Soulfish

Yes SP2 to SP3 requires a schema update

Woo! Where's the party?

Congrats Kaz

I did exactly this 4 years ago, taking a new school from building site to full operation/business as usual. Was great fun, and I learnt alot (in particular about building sites ). One thing I would say is don't assume anything. Make sure you have network sockets everywhere - it's much cheaper to have them put in as part of the build. Make sure your thinking about future proofing the building, running network cables to all doors, possible proximity card reader locations, anywhere you might want to mount a speaker/phone/tv/wireless AP/CCTV camera, network sockets for every device in the school gym etc. And don't forget about provision for external network points . Also ensure that your involved in ensuring you have network comms rooms in sensible locations. In the school I worked in we had comms room for every half floor (building was 4 stories) which air con, UPS, raised flooring (wonderful stuff) and 2 42U racks. The main server room was connected to the IT technician/workroom office and had space for 8 racks + redundant professional server room AC + 3-phase 40kva UPS. It's useful to have multiple fibre routes from each comms cabinet location back to the central server room - we had 32 cores between each comms room and the main server room split over two separate routes through the building. It's also useful to have at least 5 Cat6 cables run from each comms room (in a separate patch panel) back to the main server room - it's surprising how useful they are for routing things that aren't IP based. I'd also say that while VDI/Thin Clients are good don't base everything around them - it's good to have a mix of physical and virtual . Any questions just ask - I've still got all the plans and documentation around here somewhere

I run FreeNAS on my Gen7. Works pretty well for me!

Using F-Secure on my current PC, but found that the interface was too consumer friendly for my liking. Currently using BitDefender on the other halfs laptop and seems to work well so will likely move to that for my machine as well. Both are the full paid versions

Happy Birthday @Ric_

Ahhh I can relate to that. But then I'm a technical project manager so I get to combine both the project manager and the expert in that sketch

Have you considered staying say 20-30 mins outside of London and getting the train in/out every day?

Have you configured the send/receive connectors for Exchange? See Send Connectors: Exchange 2013 Help Have you also configured the mx record for your domain to actually point to your Exchange server? You mention you've installed Exchange, but not if you've completed any of the additional steps to have it route/receive email externally.

Have you configured the send/receive connectors for Exchange? See Send Connectors: Exchange 2013 Help Have you also configured the mx record for your domain to actually point to your Exchange server? You mention you've installed Exchange, but not if you've completed any of the additional steps to have it route/receive email externally.

As others have said as an IT tech there is good progression to the Network Manager/IT Manager level, and if you're lucky enough to find an opening to the IT Director level for the larger schools/trusts/academys. However once you reach that level there isn't a whole lot more to progress to, and having hit that wall I had to look outside of Education to progress my career. It's something I know a fair few others have had to do as well. One thing to be careful of is that a lot of private companies don't understand how advanced IT within Education now is, and the massive exposure you get to all the technologies they use. Selling yourself is key, and having a well written CV that gets that across I jumped from being an IT Director to being a technical project manager within a global company. It's a totally different perspective and while I enjoyed my time in education this is a new challenge . My role is a cross between a subject matter expert and a project manager. I get to keep up my technical skills (although as TechMonkey says I now specialise in Office 365/Exchange/SharePoint/Lync/Identity rather than generalising with all technology) while also developing my project management skills/qualifications. The fact that I actually get formal training now and the world wide travel (I actually enjoy travel though, so it may not be a plus for everyone ) are other plus points for me

Ohh been waiting for UK release of the Chromecast to use with Plex

When I worked in a school we had dual lines run by M247. Each was provided by a different company (Virgin and TalkTalk) and using different technologies (Fibre and EFM). Each was also brought into the building via a different route. Our single point of failure would have been the router, although we could have chosen to dual-home the router but decided the additional cost wasn't worth it

Been waiting for this for a while. If I had any time I'd be playing Titanfall until Watch_Dogs was released! Shame I don't have any time free at the moment

Tempted by this, but have no time at the moment and still don't play BF4 as much as I'd like to!

Being in a VM vs a physical shouldn't matter. Key to performance is to ensure that firstly the VM or physical is setup correctly, has adequate RAM and a high speed disk subsystem. As has been said you want to split the MDF and LDF's onto different physical drives or different LUNs. It should also be a fast RAID type, so typically RAID-10 although RAID-5 is OK. Also look at other SQL performance tuning recommendations. I'm unsure what SIMS does/doesn't support as it's been a while, but typically you want to look at things like ensuring auto-growth (if enabled) is set to grow the database at a decent size (not growing by 1mb, instead growing at 500mb+ or similar) and MDF/NDF/LDF files are split onto different disks.

Yup data manager at my last school had two monitors (actually all admin and office based staff had two monitors). Both were 24", with one vertical and one horizontal

Interestingly my fiance works for the NHS as a business intelligence and SQL developer and deals with the NHS IT systems and centralised databases day-in day-out, as well as all the requests to send data to third parties. She lets me know whenever they make a new attempt to centralise everyones data and makes sure we both opt out as having seen the state of the systems and how they're used there's no way she wants any of our data in them

I used them in the last school I worked in. Put in around 100 APs for site-wide coverage. Worked brilliantly and was very competitively priced.

Currently sat at home ill, so haven't been able to make BETT this year . Hoping I might be well enough to pop along tomorrow evening/Saturday otherwise first one I've missed for a while

About 70 miles and 2 hours - and that's each way. Car/Train/Tube/Walk woo!

I was with Virgin for about 2 months last year. It was one of the worst networks for data I've ever been with. They'd just implemented a hidden spreed restriction, but managed to muck up the install/config so that people couldn't get more than 20kb/s at best. Moved to Three and found them great. GF used them many years ago and found them very very poor so was slightly apprehensive giving them another shot but have to say had no problems. Data is fast and is truly unlimited. Accidentally had my phone download 40gb of my music library over 3G without issue a couple of months ago

Talk to Net-Ctrl - it's who I bought the PA3020's I was running from . As others have said it's an amazing bit of kit. When people say Palo Alto is the Rolls Royce of the firewall world they're not kidding. We tested PA kit against lots of others (Juniper, Checkpoint, Fortinet, Watchguard, Sonicwall) and it was simply the best at everything we got it to do. The application and user level filtering was just lightyears ahead of what the other products were able to do. They may say they can do it, but none worked anywhere near as well as the PA implementation . If you've got the cash for them I'd recommend Palo Alto without a second thought.

Added Smoothwall in as an option for you