Soulfish

ARD = Apple Remote Desktop Pre-paid card is OK for small numbers like you say, unfortunately ARD is about £300

ARD used to be purchasable as a stand alone application, but has recently gone Apple App store only. I know as we've had to get a refund as part of a major apple install we've just had done - real pain as we now have to find away to purchase from the app store!

We've got a suite of iMacs that only boot OSX. They run Sibelius 7, Logic and Garage Band with USB soundcards/midi keyboards permanently connected. All users login using windows username/password (all macs are setup bound to AD/OD) and get their windows home directory and a separate apple directory mapped. The apple home directories (and some shared folders) are hosted on a dedicated storage system using a 10gb network connection.

MSIs are in no way locked to Active Directory. If you wanted to you could use Novel eDirectory and their ZenWorks package to deploy MSIs with no AD lock in in site. Alternatively WPKG (open source) will quite happily deploy MSIs. MSIs are just a very nice and easy to use packaging format that 99.999% of companies use unless they want to lock you into a proprietary way of deploying their application. In the commercial world if you couldn't deploy it via MSI it's very unlikely it'll get a look in. If you can't use a standard enterprise deployment solution (such as Zenworks, SCCM or A.N.Other) to deploy and track why would you waste your time? I have to say I find it quite telling that for a brand new SIMS install that's only recently been completed Capita didn't bother to install SOLOUS 3, nor do I want to use a special console to deploy SIMS. I'd much rather then time and effort that was spent developing SOLUS 3 had been spent on redesigning the SIMS database schemea so that it actually made sense, made use of modern (as in the last 20 years) database techniques (views, stored procedures?!? what are they?!) and gave actual reasonable performance. Why reinvent the wheel when there's a perfectly satisfactory system already in place that 99.999999999% of schools, business, managed service providers and anyone thats spent any time in IT already uses.

Hi Everyone, Just looking at a few options for a 1-1 laptop deployment using either Stone or Samsung netbooks and was wondering if anyone had any experience of either? Both are being upgraded to 2gb RAM and to have a dual-band Intel wireless card so I'm more looking for experience of the actual devices (Samsung N145 or Stone N107) or the warranty support provided by either.

The Dell R210 II is quite a short server (about 400mm deep) or the R310/R315 are around 600mm deep I believe.

Sounds like the web interface isn't enabled. Try the "ip http server" command to switch it on from an enable prompt? Have a look at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_2/configfun/command/reference/frf005.pdf for some more commands that may be helpful. If you've just inherited a Cisco network then you may also want to have a play with Cisco Network Assistant - Products & Services - Cisco Systems if you haven't seen it already. Cisco Network Assistant can be so much easier to use than the command line for quick changes

I've been tearing my hair out over this one for the last few days and found that it appears that Acrobat X deserialises the entire creative suite if it's run before any other licensed applications. See AAMEE 2.0 and AUSST 2.0 Live! « Adobe Installation and Licensing in the comments and Adobe Forums: CS5.5 Deserializes if you launch Acrobat Pro X Still trying to figure out a way to fix this, but currently I'm thinking that not using adobe acrobat is the only way!

So very glad we've got for sQuid over ParentPay!

I have the Toshiba R700 as my work laptop (predecessor to the R830). I really like it as a form factor, and having an SSD, DVD-RW + i7 CPU in a device that weighs <1.3kg is amazing. Great for travelling with

Ohhhh moving down here! You'll have to come visit

You can still run NAT and your own firewall with LGfL 2.0 - I know we do and I've been speaking with their network guys at Atomwide about things making sure everything works correctly. All that they want to make your aware of is the fact that their filtering system won't work correctly if you do so, and neither will the other features and functions they provide without some work arounds. For us it isn't too much of an issue as we have our own internal filtering (Smoothwall), but the RAV3 service is quite nice but you just have to set up some form of static NAT from the LGfL range to your internal range .

I'd second a number of them. Having just read The Name of the Wind series of books I'm eagerly waiting the next book - although who knows when it'll be released!

Happy birthday witch! Have a great day

For us we're going to be utilising the SchoolsICT Moodle ZiLink for SIMS module. One reason for us doing this is it takes care of our course enrolments within Moodle, gives us a great parental reporting facility and provides a really nice timetabling/change of room/room booking system for staff and students, including linking to that lessons Moodle page. The whole package/integration just makes much more sense for us and in our opinion improves our entire VLE offering.

We're integrating parental reporting into our Moodle VLE. Like bossman our aim is to have a one stop shop for everything

We're currently looking at using sQuid for our online payments. Previously we were almost certainly going with ParentPay, but have decided after all the horror stories to stay away! sQuid is actually working out much cheaper for us though, with a much simpler transaction fee as they're currently doing a special offer for Cunninghams installs

Hi Everyone, We're going to be rolling out a 1-1 laptop provision for all students when we open in September, but one of the issues we're looking for suggestions on how to solve in battery life. Currently we'll be using netbooks (likely Samsung or Toshiba), but do they really last a full day of use? What do others do to deal with batteries that die during the day and/or charging during lessons? Any suggestions for multibay charging solutions or similar?

I know from speaking to Groupcall they're looking at making something available for use with their texting application. But if you just want to use a commercial provider most have fairly simple APIs to integrate into, usually some form of web service. Simply send it your data and out the SMS goes

I've seen similar at my last school. Printing direct from the SIMS server worked fine, but network accounts on other computers could print once and once only. Didn't matter how many were printed that first time. Annoying when you print one to check things first!

Quick reminder applications need to be in for Monday at midday. Any more questions feel free to PM me or reply to this thread

The VNX5300 is in a different league to the FAS2020. It's more onpar with the FAS3170. I'd even say the the VNXe3300 is a more powerful unit than the FAS2020. The FAS2020 is a pretty underpowered box and if that's the only Netapp you can afford I'd avoid it. The new EMC range is pretty good, but I'd look at playing Netapp and EMC off against each other and make sure they know that they're competing against each other. There are massive discounts available if they think they can displace each other

At my last school we tendered and got a new Juniper network. Dual EX8208 Juniper core switches going out to 11 satelite cabinets with 2-4 EX4200 switches in them. The EX4200's were a combination of full PoE/partial PoE (all EX4200's have at least 8 PoE ports) and 24/48 port switches. The EX4200 also have a stacking cable to turn them into a single unit. From our tender Juniper actually came out more cost effective (with install and training) then HP, Cisco, 3Com (they were just being bought by HP), Extreme networks and Brocade. They were also brilliant units Would certainly recomend talking to net-ctrl about the possibility of a Juniper network and see what they can do for you!

Going to be getting the volume license for this. We've been waiting for Lion and Final Cut Pro X to come out before placing all of our Apple orders! It does look interesting, but its a shame that they seem to have "unbundled" various bits and taken out the dvd authoring tools

My other half has a subscription that I occasionally borrow. The PDFs on the kindle are OK, but viewing in the browser isn't great. On the iPhone/iPad its fine. The new iPad app (allows you to take a book offline) is quite nice, but is very slow at rendering pages and this is on an iPad 2! Thinking of getting a sub myself as I'm using it more and more