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The school district I do IT for is on the mobile devices kick and purchasing a LOT of laptops (Lenovo x131e) and carts to put 30 of them at a time into. At the moment, we have to take the power supplies after imaging the computers and mount them into the carts. That's a lot of work and makes the adapters unavailable for the school if they should need them because the batteries didn't make it through the day. We are trying to improve the process and I'm trying to sell them on buying carts with a built-in DC power supply. It would save the work of having to mount them and it leaves the AC adapters available for later use. I'm not having a lot of luck, though. So far this is the only option I've found and I have no idea how their pricing compares to what we're paying for our current carts. Does anyone know of any other options I could try to look into? Thanks in advance.

I need to install the office.com template and media activex control to about 60 machines I'm responsible for. I have searched and searched but I can't find a reliable way to do it manually. The best I've been able to find is to try to copy the ieawsdc.dll file to the machine and manually register but I'm not sure that will actually work right. The solution given on the office.com website is to have your administrator log in, go to the website, click on the course, go to that page of the course, and install the toolbar when prompted. For one machine, sure. For 60? Not happening. Can anyone tell me how to get this thing installed without spending 6 hours on it?

My principal asked me to look into this today. We have a student at one of our middle schools who needs to be able to view a class at a nearby high school. We are trying to figure out what our best option for this will be. Some sort of video conferencing solution would seem to be the best approach. We would need to be able to see the board and, preferably, the teacher. If the camera could be remotely operated by the student for tracking and zoom or would autotrack that would be ideal. Both schools have gigabit fiber connections to our WAN so bandwidth is not a problem. I was thinking about the possibility of a high quality webcam and skype or a similar application as a lower-cost possibility. If you think we need some sort of true video conferencing solution, that should be doable as well. Any thoughts on the best approach for this?