Soulfish

Hmm trying to do things on an iPad on a moving train is not good!

Well I'm in and confirmed

Similar to how my direct Dell account manager tries to sell me equipment. They don't seem to understand why I get annoyed when the price they quote is twice the website RRP price...

Snap - I'll join in the next game

Had similar issues with Orange/EE when we were signing up. Got passed from pillar to post, until I got the public sector/local government team contact details! Do they have a Public Sector or Local Government team? You may find their contact details on the GPS website normally - although that requires having a login!

So the contract you now want is PSN Services Framework from the Government Procurement Service, specifically Lot 6 RN1498 - Find a Supplier | Government Procurement Service

Have a look at Buying Solutions (or if you're an academy Crescent Purchasing Consortium) government contracts. We have our phones (3 of them for facilities) through that. Costs around £1-2/mo and we get £50 credit towards a phone (2 year contract). Phone calls are then billed to the school, although since we're with Orange, Orange - Orange calls are free. There are other options if you're going to be doing lots of calling or data (ours all use Blackberrys to make use of UMA due to the shocking phone signal in this building so have blackberry data plans for not much more). When we were looking was the cheapest way to do things by far.

I get back from holiday the Sunday before, so may not be able to make it

You can get access to the Cunninghams DB if you ask nicely (or ask the right people nicely!). We've certainly got access to be able to pull out more detailed reporting info, and also because we do weird things with staff duty meals/free drinks vending for staff.

Just need a Kindle with 3G access to work for that aspect - xkcd

What you really want to look at is archiving with built in legal discovery/hold options to help with FoI discovery etc. I know that Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange has an addon archiving option if you run onsite Exchange.

Have to say having done it on the mk2 focus a few times its a single screw and a couple of clips to get the headlight assembly out. Not too bad after the first attempt

We have PSF relay via our internal exchange server. No need to setup port 25 access on the external firewall unless you don't run internal servers? In which case you'll need the server to relay via your external user and may need to setup a specific email user/account for PSF.

I'd double check with the University IT services. Certainly I know when I was at uni once they'd figured out what you were doing they blocked your access. Do they not have site-wide eduroam access? Or does it not extend to the halls (quite possible I suppose if it's not a campus uni)? It sounds like they're running 802.1x as well (from the user/password combo) so it's possible they'll lock down access to that IP to specific mac addresses, and getting the router to authenticate will likely be non-trivial.

We had an Ofsted inspection just before half term (so around 2 weeks ago). The inspectors were here for 2 days and other than when they introduced themselves on the first day I didn't see them again

Woo! New buttons!! Time to go and explore

Well we don't have ours linked to SIMS, and I'm not quite sure (other than possibly personal) what you'd be linking to... To be honest PSF is a totally stand alone finance system and is treated as such by our finance team. I think it can link through to our payroll system, but again don't think we do currently.

Forgot to say that we currently have around 15 VLANs for various things. Mostly our VLANs are centered around separate comms room/floor location (similar to @CyberNerd), along with separate VLANs for each wireless SSID, servers/printers, DMZ, VPN connections and VoIP phones.

Interesting VLAN number for your blade centre management . I also tend to use /23's for most of our "fixed building switch stack" VLANs with wireless pools normally being a /22 or /21 (dependant on wireless usage). We've also got a /20 that our servers sit on due to historic setup that was decided before I started and was easier to just continue with it while we migrated away from a flat network

Be interesting to see how the new firewall components performing . Being a Smoothwall filtering customer that's just purchased a new Palo Alto firewall I'm not sure I could live without that Layer 7 application filtering/user identification any more. Having demoed lots of other products nothing came close to how PA had implemented it so I'd be very interested to try out the new Smoothwall firewall .

And ours is a very nice system from the very nice people at schoolradio.co.uk

Well I've setup PSF (and still run it) and I can tell you that those ports aren't open on our internet facing firewalls . Certainly open on the PSF server though

They only need to be opened internally, unless you're expecting the PSF client to need access from the outside world? Unless you have some interesting network design with an ASA in front of your servers, I imagine the ASA sits in front of your internet connection. In which case you only need to ensure those ports are open on the Windows firewall (or similar) on the PSF server

Cut my Mums normal sim down to mini-sim size when she got a Nexus 4 for Christmas. Easy to do and plenty of guides online if you can't wait for the virgin sim to turn up

We run PS Financials here as our finance package. Coming from FMS be prepared for some big differences! Firstly it makes full use of SQL reporting services for its invoicing/PO part. This is the web portal that you've been told about. For instance we have a paperless ordering system. Everything is done via the web portal for budget holders, or delegated budget holders (including allowing budget holders to approve POs raised by others under their cost centre). For the finance team you'll need to install the PSF client on their PCs. One thing to take note of is the fact that there isn't alot in the way of documentation (...a manual would be nice...) so make sure to take lots of notes when they do the install. They'll send you a technical requirements brief setting out what they need before their contractors can remote in and install the system. You'll also normally have some onsite training although we've found some trainers are a lot better than others