ayoward

I would be interested in attending the Leeds NM meeting if I could. I attend the one in East Riding and find it very useful. Always good to share ideas and such like.

Never let it be said that being members of YHGfL didn't have any benefits.... We have a 42U 19" rack that is surplus to requirements that is just taking up space in our store room. If you have a need for it, you can have it. The only stipulations are that you are able to collect it from our Scunthorpe office and of course that you are using it in one of our member schools. This will be on a first come first served basis, so get your request in to [email protected] Cheers, Andrew

Servers for Sale: One previous owner Full service history Taxed & Tested Selling due to no longer required (virtualisation) Further details can be found on our website here: Dell servers for sale - Support - YHGfL - YHGfL

We have a new vacancy at YHGfL. You can read a bit about it here: Development & Support Engineer - LAMP, HTML 4/5, Networking, Linux job - Scunthorpe - February-14-2013 (C5ZUW) Further details will be on our website soon here: Work with us - How do we do it? - About Us - YHGfL - YHGfL Cheers, Andrew

Absolutely, but you get the point? I guess on this forum, it's a bit like teaching Granny to suck eggs, because us technical types know all about contention and bandwidth etc. but when one of the major selling points any service provider makes when trying to win business is the fact that they're putting in a uncontended line, that might sound great to the uninformed and could skew a decision.

It seems our completely fictitious support fox Gloria has been blogging again. It is my contention that the post is interesting nonetheless. I would welcome your comments. eNews » Blog Archive » Bone of Contention Cheers, Andrew

Now then, We have a vacancy for a Systems Engineer in our Support Services team. You can find out more about it here: Systems Engineer vacancy - Work with us - How do we do it? - About Us - YHGfL - YHGfL Regards, Andrew

With the release of Windows 8 tomorrow, schools may be making purchasing decisions for 1:1/replacing school devices etc… We want to make sure that they understand the differences between RT and Windows 8 so that they can make an informed choice. Our friend at Microsoft Sean O'Shea has written a blog post about it which you can find here: Windows RT or Windows 8 devices for your school? - Microsoft UK Schools blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs I think you'll find it useful. Cheers, Andrew

Absolutely I can. Thanks very much for your appreciation.

Colleagues, As I'm sure you're aware, towards the end of last term we had some problems caused by our deployment of the new Smoothwall system. We have worked very hard with our partners at Smoothwall over the summer break to sort this issue out and, after some extensive testing, we believe we have implemented updates to our system which will resolve the problems we experienced. What we would really value, however, is some live testing within school environments. My plea therefore is this: I would ask that between now and the beginning of the new term you help us out by testing the system and letting us know how it is performing - the more users that you can have on the system the better. I am attaching a form that we have used to ensure we have some uniformity across the board. If you would like to use this to log any results, please feel free to do so. If you have any queries, please do let me know. Many Thanks, Andrew Yoward Head of Support Services YHGfL Foundation. Website testing August 2012.xls

Hi Chris, We have our pilot up and running in house now and it is running fine. We have a number of our staff using it now and it is proving to be quite useful. I steered away from trying to implement it myself, I.e build a box and install it and try to configure it when I learned it was included in the new offering in Office 365. Deploying Lync that way took out all the hassle and as an educational establishment you should get it for buttons if not buck shee!! Cheers Andrew

Hi Folks, As a bit of a knock on from the ridiculously good deal that we have managed to do with Microsoft for their EES licensing for schools that part of the Yorkshire & Humber Grid for Learning (that's right folks, no one else in the country has such a good deal, not even those southern softies in London Village), I have been playing with Lync. The primary aim of doing this is to see how it could be deployed and utilised in a school and what benefits could be driven from it. We have been looking at a way of hooking it up to existing school telephony systems and we will also be investigating how we could attach it to the school broadband links so we could converge voice and data and perhaps use the JANET links to save even more money. I would be interested therefore to hear from any of you who have deployed Lync already, your experiences in doing so and your reasons behind deployment and any of you who are thinking about it but don't know what you would get out of it/need to justify it etc. I intend at some stage to maybe collate some best practice/case studies/benefits/business cases etc. so I would really appreciate any input you cared to offer. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about in terms of the MS EES offer that we have brokered, you can read all about it here: Save money on discounted Microsoft licences - YHGfL - YHGfL Cheers, Andrew

The Grid is configured to only allow SMTP outbound through smtp.yhgfl.net. This enables us to make sure it goes through our sendmail servers running mailscanner and our Sophos Mail appliances which should prevent accidental spam or virus spread from within the grid outbound. We would be very quickly blacklisted (has happened before) by the mail relays of the major ISPs were we to inadvertently start sending out malicious mail traffic which would kill outbound e-mail for the whole Grid and its connected schools. There should be more detail here: SMTP relay / Support guides / Support / YHGfL - YHGfL

Get it logged with Thales and we'll look into it for you. I note that it isn't one of the topics on our support page FAQ and I think it probably should be, so I'll have that rectified as well.

Yes, you are quite correct. I don't know how we would solve that. Maybe in the future, if everyone had a decent broadband connection at home then we could just have them in virtual classrooms. I guess some inner city schools get more because they are in deprived areas as well? Maybe communism is the answer, but true communism, not all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.