pcstru

We use Smartlog for web based training/assessment for a number of H&S areas (fire awareness, manual handling, DSE, working at heights). Not free but seems to work well enough.

For photography, I'd push for monitor and printer that I can calibrate to give accurate colour rendition. I'd put that way ahead of 4K for the given use (not that secondary school photography students will (probably) notice). On SSD's - they are the only component where the change from an HDD gives a performance improvement several orders of magnitude faster. For a modern client end machine they are ... standard. I'd only buy HDD's where I need good value storage capacity and that is not generally going to be on networked client.

Unfortunately, in problem diagnosis the "proof" only usually comes at the end, when the problem is resolved. What happens is you call up, there is some investigation, they maybe ask for your data if they are feeling generous, internally they run up your data on their 'platform' and declare it works to spec, they then notice you have an odd set-up and say it must be your hardware/infrastructure and come back when you have checked that out and are running on kit that meets their spec. Contractually, they will be OK because they are not refusing you support for the product, they are just asking you to host in in a way that complies with their stated requirements before they will continue to throw resources at an investigation. Sure, I skipped the theory and went straight to the practical side where hardware that supposedly met specifications either didn't, or was driven by software that took liberties or was just badly written. These incompatibilities are why you suppliers like VMWare, Oracle etc will supply lists of hardware which they support (and have actually tested). When you get to nice expensive SAN's, you might even be restricted not only on what kind of drive you can use but which actual models down to batches of serial numbers. No doubt EMC and the likes just don't understand the point of standards like SATA 2.0, 'eh?

There is mention of "computer and processor" and there are listed specific OS's which will run on that. There is no mention in the list of supported OS's of hypervisors or cloud hosting. Do you really think they should have to list everything that they do not recommend? That might be a rather big document. You might argue with them that putting a hypervisor between the hardware they recommend and the OS they specify is neither here nor there, but if Capita find they have had to assign you a full time 3rd line/dev support and you are running some wierd set-up, they are unlikely to want to spend time eliminating that set-up as a potential factor. Bear in mind this would only come into play if you are running into problems that require some expert investigation. If your azure hosting is working fine you won't even be talking to them. But when someone is assessing whether they want to run SIMS in production but using cutting edge hosting that Capita have not considered, they should think about the risk to their support and act to manage that risk accordingly. A chat with the lovely lads and lassies at Cardington would probably be wise before going down that road. Assuming that you will get unlimited support in such a situation and be able to argue that "well you don't say not to run it on X", would be ... unwise.

Well, it's been a while since I worked much with Capita and SIMS but this looks very much like a list of both hardware and software requirements. In reality they will likely give support up to a point but you might find that at some point they pin (say) performance issues on how your are hosting. If you are frequently running into issues they might then refuse you any support until your hosting meets their stated requirements. From the other side of the fence that's not entirely unreasonable. If support and development time is being sucked up in quantity by a single customer, you will look at the situation very critically. It becomes unfair to other customers when you have to pour a lot of time into one who will not "play by the rules".

No. But if we were running SIMS and SIMS was running very slowly and I phone up Capita for help and I have SIMS running on a stack that is not on their list of recommended stuff, they might just refuse to investigate or break off an investigation before the root problem is identified. That may or may not matter to you so you might or might not consider it when choosing the hosting platform.

I don't see "recovery of file versions from 01/03/2016, prior to them being sabotaged by a member of staff" on any Azure offering - perhaps I'm missing it? We use a 3rd party product for GAE documents but it is not good value. It's one of the problems I have with 'cloud' - they might offer resilient infrastructure which minimises the loss of assets due to (say) the loss of a whole data centre, they do not seem to offer the multi generational backup schemes which keep us buying LTO tape and which helps me sleep comfortably at night.

Ohms law is function of three properties so saying it is the amperage would seem to be as true as saying it is down to your resistance. There is also another dimension to the problem - time, so perhaps it is about power - or maybe not even as simple as that since a cursory read-up about defibrilators suggests they profile the delivery - it's an AC circuit. And then again, it probably depends on how you frame the problem, are we time or frequency domain types? Maybe getting blasted by a high voltage cap is down to an even more fundamental universal force than mere electrickery. Luck! I used to take stuff apart as a kid, including TV's. My parents encouraged this but now I realise they were probably trying to save on the long term food bills.

170 V - more like several thousand. High voltage caps also have a nasty little trick similar to memory effect which can mean that even when you discharge the cap, the voltage can creep back up afterwards (so quickly shorting them with a screwdriver can be ineffective). The glass tube in a CRT may itself be in part acting as a capacitor - so don't rely on looking for things that look like capacitors. That said, there is generally very little energy involved so the risk is skewed toward a nasty shock rather than death - assuming you are fit and healthy.

In submarines there are only Boats. Everything else is a target.

