jamesfed

Friday doughnuts helps as well

We are about there with App-V as well - v5 is looking good as well Video showing off the basics of it use will be going up onto YouTube (will link here) tomorrow morning.

A propper mobile website is the way to go Costs less to develop and requires no special skills to run.

2.99GB later the video (MDT and App-V) is ready to upload I'm afraid I might be here all night if I do it on my home connection so will upload tomorrow at work.

Oh no we have sliced bread here as well Ahh so a pretty light image - I'm just intrested as to how other schools get on with time to install loads of programs (I remember being at a RM school and it took agggess).

Out of intrest how long does it take you to get the software onto the machines after the image is on there?

Ooops thats the one extra letters where they shouldn't be!

Righty ho video of what can be done with App-V and MDT when setup and used to deploy has been recorded - will hope to have on YouTube in a few hours (HD edition so depending on my home upload speed!)

But there are no diffrent hardware requirements and do the same general thing

I'll see if I can get a video of the whole process in action up on our YouTube channel today sometime (if the NM has brought his video camera in).

The MDT server is nothing special - anything that works with WSUS will work with MDT just fine (after all it is just the same thing but with a few more features). App-V accualy uses the local processing power on the PC the user is at - all it does is figues out which applications the user should have access to and provides the virtual application files to the PC as and when required. So again nothing special needed however we do run ours off a PCI-E SSD but I know of people running it with much less. Most of the time to setup is in getting the virtual applications made up however that can be done over a good few days using virtual box In the long run it is a BIG time saver - smaller image to look after (fire it up every now and again to apply the latest IE plugin updates and windows updates) and then do your application updates on the fly using App-V. Its a pretty fool proof way to deploy applications as well as App-V dosn't insall anything on the local machine (although it does cache the files sent to it which is essential for notebook PCs) and so need to use MSIs to uninstall/reinstall.

Our current method works around both MDT and App-V to get things out there. We have a image of Windows 7 which contains all the IE plugins, all Windows updates, the App-V client and nothing else (not even Office!!). When you go to image a machine using MDT we have a number of 'task sequences setup' one for staff (which locally install Outlook 2007, Word 2007, a connection client to our LEA SIMS service and our IWB software) and one for students (which is pretty much blank). From that point on everything is down to App-V - every time a user logs in App-V checks which applications they should have access to and presents them in the start menu. This way a science teacher can go to English and still have all the science applications. It is the best way to run things that I've found so far and makes for very quick deployments with just a 6GB image!

PRTG Easy to setup on any windows PC and they offer a decent discount (think it was 30% last time) for schools. Covers pretty much everything and you don't need to know anything about *nix to setup/use it.

How many users are you going to be supporting with this server? There is a big differance between standard desktop drives and 'enterprise class' drives which you will find out about all too soon if you go down the wrong path....

Wow that does sound good - would jump on it in an instant if I were anywhere close.

Is this designing and building the network from the get go?

No problem plenty of space

Blackberrys require a server side component installed (already pointed out in the above post) - without it you won't be able to get any blackberry to talk direct to your exchange server. The other option would be to get the staff member to forward any school emails on to their blackberry email account although this wouldn't give you calendar details/contacts ect.

That article is olllld - Mesh and Sync are now all part of the same thing, I can imagine everything will come under SkyDrive pretty soon.

Also check that the Server service is running ok - I had a Windows Update not too long ago that totaly mucked that service up and caused no end of problems with AD.

Most of the big OEMs (HP/Lenovo/Acer) will ship a Pro licence with their business PCs as they assume that most business won't have a Microsoft Software Lic agreement and as such it makes sense to ship them with a 'good to go out of the box' licence. Smaller guys who do custom builds like Novatech, Stone ect are able to ship with the lower lics easy enough though as they can take into account the particular needs of a school.

Should have a email with you now with the full details

Hi all, Have put all the final details in this new thread - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/thin-client-virtual-machines/93764-vdi-box-demo-day-6th-june-2012-fitzharrys-school.html if you are still interested in coming do PM me

Its finally organised - I've got 3 speakers (including a chappy from Citrix) to come and present at the second Fitzharrys School (Abingdon, Oxfordshire) VDI in a Box demo day. Details are- Wednesday 6th June 2012 Starts at 10am finishes ~3pm Talks are on VDI, Thin Clients, Remote access to VDI and how we do it all at Fitz Bring along your own Citrix Receiver compatible device and we shall see about hooking it up to our WiFi/VDI School Tour - we might even have Lync 2010 setup on the phones by then. Free Lunch PM me for the full banner (don't want to post it here as its a little too advertisementy) and to reserve your seat. Any questions again just PM me or put them below.

Cheers - I'm just waiting for one more person to confirm (from a company) before I put this thing live but all is looking good at the moment