Soulfish

Currently C2D E7500 with 2gb ram for all desktops. Looking at moving to i3/i5 based chips once Dell offers them as an option on the Optiplex 780

Well I've got most of the week off and I'll be at the EG conference for part of it. Planning on tidying up the office on Friday (only day I'm in) as we've got a 3rd person starting and nowhere for them to go at the moment!

Realistically you're looking at a lot for that much data offsite. It may be cheaper to purchase a storage server of some kind and colocate it yourself in a data centre not too far away? That way you can do the initial backup and from then onwards only transfer the deltas. A similar idea is to team up with another local school and do the same thing, but into their server room (and they do the same with yours). That way you don't have the colo costs. With AWS import (AWS Import/Export) you could get the initial transfer done without worrying about how long it's going to take. But for 12tb you're still looking at at least $1800/month just in storage costs. Backup isn't cheap unfortunately

Tectrade - Protecting Data - Managing Data Growth - Simplifying Infrastructure is one that I know about

Are you talking about 2d barcodes? Like QR Code - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ? Some "normal" barcode scanners are able to read them natively. Or a smart phone with the right app

Depends what your existing infrastructure is like, but something like the new Wyse Xenith with XenDesktop would give you full HDX (i.e. full screen HD video) with zero client functionality.

+1. We've gone from 40p+ a page in some areas to a fixed cost of around 5.9p/page colour and 0.7p/page mono. All of our big colour lasers are now C420DN's Not too impressed with the C232s that we have - they're OK but not great.

Planning on deploying it this summer along with W7 Currently using it on my workstation however

The Reg, Slashdot and Arstechnica are all sites that I like to check.

There are 3 mount points. The screw holes are very small. According to the Sahara universal mounting kit (we ended up using the smallest screws included - Thanks to John for the tip ) the screws we used were M3 in size

Increased budgets I'm all for but as far as I'm concerned I'm free to purchase from whomever I like - providing I meet our purchasing regulations (3 quotes under 50k, competitive tender or framework agreement over). To be honest 90% of the time it's cheaper for us to purchase through a framework agreement that has been setup by a large buying consortium such as OGC Buying Solutions.

I've had some demos of the Mobotix cameras from Net-Ctrl (they're an EG sponsor as well ) and I've seen them in action at BETT and they seem like great cameras. The 360 degree view camera is a great idea as well

With IPv4 depletion not far off now there will come a point when devices on the internet are only able to use IPv6. We'll either need to start looking at some form of NAT or using a specialist 6-to-4 tunnel. Of course IPv6 ideally removes the need for NAT and private address space so the perfect solution is that we all start planning to make the move to IPv6. As John points out though it's quite possible you have devices that won't support it, and your upstream provider may not even support it yet! We're just going through a major network refresh and are planning IPv6 compatibility for everything and looking at rolling it out on a test basis this summer using a dual stack for a handful of machines.

That'll be through the OGC contract

You can now do that with BES Express as well, so it's now feasible to run a small number of Blackberrys

Best idea is to get pricing from the main mobile networks on their OGC Buying Solutions frameworks. The price is a lot cheaper then typical mobile contracts with choices of 1, 12, 18 and 24 monthly contracts normally. If you want more info drop me a PM. The contracts themselves are covered by NDAs unfortunately

I'd be interested in knowing this as well. Have a OneLan system here that likes to break every few months

The hoverover on this (and many other XKCD strips ) made it even better

As above - what I'd like is lots of diagrams explaining how things are currently configured and setup. What services reside on what server and why. What the dependencies are. Usernames and password lists for all software. Licensing documentation and where it's all installed, documents listing IP allocations. A complete hardware inventory and audit summary. What I'd expect is that there's nothing at present and that I'd have to do all the above from scratch. If it's any different then bonus for me

Well it took me over a year to put together our budget - but then again I was working from no previous records. Having to go through expenditure by my predecessors and try and figure out what everything was wasn't fun! Still the budget is finally done and going before the Governors this evening so fingers crossed! Let me know if you need to know anything else

You really need to be taking a greater overall view of where IT is currently within the school and where you/SMT/Governors want it to be. You'll need to be looking at ensuring that you have a refresh cycle for equipment that you can realistically work with, and planning for future projects and development work. Your initial plan should be for several years so you can show where it's going - but remember that all future years planning is only an indication of what you see being done/needed. I wouldn't expect it to be anything like you projected when it actually comes around I'd probably split a few of those categories up. Licenses - what licenses are we talking about? MS, Adobe, Anti-Virus, AN Other? In our budget big spends like MS licenses get there own headings so that people can see just what we're spending each year. Hardware - once again I'd break down into Laptops/Desktops/Thin Clients/Servers/Storage/Backup/Network Infrastructure/Network Cabling etc. All of those will likely have different priorities, different refresh cycles etc. It's a lot easier when you've sat down split things into much smaller categories and allocated what you feel is needed to be spent on those areas to then go back through with someone and go "Ok, we can cut a bit from there by doing this but there's no way we can really spend less in that area because of x". I hope that helps a little

We currently use MS Expression Web - seems to do the job well enough for us

I've had another 6 of them turn up this morning (we already had 2!), and when we received the first unit several months ago the warranty registration hadn't been setup so we couldn't register. I phoned and asked and was told that we'd still be covered - I'm going to be calling my contact at Casio later to see if there's an easier way to register the units. John

Just get the DL385 G7 with Dual 8 or 12-core AMD's They also now run DDR3.

That's because print scripting is a pretty cool feature . I've only dipped my toe into using print scripts but they are a great tool