For the end users, it's not about the technological ecosystem, it is about data and information, digital assets, IP, operational control, strategic control. Who really cares how many RAIDS or where the compute or storage actually is. But the directory and the MIS and the documents and their meta-data and the spreadsheets - oh my, the spreadsheets. That - or rather what is embedded and encoded in that and every day acted out from it, that is what is important. Disruptive change is when it gets ahead of us - when users are sharing departmental assets on personal dropbox accounts and 'signing up' to whatsapps personal T&C's while using it as a business communications tool, we have to accept they do it with good intent. And anyway in a few years, maybe 10, embedding 5G at chip level will be so cheap and network coverage so good that what we think of as our networks will be pointless. In 20 years time Abillybob will be regaling new posters here with tales of patch cables and real physical network 'switches'. Mind you, they will still be wondering why IPv6 hasn't yet managed to displace IPv4. No one ever asks whatever happened to v5. In some circles they bury the bodies real deep.

Todays 'cloud' is tomorrows nitty gritty. I was witness to the disruption the rise of the Personal Computer caused central IT who were providing mainframe/mini infrastructure. In many ways it was similar shift in IT - a transfer of power from a central provider to the user as people could do for themselves what they once needed to ask IT to do. Where once we installed a fat outlook client, now the vast outlook factories lie silent as people bypass us and take email on their phone or tablet. Anyhow, personally I came into IT way before todays nitty gritty was even a gleam in someones eye. I'm not even really a sysadmin, I'm one of those software typres. I just snuck in when no one was really looking. You won't tell, will you?

We are a substantial size, have an odd set-up and the last few years has seen sustained investment in new IT as well as refreshing existing stock. The budget covers a lot of stuff.

Necromancy!!! Had me fooled too.

The best bit : at the end of the day I know that what I am helping deliver is something that will fundamentally change peoples lives for the better, for the rest of their lives. It's not 'just' endlessly being asked to "go the extra mile" just so some sales people can make their targets and shareholders can get their return selling products that are either cogs in a larger machine or wasteful, meaningless consumer tat or sometimes both. What we do actually does, really matter.

It depends on the priorities of the business. Sometimes saving money is an absolute essential because if you don't, you simply won't be in business tomorrow. I'm sure some will say that that is an unlikely situation in schools but having just had my budget reduced by a nice round £200K, I'll even look at reducing functionality if it saves money and we can live within whatever functional constraints remain. Personally, I don't think personal preference should come into it. Impacts on cost and functionality should be understood, risks identified, quantified and managed; all of which should lead to decision makers making informed decisions.

Yes - we do it here for BYOD and chromebooks (a bit clunky as they have already logged in but single sign on seems to be broken), so it is possible to mix up authentication in that way (some devices pass creds, some are prompted, some are just let through but a policy is applied).

If you are using smoothwall, why not have the students authenticate when the browse the web (smoothwall can prompt for creds when someone tries to access the web)? That way your filtering records will be able to identify individual accounts. Otherwise, in smoothwall we allow some VLAN/subnets to bypass authentication but have the default student filtering applied.

You might just reduce that to X should be used where it offers some benefit. It might be functionality OR cost OR it might even be some other constraint - perhaps staff skills, external support or just the supply of a product (this thread arises basically because M$ will start to motivate us using several of those constraints to push us along the path they want us to take).

$Description= Get-ADUser -Identity $row.samaccountname -Properties Description | foreach-object { $_.Description } In cases where Get-AdUser returns multiple rows, $Description will be set to the last one.

It's a while since I've had much to do with SIMS but you should be fine. Assessment products tend to be complex so rarely get the accolade of "easy to learn" but since you already have good knowledge of the domain (you know what you want it to do) and knowledge of how another product does it, you have a good head start on figuring out Facility.

No. The market rate should inform decision making for any instance of a post. It will be an important factor, it will not be the only factor. Market rates inform the process. If you fail to take into account variations in what you are asking for, the local market or the actual local needs of an organisation, then you might well get it so wrong you do not get the quality of candidates you need and so have to re-advertise. I make no claim that schools do not make mistakes in this area - even when they have the benefit of someone with many years experience to guide them.

There is a tautological problem with the question sure (I mean if it is done properly then by definition it should not fail), but I'm interested in whether people think that outsourcing is always going to be a bad move and why. I kind of hope people will steer towards the intention of the question rather than get hung up on the tautological problems with the construction. From my POV I think outsourcing can work well when you don't have a position that is full time, you need to access a broad pool of skills any of which might be in depth, and/or when you don't have management expertise to effectively manage those technical skills. However, the problem even then is the same one I think we face when using consultants to bring in particular expertise; how do I do quality assurance on the advice/recommendations they will give?

I don't think the package people get when working for schools is substantially below "market rate" - so no, I don't therefore think that there must be a knock on in terms of candidate quality when recruiting. I'd agree that people who work in schools can generally, with their skills, get more in the private sector (they can also get less) but I don't think salary is the be all and end all when considering the 'value' to an employee of a particular job. As a personal example, I think I could probably add another 1/3 to my salary if I looked outside of education, but I very much enjoy what I do and that is much more important to me than at this point in my life than more money in the bank. You will need to elaborate. Any market in the sense we are speaking of is an aggregation of the individual instances, so to find the "the market rate" for IT Managers in schools we might take the salary of all the IT Managers working in schools and go for the average. I don't really see how you can meaningfully say that that is "defined by individual view". Any individual given the entire data set should be able to come to the same number for "market rate". It is defined by math, not opinion.

Would you say there is any benefit in outsourcing if it is done properly or is it always going to just fail?