AdamGent

I can see the cost aspect for definite there with your heavy / total use of Open Source. Interested if you use MS AD for your workplace / school computers? Myself and a few other started an outsourced / Hosted Services company a few months ago, after 6 months of deployment building the platform (Highly redundant w/ support for upto 10,000 Concurrent users) for the three MS UM components (Exchange, OCS, Sharepoint) inc SIP VoIP calling support. I was curious as to what the motions are in the schools sector, we hand the control of all your users and accounts to you, and can integrate your logons with your own AD.

It seems that the trend is away from outsourced / hosted services and towards more in-house IT services? Is this for cost, control or do you not trust your providers to be more reliable than your own resources?

We run the full hosted messaging and collaboration UM platform. So Sharepoint, Exchange 2007, OCS 2007 R2 It integrates really well with the whole office package, we use SIP phones (even over the internet) and it works like a dream! We also sell it as a hosted service to anyone interested.

Try and find a copy of virtualPC online, this is a full hardware test program - boot from the CD and run a full system test - A colleague of mine uses it to test refurbished pcs and it often finds faults that dont always show up otherwise.

So do you use leased lines or some similar service? I take it you have good availability, how many users do you have on the system?

Hi guys, I'm just curious as to what you are currently using for your school email systems, what you do about web hosting and what your plans / views are toward hosted services e.g. Hosted Exchange, Hosted Sharepoint, External Dedicated Servers / External Virtual Machines How much do you pay now (approx for in-house, or hosted - if so what do you use) Thanks