Sylv3r

Thanks - I signed up yesterday. Been watching the Twynham development over the last year or two, some exceptional work accomplished.

Ours was around 15k with CRB (Cunninghams Impact), support and maintenance is now around £2k per year. 3 Revalvs 2 Servers 5 Tills

Sounds like it hasn't been looked after since it was installed - but all is not lost and as Boredguy has mentioned above, if the school still has some sort of support contract through RM or the Local Authority then getting a logon at RM Education - Inspiring Engaging Learning is important and will point you in the right direction if you can't find manuals etc. Where are you based - I am sure a few members on here will gladly give you a hand if your local - myself included.

Have a good night everyone - the north east party will be arriving early tomorrow morning. Good news is, I believe I am not sharing a room with @bossman tomorrow night, so I should get off to kip no problem

We don't use it but http://www.gcsepod.co.uk is another. From the list you have posted above we use kerboodle in our sixth form MFL lessons and staff seem to like it.

We've started doing this a while ago and will be looking at creating more help videos over the summer ready for our new network in September. Whether the staff will watch them as it's generally easier for them to pick up the telephone or report an issue via our helpdesk is another issue.

Have you spoken to the procurement section at your LA? I purchase our phones through them and quite often they can drive a good deal due to the number of handsets across the authority and schools etc.

I don't think it's as high on the agenda as it possibly was under the previous government legislation, but we will continue to publish this sort of information as the parents have actually engaged more with the school through the increased information they now are able to view on a day-by-day basis. As with most things involving schools and ICT - the new government have yet to make any decisions other than cutting funding to schools through schemes such as the harnessing technology grants.

Myself, @bossman and @webman played this game a year or two back at BETT. We come up with some strange words and had to use them in our conversations with the sales people - we got some strange looks )

Only staff can access their personal e-mail accounts. All access by students was removed a year or two ago after a 6 month notice period.

We use a Wordpress mu setup for our media and technology studies. We currently don't have any AD or LDAP integration but will be looking into this - if we can get it to work - we will make blogs available to all students. Does anybody know any good AD / LDAP modules that will automatically create wordpress mu accounts as well as use password credentials direct from our AD? - Is their such a thing?

A quick list from Tom http://www.edugeek.net/forums/smoothwall-direct-support/75255-guardian3.html#post673340

We allow currently for staff and sixth form only. If I had more bandwith to play with, we would probably allow it for KS4 also.

Generally when staff leave I remove their accounts after their final day of employment. Staff are aware of this, and if they ask I will gladly keep their accounts open for a little bit longer if requested. Staff are all aware not to carry out school business via their own personal e-mail accounts, but I do permit them to access their hotmail accounts etc from within school. Students on the other hand only have access to the e-mail system I provide through school - they can't access hotmail / yahoo etc. My staff e-mail addresses tend to take the form of jbloggs@..... after a staff member leaves the account gets deleted, a new member of staff with the same surname and first initial joins the school 5 years later, I then set them up with an account using the above criteria - I haven't come across it yet, but theres likely to be a lot of junk etc coming through for the previous member of staff - I guess theres no way to stop this, and just either have to remember all the names of old staff or hopefully the mail has dropped off after a long absence of bouncebacks. I doubt we would be able to ask staff not to sign up for any newsletters etc, as details just tend to appear on these systems plus sometimes it's impossible to opt out.

Good to hear it was a good day, I would have liked to have come down but had things in the diary I couldn't rearrange.

I also use C-P-Ltd and have been impressed with them. IT Services | IT Support | Business Telecoms - Sheffield, Leeds and Yorkshire - Millgate Computer Systems is another i've had succesful dealings with.

Our students see a student page on our VLE with annoucements, links to their webmail etc. We try and give them one click links to as many places as we provide for them including revision sites, student blogs etc. We are currently redeveloping the subject VLE launch page and will change it to this location for September including RSS feeds suitable for whichever year group that student is a member off - we are currently investigating Postereous as a means of staff adding student news directly rather than the large amounts of "Please can you tell everybody there's a cake sale...." e-mails that fly around to all staff who are then expected to pass on these messages in assemblies / registration classes.

http://www.stbedes.durham.sch.uk is ours. We are currently developing a new site which we hope to launch in a month or so including a mobile theme. We are taking away the current student / staff sections on our website and moving that sort of content to our VLE - the new website will be aimed at prospective students / parents / job applicants - more of the public image of the school.

We use Kayako - Help Desk Software, Live Chat Software and Customer Service Software, but it probably does more than above what you require - we don't use all features, but will look at the live help / remote assistance ready for September. Some of the above options people have suggested may be better for your needs and most if not all are free. Spiceworks seems to be a popular choice on Edugeek.

Our LA are happy to provide an internet connection for those schools in the area moving over to academy status for the same cost plus 10%.

When we get asked for some new toner for the black and white printer we always respond on our helpdesk asking whether its the black or white toner that is empty!

Azerbajan also appear in the European Football Championships - or at least the qualifiers anyway they are currently in the same group as Kazakhstan!

We moved from BackupExec to Yosemite around 2 years ago but will probably move back to BackupExec this year. The Yosemite has done the job for little money over the last 18 months, but I think I preferred the BackupExec product alround - it's only the price that lets it down, especially when updating existing licences or agents.

The exams that are permitted to use spellecheckers have office installed on the laptops and those that don't we just use wordpad. Neither are added to our wireless network.

As Bossman has pointed out, we won't be around on the evening before, but are stopping in the hotel on the night of the conference.