise cal suite as its part of the forefront protection suite. Regardless of that FOPE is now free for students and staff for educational institutions using EES. See 11-2011 : Pricing changes for Forefront Online Protection for Exchange & Azure Storage

Well I'm registered

Well I've just gone through a new build process, so can provide lots of advice/documentation etc if you want . I'm on holiday at the moment, but when I get back in a week or so I can send you some more information. We're a little different to most schools though as IT was at the heart of the build (just ask any of the edugeekers that have visited ) so power/data/comms rooms/server rooms/it offices were all included very early on. Unfortunately for us we still have too few network points, and wireless wasn't factored in at all.

No - almost certainly not. For instance we will have around 1100 devices on site accessing files/our internal moodle and other resources. We have a huge amount of video/audio as well due to our specialism. For instance we have a 60tb replicated SAN just for video editing with 10gb uplinks. Our connection is good enough to move some stuff offsite, but we're so heavily invested in onsite provision for a lot of things that it's not feasible for us to totally get rid of our server rooms!

With our server room you'd want servers on site . we're actually looking at having a offsite backup location now we have the connection to support it.

£17k for 1g/1g with 40mb backup. This is london though

Hey Everyone, As a new school we're just having to purchase a load of MP3 players for use in our GCE listening exams. I was just wondering what everyone else was using? The JCQ guidelines state "the MP3 players are of a suitable size and must be capable of operating independently;" so we're a bit weary of purchasing the tiny MP3 players that seem to fill the cheap end of the market! Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated . And yes unfortunately this was a last minute request!

They can all be found at About | London Grid for Learning The most recent security guidelines were updated in March after we had some discussions with LGfL (and one of the reasons for our deciding to leave).

Yes, but will unblock if requested and if it doesn't conflict with their security guidance.

My exchange was upgraded to FTTC and went live end of March. However I'm one of the unlucky people that can't get it due to being on a line connected directly to the exchange!

Not looking forward to the Olympics. Virtually every station/route to/from work has lovely red circles

Almost certainly a driver issue. I've had this issue before with Ricoh (and other manufacturers) where the printer isn't able to interpret the information being sent by the driver. Typically changing to another driver (PCL6, Postscript etc) sorts the issue. Its an annoying issue for sure.

I've dropped you a PM explaining. Unfortunately I doubt any other schools will be able to use the route we took

Thought I'd update the thread and let you all know that we're terminating our LGfL2.0 connection as of this summer. We want to be able to do things that are currently against some of LGfL's security policies, and unfortunately due to some communication issues with LGfL just don't feel it's the service for us. To be fair the service hasn't been bad, and Atomwide are fine once you know how things work but we needed greater flexibility without the level of filtering that is currently applied.

I know you said separate from finance packages, but we use the web ordering system that's part of PS Financials. Works great, people can login and submit orders where they can be approved by their manager and then by finance (or as many levels of managers as you want ). @GrumbleDook's suggestion of Sharepoint is good though if you want it completely separate.

Have to say that as PiqueABoo says Dell has provided SCCM/MDT driver packs for a long time. Their enterprise computing support site (where you can get the drivers) also has some very good guides on how to import the drivers, target them to specific models etc. Makes it a breeze to image Dell machines I've also found that Fujitsu also provided a SCCM driver cab download for their enterprise models.