rsenior

We have had the Nrs system for 12 months now,it works very well with parentpay and biometrics . The frontend and backed are excellent with even our catering manager being able to work about 90%. Hardest thing ,we had to do was setup menus which took an afternoon.

"The current arrangements in relation to EMBC costs and service levels Schools currently pay a per pupil amount plus a fixed charge for their embc service. Harnessing Technology grant has in the past paid for the connectivity charge. The LA has smoothed the costs such that larger schools pay proportionally more than smaller schools in order to offset the effects of both connectivity charge and distance from the local telephone exchange on which this charge is based." This is a direct quote from an open letter from heads to the embc. It can be found on eis : https://portal.leics.embc.uk.com/eis/laservices/bbreproc/Lists/Recent%20Announcements/Attachments/11/LPH.pdf

We are looking for an ICT Technician for an immediate start. This is Grade 7(£17,568-£19,125). For further info and apps pack see the link below: Ibstock Communtiy College - Job Vacancies

A lot of the fujitsu's where the old ddr memory .if it is the one I think it is, I have a box full in the cupbard that has been pulled from old servers.If you pm me your address I will send you some FOC.Is that the model with the IDE raid ? if you upgrade the harddrive it may be worth fitting a sata card and drives for extra speed. If you have access to the cash buy a new one. I've had some good dells on Dell t310 ,I think the last was just over 600 quid with 4gb 2x1gb card and 1tb raid.

Dos_box has a point about the nics but you will need to have a GB connections on the network switchs . I know a quite a few schools with older equipment that still have 100mb switchs/hubs (found one a few weeks ago that still has 10mb in one classroom). Are you using roaming or mandatory profiles for staff/students .We have pretty good network and servers but don't use profile limits and still get the "my computer take ages to login" only to find they have dumped 4/5 gb of photos on the desktop.

Not much. I would look at having 4gb+ for a PDC/FSMO ,but I would also guess that your harddives are pretty old and slow as well.What Os are you using ?

We use Nationwide retail /Trustee with biometrics and can't fault it .The issues we seem have are parentpay but none these where major(would be nice if the staff upload was automatic from sims)

I did ours by: Setup routing on a isa server between admin and curric added the route to workstation Set domain trusts for admin and curric Modified the connect.ini on the local machine to find the ip address of the sims server( you will need to point the sims install to the local connect.ini) Have had this up and running for 4 years with no problems.

Learn : To grovel so that you can spend other departments budgets instead of your own. That adding information to a knowldge base makes more work ,as teachers will forget how it works and constantly keeping asking you,you will then show them how it works and still go round and fix it yourself. Wear your ID card with your photo facing your chest so that new staff/students have no idea who you are and can't ask you stupid questions

One comment that was made (on Newsnight I think) was that they would continue to build some schools but cut some corners .A lot of the problems that we are suffering from now are due to cutting corners and poor building standards of the 80’s ,with a lot of these schools now in need of rebuilding. Our main college building was built in 1927 and is solid as a rock. If we are going to build these schools,it would be better to build less and to a higher standard so that we are not in the same position in another 25 years.

Disk-disk-tape. Use a couple of 6tb seagate blackarmour nas boxes and have just moved from ntbackup that was scripted to run daily backups and full backup on friday night .just for fun we keep a second copy of the full backup as we run a six day timetable in school(soon to be move to 10 day so scheduling wont be a problem anymore) to the latest backup exec.It's like stepping from windows 3.1 to windows 7. No more problems with corrupt backup ,skiped sql file etc. Would love to have a couple of the baracua backup units and online back but like most colleges we're far to poor.

I setup as a test ,a dell r800 with 4 gb and 160 gb hardrive with server 2008 and apps publishing to publish sims .We now use the same server for staff to access sims from home and even with 25 user on at a time it still runs well.

Dead simply answer don't buy it. We bought sequel 2 about 12 months ago and it nothing but trouble were do I start: Midi and Audio drives don't work ,we use Keyrig 49 that seem to work on everything but the latency on sequel is dreadful. licences are done online with individual auth codes that come with the disk ,each machine must be registered and the the auth code expires.For reinstall you must request new codes.We ghosted each machine just incase and another code is need for "extra free" sound files drag and drop midi does not work. default location for files must be change on every login. Tech support is rubbish ,had lots of problems got in touch and they have never resolved a single issue. After throwing a few grand at this, the current music teacher has given it up and we are currently trying various replacements .

We have 20 of these and have no problems apart from kids getting the keys off ,but we get that with every make of laptop we try . I would pay a bit more and get the high cap battery . We use these trollies on all our laptops as you see from the video ,built like a tank. Laptop Security Cabinets and Trolleys At the time we purchased ours the dell trolley was not available. The rugged design just means dell have stuck a piece of rubber on the top and bottom. I managed to buy of some toshiba of the same spec for less

At the moment EMBC offers good value,the current price to the school is discounted because in leicestershire the Lea hangs on to harnessing technology grant and uses this to fund the embc.(Bear in mind that your current invoice is only an estmate and you may receive another in Oct). I looked at moving away just before the switch to synetrix,the setup cost to buy new servers,microsoft exchange,sharepoint,web filtering and 2800 cisco ISR came to around £12000 include the first years line rental from BT and an on going cost of around £4500 for line rental etc. We find that apart from the sums problems we have a pretty good service from EMBC but would still consider moving if we lost the grants and had to fund the £11700(the original cost without standard funds or HT grant) ourself.