pcstru

Pedant point, it's not education, it is just schools (and to be fair not even all of them).

Given the increasing importance of the internet, it is surely a service that we look to be reliable and resilient. So in terms of value vs risk, we may now be getting to or at the point where it is as viable to invest in that as it is to invest in reliable, resilient local storage. The problem might then shift to bandwidth capacity; if all your students hit save file at around the same time (end of lesson), how well does the overall system cope with such peaks? Has that introduced a new need to pro-actively manage bandwidth (new skills and systems)? I've recently been looking at a friends needs for his small business and O365 vs the cost of replacing SBS (Small Business Server) looks quite substantial (~50% reduction for going cloud, which surprised me). Our school has efficiencies of scale that they don't but even so, I can't see local hosting hanging on that much longer.

Could you give indicative costs on this per user please?

Any number of reasons from different instancing leading to different routes, through how they scale the product (are you on a server with all schools that begin with a B or some other arbitrary manual, automated or database managed partitioning) and how that can then affect the DB (are you perhaps on a system with a school with odd data that is skewing indexing or perhaps uniquely exposes 'missing' indexes). In short, unless you know a lot of detail about the systems architecture, you can't rule out the root cause of a performance issue at the providers end just because they called it 'cloud'.

If you store data on the same logical system you are at risk from design/code flaws locking you out of both the data and the backups. An example might be a date sensitive algorithm - so you pass an arbitrary date and bang - you have no access to any part of the system because all nodes that you have replicated to are subject to the same defect. These types of failures are rare but do occur. So IMO it is never a good idea to backup system states to the same system and unless you ignore the possibility of such failures, it cannot be said to be a secure copy.

Sure there will be a lot of specialisation - IME that tends to happen anyway; as you get larger teams it makes sense to narrow peoples focus and increase the depth of their expertise. However, our support ratio is ~ 1:540, theirs is 1:100. That is quite a stark difference. I wonder how it compares to an industry of comparable size with specialist IT needs.

The real shock to me was this : "The IT team has grown from c. 115 members in 2014 to approximately 350 members." 350! Sure they have more than 27,600 students (10,500 postgraduate students) and 6,800 employees while the organisation has an income of £684 million. So they are ~15 times bigger than us in terms of students, ~20 time as many staff and they have ~40 times our income but their IT department is nearly 90 times our size. This IT thing just doesn't scale!

I don't think anyone would say that trying to protect kids is wrong. The question is how you balance risk management against practicality (and unintended consequences). Logically, the way to 100% protect kids from being a passenger in a car accident would be to ban them from cars. Unfortunately all other schemes are basically a matter of "how many deaths are acceptable" when set against the "benefits" or transportation by cars.

We make use of sharepoint workflows for our ticket list but it is limited to just working out which emails needs to be sent to whom. I did use some powershell to populate sharepoint lists from our MIS when we were using sharepoint for lates etc, which might be a way to do some complex image processing to obtain an index/hash (or generate other metadata) prior to upload. My gripe with sharepoint is it is such a huge mess - as soon as you need to step beyond the basics it gets very deep very quickly, and it is all so ... finickity.

Any particular flavor of SQL server? MySQL, MsSQL, Oracle, Postgres etc? How are you connecting to the server and running the Query? What is then holding and pushing the result set to the file?

We use powershell to extract data from the MIS, create accounts from that data and email tutors, ICT teachers and our helpdesk the credentials. Normally tutors give them out but sometimes they come to the desk to get them.

Just to pick up on this small detail : if there is no actual need to process data, it is generally not allowed under the DPA. UPN is particularly problematic in this respect since it is quite tightly controlled. A data subject might be be said to have a reasonable expectation that it is not replicated between systems unnecessarily. In which case it is unlikely to be fair processing as defined by the DPA. Unnecessary replication of data will also turn into an unnecessary cost under the new regulations.

Right, because explosions at nuclear power plants are nothing to worry about.

But why always the mention of power (watts (do we presume watts per second or is the 2.6GW figure annual?)) with all the talk of energy (joules). Is this Fake News?

TM : "Why are you smiling cretins! That little thing is going to have your jobs!!" Girl : "Na, we programmed it to be a politician, look - see how it goes round and round in circles and look ... awww, it's voting itself a pay rise!"

Perhaps the new GDPR could be used to motivate suppliers (or users) to develop and share a way to easily report on ALL data held against an entity - which might also be useful in these data conversion exercises.

Works fine for us. Yes - well, they do let us use it.

That surely rather depends on your attitude to stuff and how much space you have. My ex used to throw my stuff away while I was still typing away on the keyboard - which was probably a bit too ruthless. Having now moved to a smaller house, I'm now much more ruthless than I used to be, although I will let myself finish typing this befo[NO CARRIER]

Narcos. The story of the Medellín Cartel and Pablo Escobar. Pretty much an excuse for another American cop show, albeit with a bit of history and primarily set in Columbia. Good performances (Wagner Moura is superb as Escobar) and on the whole it is well done. I wasn't sure I'd stick with it into Season 2, but now a couple of episodes in I can see a little binge to fill some of my leave.

I was quite excited by the prospect of an Excel plugin with Bromcom. In reality - it seemed very limited and quite clunky, it was a real disappointment.

But is Rob a suspect?

We used to use SIMS FMS when we were running CMIS/ePortal and then for a while when we switched to Bromcom. Now finance use whatever the Trust says - I don't even know what it is called :-(.

Looks a bit like an old Compaq III portable - or a clone of it. I remember installing Xenix on one which involved about 50 5 1/4in floppy discs.

That was my first controller for playing Elite.

Joystick for an old BBC Micro.