Blue_Cookeh

We had an Education specialist from Apple in yesterday, I didn't realise (according to the license agreement) that because Apple don't yet have a volume license program in the UK, we're supposed to be buying Apps once for each iPad... he was well aware schools were breaking it though. Also, I was sceptical about using iPads in schools, but the man was right. You shouldn't be sitting down and thinking "now, what can I do with these iPads?" it should be used more as a tool. As a primary school we could be doing a certain theme such as the Romans or the Olympics and the children should be able to pick which tool they would use to create movies, do research, make presentations or whatever. I'll be trialling a few out before we go full hog though.

Sometimes you just need someone else to blame when things break!

Sorry to hijack, but other people may be interested too... Does anyone have any ideas how the taskbar balloon saying "You've been logged in with a temporary/cached profile" (or something to that effect) can be suppressed when offline, or am I doing something wrong? I can't remember if this was a profile problem or because it was actually offline seeing as I haven't had a play with it in a while.

iPads won't print to "normal" printers, only ones that support Bonjour (unless you're getting around this somehow? If so, please enlighten me!)

Would you not be better off purchasing PCs with OEM licenses on from someone like Dell?

Hey Guys, Just wondering, what do people do about Windows Firewall with Windows 7 in a domain environment? With Windows 7 I can't help but think it would be better left on... if this is the case, I assume the domain profile will allow all relevent connections for Group Policy, software installs etc automatically? Thanks

Passwords aren't being changed though

This sounds like our problem, will give it a go on Monday!

No password changes. Using Outlook 2010 and it happens on both XP and W7.

Hey Guys, I recently deployed Live@Edu in our school and I have an issue where after a couple of weeks Outlook will ask for the user's mailbox password, even though I told it to remember it when I first set Outlook up... we don't use SSO or sync passwords so this is a fairly annoying issue because it means users have to ask me to put the password in. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks

If you need to find a use for something, do you *really* need it? Especially considering how much iPads cost!

Hey, So right now, we have x2 servers running DC roles and I'd like to get our first or 'initial' DC upgraded from 2003R2 to 2008R2... but I've not done this before so I'm wondering how I might go about this and whether you guys have any tips? .. yes, I'll be keeping 3 different types of backups on x3 different types of media in case it goes SNAFU! Thanks x1 Physical running 2003R2: 'Master' (or initial) DC DHCP DNS Fileserver (I'd like to get DFS going on this for failover at some point, now is probably a good chance) x1 Virtual 2008R2: DC DNS WSUS

Did you manage to demote the failed DC properly? If not you might want to take a look at How to remove data in Active Directory after an unsuccessful domain controller demotion. Leaving 'stale' DC info in AD can cause problems, iirc just because you can't see an old DC in the GUI, doesn't mean that it's totally removed from the domain. I also don't think disconnecting the rest of the network would help in this case, but I could be wrong.

Blocked straight off the bat by our ForeFront TMG filtering The page you are trying to browse to is categorized as "Malicious"

I'm not impressed with the whole "shoehorning" of the tablet UI to work with Desktop systems, I'm looking forward to seeing what changes they make between now and RTM to the UI to be honest. Good thing I haven't posted a screenshot of my school desktop anywhere... I only have about 4 spaces left for shortcuts!

I wouldn't touch OpenVZ with a barge pole nowadays, especially with the likes of Xen around that provide much more stable platforms (and support Windows!)

In terms of "being best" you're best off getting quotes from various authorised sellers, in the end our school found Pugh.co.uk to be the best suppliers, and they seem very knowledgeable whenever I have a licensing query. We ended up going with a school's EES agreement, licensing our entire site for Windows and Office. With this, you get the latest and greatest OS and Office version upon release, and access to things like Windows 7 Enterprise and MS Technet. As far as I know, your systems have to have a base license on in the first place to use volume licensing (may no longer be the case though). It might not make sense for you to go down the volume licensing route yet, it worked quite well for us because licensing was a huge mess in our school and we wanted to start pushing 7 and Office 2010 out on workstations only licensed for XP and Office 2003.

I'd have to agree with this. What I would suggest is dropping a couple of Universty IT departments an e-mail, a lot of them have Python and other interpreters installed for CompSci students, in a domain environment. In fact, I learnt Python in a Windows 7 domain environment towards the end of last year.

Hello, I'm deploying Live@Edu in the coming weeks and am just setting up the account now. What I'd like to do is give a user an alias, so [email protected] is an alias to [email protected]... but I was wondering, if I do this, will I be able to send from the [email protected] account? How have other people gone about doing this? I want staff to have consistent firstname.lastname addresses, but at the same time we need a couple of generic addresses... of course, staff don't want to be bothered checking multiple accounts though. Thanks!

You might want to give LiveWeb - insert and update web pages real-time in PowerPoint a go, not used it personally though.

We're a lower school, not gone primary yet. I'm supporting ~60 machines, half 7, half XP with both just one domain for admin and curriculum networks. I have... 1 x PowerEdge SC1430 - Server 2k3r2 (DNS, DHCP, FS, DC) 1.6GHz dual core Xeon, 2GB RAM, x2 160GB drives in RAID1 1 x PowerEdge T110 II - Server 2k8r2 (Hyper-V) 3.10GHz quad core Xeon, 16GB RAM, x2 250GB drives in RAID1 Hyper-V has: Server 2k8r2 - ForeFront TMG Server 2k8r2 - Secondary DC, DNS, WSUS, RIS Ubuntu Server - Dansguardian+Squid, Intranet webserver Ubuntu server - Nagios for monitoring + other bits and bobs. Ideally I'd like to get our first server up to 2k8r2 and get some DFS going for user profiles and files. E-Mail and website is hosted off site.

If your mail server supports IMAP, you might be better off moving all the mail from the PST back to the server and using IMAP folders etc, this will keep the two Outlooks profiles in sync no problem without the worry of PST files... afaik it also means you can have two clients open at once using the same account.

I didn't have a great experience with Office 2007 in terms of reliability/stability, which seemed to have been greatly improved in Office 2010. As others have said, I know it's not related to the original question, but it's worth holding off so you can jump straight to 2010 when everything officially does support it.

Our contract with the LA is up in the next few months, so I was wondering what you guys did in terms of broadband, antivirus and content filtering? We're looking to move away from them this year. Right now, I'm looking at bonded ADSL (we're fairly rural) from someone like Eclipse Internet, with antivirus from ESET (possibly MS Endpoint Protection and SCCM...) and for filtering... well, I don't know yet, we already have the Forefront TMG filtering subscription but it isn't really tried and tested in schools. I'm looking around and getting quotes at the moment, but need more suppliers to ask around.

a Those are hosting panels for configuring SQL, Apache etc. If you're going down the VM route it's not that difficult to setup for something like this. You could use a Linux distro like ProxmoxVE to provide an easy to use interface for making VMs etc. As far as I remember, it uses KVM or Xen HVM which supports Windows VMs too.