StevenEdgar

very true as long as it is supportable

Apologies for the typos - must get my fingers to do what they are told. Lets face it - all MIS are a joy to work with !!!

Lets face it there are only a few suppliers of MIS for schools and each one will build a product that fills the statutory requirements and thioose things that the majority of schools have asked for. They all have their merits and "issues". SIMS have the bulk of the market as until recently there wasn't much in the way of competition - this is changing. Schools need to look at the competitiopn and see what suits tham best. Only thios was will all the suppliers tailor their products to what is required in the marketplace. In my experience I cannot think of a single school who have either the time/experience to develop their own apps and in the odd occaision where even a small app have been developed it cannot be supported once the author has departed ........ a big risk I would say

On a related matter I assume everyone is familiar with the various versions of SQL 2005

quite right - easy to forget about FMS - agaion will be ok once it moves to SQL 2005 later this year

As long as you don't need to keep using any of the older modules access via launcher then there is no reason why you cannot use the unc path. Jim mason at Capita confirmed that there should be no problems as long as you aren't using Nova, etc

we don't get many problems other than the odd server playing up but we use load balancing with plenty of redundancy to cut down the chances of major issues. The one obious area where you can have a problem is with your comms. It has to be reliable and robust. People have to trust it. If you lose that then your are dead in the water. I won't say that this is easy to implement - it has taken time and a lot of effort but it really does work well

I manage the SIMS support team for Oxfordshire County Council and come from a fairly technical background in LA's and the private sector so I am a sad case in many ways !!! We have spent a awful lot of time and effort getting a centrally hosted system running for almost all our schools and currently host 270 school databases (inc secondary schools) plus the same number of FMS databases. All the schools have at their end is a PC with IE installed, an active x control for a package called screwdrivers (to cut down on printer issues) plus their OCN (Oxfordshire Community Network private broadband connection). This means schools no longer have backups or upgrades to do and network technicians can find far more interesting things to do !! Seems to work really well here and we are now looking at setting up a bank of 20 training databases so we can do training anywhere in the county rather than just being stuck in our fixed training rooms. THis does mean that we can upgrade all our hosted schools in a day !! You may be able to tell that I am fairly keen on this ...

what fun ....... thats why most of our schools have gone for SIMS being centrally hosted. leaves them to do whatever they like locally within the schools and we provide the infrastructure to run SIMS on. Best of both worlds. Steve Edgar

vmware web site not a bad idea if that is the area that interestes you. Virtual machines/servers can work really well. Also great for testing as you can test apps of different OS's without need for multiple physical servers etc http://www.vmware.com

Good that you have had the chance to get involved in this as i feel it is a very exciting area that can give schools a lot of scope for development.

Isn't it fun ..... but if you can see the real long term advantages then this sort of technology is great. Just using vmware with non persistent disks in training room is a revelation to people - no more need to refresh between courses etc etc

In total we run 33 servers - inc virtual on our SIMS/FMS farm

I am part of the ICT dept at Oxfordshire and not Education/CYPF. I manage the SIMS support team and we make use of the expertise around us as much as poss !!!! I am already braindead

We are currently talking to Capita and others regarding a county wide implementation of Learning Gateway (or alternative product). Currently no one seems to have a product that will work with multiple databases in a single location (AD problems with current models of s/w)

It isn't cheap but it is very reliable. We have been running a year now and it is even popular with some of the secondary schools. Will check the backups as other people look after all that here within the infrastructure team

yes Vmware and it has worked a treat but yes they are beefy boxes. All the data is held on our SAN and all the blade servers boot direct from the SAN so we can rebuild/.clone one in a few minutes. I will ask about the licensing as someone else dealt with that side of things .....

Dead right. We have dedicated FMS servers that can handle up to 20 databases each. We are using a comination of hardware and virtual servers to handle this. No load balancing for FMS as each school goes to a specific server. Not much in terms of problems with it now. have used a 3rd party package called Screwdrivers to eliminate 99% of printing problems

quite a few LAs are runninmg smaller scale implementations especially for their smaller schools. We actually run a number of large secondary as well as most of our primaries. What sort of scale are you talking about ? nos of schools etc

If anyone is interested we are hosting 270 school SIMS and FMS databases centrally on a farm of terminal servers. This removes the need for dedicated admin servers for our schools, no upgrades, no SIMS backups etc etc. If anyone would like to get more info or if you are implementing something similar and want to share your experiences just shout. Steve Edgar