jamesfed

If its stable enough for Dell its stable enough for you - Microsoft Case Study: Microsoft Lync Server 2010 - Dell Canada

Almost entirely now - still have a few old phones in some areas (waiting on network cable) but other than that Lync runs everything now Are looking at 3CX now as well for a primary we look after - propper digital VOIP systems are certinly the way to go.

Sorry should've closed this a long time ago We wen't with Obit telecom in the end - had to get them to switch things from UDP to TCP packets for the SIP request. Have blogged about the UK normalisation rules here as well - Lync Normalisation Rules – UK (Great Britain) | my world of IT

Irony is I only just had a email from BT offering their Broadband services!

Do you/have you by chance had it hooked up to a IWB or ever had any IWB software installed on it (expecily the SMARTBoard stuff).

If its in a HP server on a HP RAID controler you might have some fun with HPs custom firmware that will only let some drives work.... Best bet is to either by direct from HP (you may find something on the HP renew site for a reasonable price) or buy a drive as close as possible to the one you have already.

Nice little tip bit there about XNA then will have to give that a go Will be playing around with v5 when it comes out of Beta - probably won't be until next summer that we go around and get it on the machines.

Pretty much the same as you except as we don't have SIMS on site (LEA hosted through Terminal Servers) we have Office 2007 in App-V (soon will be offering 2010 but with 2007 being the default). Did you get Kodu to work through App-V so long as XNA as installed locally? Things are looking up in App-V v5 with things like applications being able to 'talk' to each other so could help solve some issues.

What are the fonts that you are using by the way?

What are you supposed to be getting?

One thing to add in HP will give you cash back on pretty much any server trade ins - could help you offset some of the cost of any new kit.

We have some networked at our site and have only ever had troubles with them, the driver is mahoosive at about 50MB and is a right pain to deploy. I find the GUI/buttons on the photocopier its self to be quite unintuative as well. But on noise/reliability all fine with no real issues other than the usal jams you get IMO we have Ricoh at a Primary School we do work for and I can't wait for the lease on ours to be up so I can get them at our site as well.

Were going for Novatech nBoxes over the summer holiday as part of hardware refresh - pretty much the same size as a thin client so so small they just VESA mount on the back of the monitor - tiny little things and keeps everything looking neat with a few cables ties.

I'm going with its nice clean and refreshing - make sure you have IE compablity mode turned OFF though as is mucks up a whole load of things.

SAN and Blades for a school of 900? We are at 800 and have pretty much everything vital on 2x HP DL165 G7 (1Us) with Hyper-V running VMs on either the 4x2TB HDDs or PCI-E SSD - total spend hasn't gone over £8,500 yet. The servers have been setup so that everything vital (Firewall/AD/File Storage/DNS/DHCP) has a duplicate in a cluster on the other server so we could loose one and the school would keep on running (ok maybe without Printing ect). Our VDI runs on local PCI-E SSD storage as well (no SAN) and we are deploying a 4x RDS cluster similar to @CyberNerd over the summer holiday - again no SAN required because of built in fail over/clustering. IMO a SAN isn't always the answer most of the time with a decent Hyper-V host and using built in fail over/clustering technology in 2k8R2 you can get away with an 'acceptable risk'. In your case a pair of DL385 G7/G8s with the hard drives maxed out to give you a similar setup (WITHOUT a SAN) wouldn't go much over £15k (depending on how much data you have).

Very Windows 8/Metro - I like!

YouTube it and let them deal with it Both Flash and HTML5 video - will play on anything without issue.

When I was at a RM CC$ school I kicked up a whole load of fuss over the speed/stablity of their take on software that it came down to a meeting between the NM, HT, our RM account manager and one of their 'senior techs' - in the end it saw 4 days of (free) on site support from RM while their guys sorted it out. Kick up a fuss with RM, make sure your HT knows what you are doing and in the end the mighty RM beast will cave in and they will give you a network that works.

I stoped using iGoogle and changed my homepage to Bing after the most recent refresh (the one that moved the search box to the far left). Used to have all my news feeds ect on the page however after a while I figured out that between RSS and general web browsing I was seeing all the things on my iGoogle page anyways

I've seen £15 or less in the UK to upgrade to Win 8 Pro - e.g. Novatech

If you have WSUS to download/install without moderation then you deserve to have things like this happen (all IMO)

No way! for $11,699 I would be expecting one of the Fusion-IO cards - those things FLY. Anywhos all off topic back to the SAN

Yep not that I wouldn't use propper HP kit if I had the money at £1,400 for the farm of 4 though its a easy call! Using cache always depends on the work load if its a lot of random read/write then you should almost always see a boost but if its easy sequential stuff then you wouldn't see as much of a boost. The flash kit uses super capaciators to keep things powered more details here on page 10 - http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00687518/c00687518.pdf

Not this time round (have PCI-E SSD in all of our Hyper-V servers now though), biggest reason not to was we will be using custom 2U cases and half height PCI-E SSD isn't cheap so just normal 2.5" drives this time round.

We are working on something simlar this summer accualy - a farm of 4 RDS servers with OCZ Vertex 4 drives in Will post up the results once we get everything in place.