EduUser

Very helpful and interesting points, thank you all so much. I’ll see what further information I can get tomorrow, I’m really curious myself too.

Sorry forgot to ask, what's the rough yearly cost on something like cc4 for that size school? The quote I'm seeing for support are literally remote support with someone on site once a week, or once a month, and I don't think they realise this person is at best going to keep things chugging along and more likely tell them it's all old and their company can buy them what they need! The later quote is with RM too.

I think that must have been the initial idea, but since now they're looking to for a support contract with someone on site every week, we're moving to the middle ground where the saving from ditching that system can pay for someone on site to support a vanilla one.

Thanks for your response. That's what I suspected, and if they're still running that, then their server hardware is probably just as old. It's a primary with around 400 students. I'll speak to them today/tomorrow hopefully and get a complete picture on what their setup is. They told me 'dont worry we're moving to the cloud' :/. Comments like that worry me because it gives me the impression someone has sold them that as a catch-all solution for everything.

Hi all, I'm a very experienced programmer and low level software and hardware engineer, and know the unix and Mac world extremely well. I've coded OS's for firewalls and embedded platforms, but haven't really touched the windows world in many years and know very little about the big names in education for network management. My child's school is looking at some new support contracts as they will have no one technical on site soon and asked for some advice. I've just read the proposals and noticed the school has RM CC4 deployed. I tried to look up more information about it but it isn't even advertised at RM anymore, and I'm seeing a lot of posts about it going back to 2010 and earlier. From what I understand it sits on top of windows and tries to dumb down device and build management etc? I suspect the current support with RM for CC4 is expired or expiring soon. Can someone give me a quick primer on the state of CC4 right now? Is it legacy? What is RM's current replacement, and what is the best replacement in the market if not sticking with RM? They are also using RM Unify for single sign on. Basically my concerns at this point are that they're going to get tied into a cheap looking manage-all support contract with one of these companies, who is then going to up sell them a whole refurb. Not only that but any support issues will get offloaded to each suppliers support contracts, and support there may not even be in place. The school, in trying to get one company to look after everything, may end up in a bigger mess and more unforseen costs. I'd prefer to put some time, and perhaps donate money, to manage migrating to a complete and current system, and incorporate any support included, into a complete support plan, or possibly even hire a full time person to support in house. It's very early in the process and I don't have all the information at hand, but I'd like to go in as prepared as possible, so any insight you may have would be really helpful. My instinct is to rip out CC4 and migrate to vanilla windows. Donate a couple of high end servers and whatever else is required, and outsource the management to a third party company in the education support domain. Then the school can focus costs on licences for any software they actually need, and going forward almost any support company could bid year on year for the contract. (I'm going on a lot of assumptions right now though)