Sylv3r

Licences was the only real change for us here. We also moved away from FMS to Sage as we felt it met the needs of our new start of academy life better. It is also more likely that you will need to ensure that you have relevant policies in place if you don't already have them in place for disaster recovery, data protection etc to satisfy more stringent auditor requirements. Your financial year will also change from 1st April - 31st March, this may have implications if you currently pay SLA's etc from a cash flow prospective. Also any leases need to be Operational Leases, not sure if theres anyway to change once already signed up though.

We've had Sisra for a number of years, but have also now bought 4Matrix in the last couple of months. Yes, theres duplication in both products but they also work well as standalone products for various tasks.

We've just bought 4 x Vividtouch boards for one of our primaries. They are delighted with them!

It used to be changing the wallpapers and locking the devices out.... since we've been able to stop that, setting the alarms is the biggest problem for us now!

Another happy Room Booking System - Online Room Booking Software customer here.

We've got 40. We too had issues with lack of USB ports, but the hubs worked OK. Spec was, they have been more than useful to power teacher PC's for basic powerpoint, IWB use and SIMS. Don't think I would trust them in a Media rich area such as Graphics, Media or Art. Biggest issue we had when we first put them in and mounted them to the rear of the monitors, we got several tickets to helpdesk from various members of staff saying they either had no PC in their room or it had been nicked !

CRB Cunnignhams for us. Links with SIMS and the kit has been rock solid for us. It uses Biometrics with the IDStore software. Theres various other boltons which they demoed at BETT for password resets, lockers, pre-order kiosks which were also quite impressive.

The LA used to sell Kaspersky to it's schools and it wasn't to bad. We did however decide to go it alone and use System Center Endpoint Protection.

We purchased both Meraki switches and APs last year and I love it. Management of everything in a single interface is fantastic. I purchased via Softcat but I imagine most resellers can sort you out.

Our e-mails only ever seem to have a subject but no message body - is that right?

I did like the look of the product but we've got the major issue if we roll out something like this with some staff using it and others not - it then proceeds to give parents a mix message on what homework their Son / Daughter has. When its possible just because the system shows no homework it's not the case. Our current method of 'write your homework in your planner' just works. I do have one reservation with the company, they are pushy! Not sure where they got some of our staff names / e-mails from but they constantly pestered them - they have now found their way onto our block list.

Not sure how useful this will be for those without an IRIS logon subscription, they may also need to speak to IRIS to to make sure they are willing for schools to transfer the hardware to another account.

I've just signed up to a pitney bowes machine - much better than our previous neopost offering.

I think RM sell a curriculum choice package for both the 32bit and 64bit versions. You don't get both and they need to be purchased separately.

Each year we run a university challenge. We've hired the kit from here and it's relatively cheap plus it comes with scoreboard software. Buzzgold|No.1 in the UK for quiz buzzers|Quizmaster|lock-out panel quiz buzzer game

I am not 100% sure on the costs, but IAM Cloud | The Ultimate IT Management platform should be able to do what you need. I don't use it, but i'm considering it.

I was doing a bit of PowerPoint training today for some of my admin staff and only come across this option for Office 2013. It seemed to work flawlessly for me when I tested it with a random video from youtube.

We've had this running on a virtualised VMWare server for 18 months without a problem. Touch wood, we've not seen any issues of slowdown etc. here.

We are moving to a managed print solution in the next 3 - 4 weeks. It is our intention to offer them for staff for a donation which we will give to charity. Sold as seen, we will only provide toners for what we have spare or what remains in the printer.

Our Sixth Form have access to twitter, everything else is blocked. Certain staff have access to Facebook for updating our school page or investigating CP issues.

We've never bought them to be honest. Once the Laptops for Teachers ones died they were never replaced. We've got a fair size staff study with 20 PC's plus other smaller departmental offices plus a PC in all classrooms so we didn't see the need.

As a thought, if this can't be stopped should the staff not be BCCing the distribution groups into the initial email? That way even if the student clicks reply all it will only go to the recipient.

Historically we bought Sanyo, but now buy NEC or EPSON.

We ultimately went with http://www.classcharts.com for our behaviour reporting side. Staff love it for both the behaviour and seating plan elements. With it also being webased staff are able to access it on their own devices leaving the classroom PC for teaching and learning. Everything logged within Classcharts automatically uploads to SIMS, so our parents logging onto Sims Learning Gateway, still see the full achievement and behaviour logged by staff outside of SIMS. As @vikpaw pointed out, our staff ultimately found the behaviour module on SIMS a little clunky and required a lot of data entry - this has since reduced considerably via the route to add behaviour via the registers but this came about after we started to use Classcharts.

I think you can only use Google Analytics if your self-hosted. Basically by adding a bit of code into a web part on the page. Someone may be able to confirm this who has carried it out.