Achandler

Any filtering system where reporting is an addon is surely a bit of a joke? Yeah we will fitler stuff for you, but haha no you can't see what people have actually been doing... Fundamental in my opinion.

The reporting in iBoss is pretty much a simialr standard to Smoothwalls to be honest, I've seen both. Currently have Smoothwall and was looking to move to iBoss, one thign I hoped was the reporting was better. It wasn't, it was just as cumbersome! UI was nicer though!

Nothing is certain with Power Plants though, thats why there should always be spare capacity. Wind is only good when its windy but not to windy! Also most people hate the look of turbines, apparently they are noisy as well. Solar requires, well the sun, not much good for the UK. Coal/ Oil/ Diesel are polluting massively. Gas is cleaner then the above but still burning fossil fuels. Tidal (seems to be good) but is untried and might effect other stuff we don't know about yet. Alll of the above seem to be hated by Environmentalists for one reason or another.

We use CMIS and FMS (controversial combo I knows!). Payroll is still done externally using the actual data within CMIS, CMIS itself doesn't do it for us.

The issue you have, is putting in fibre capable of 1GB and not 10GB seems pointless but you are stuck with options at the moment because of the 2nd legs of the runs. I assume its not possible (due to cost) to replace all the OM1/ OM2 linsk at once?

Cancel sky and wait, they usually offer you a deal. I rung up to cancel, all they would give me over the phone was 40% off for 10 months fo a 12 months contract. I cancelled, yesterday I received a letter offering me 50% off for 12 months. We don't have an aerial in our front room, so I was planning on a freesat box and Now TV for some shows. It would have taken me over 15 months to get the savings back, so sky for another 12 months it is.

You need to find the URL they are accessing through the App then block it, Opera Mini use to do this and was the first I remember doing it. They all access a URL or IP in the end though that you can usually block and it stops it working.

We gave our students 150mb back in 2009 and even then they complained! I once had student complain they couldnt save anything, so we looked in her home drive, there was 100s of pictures of horses and I said you'll need to delete these before we give you more space. Her response was, she liked horses so how many will she need to delete. I couldn't be bothered checking and told her to delete them all, but instead she went off and I then watched her delete them one by one, and click save on her work after every picture until it saved! She must have really loved horses!

My advice is go to speak to local colleges/ schools as well and see the actual machines for yourself. I know little about actual photocopiers to be be fair but I did this process recently with our Reprographics person. We opted for Kyocera, actually rebadges as Develop, (Canon was our 2nd choice), but we looked at Ricoh and Sharp as well. The Ricoh, everyone seemed to say were great for 4 years but in year they were needing engineers called out constantly, we saw both newer and older computer. They were also plastic inside (as oppose to metal). The Sharp, we couldn't find anyone who had had them a long time, but again our Repro person didn't like how plastic they were, basically more plastic is more breakage apparently, through either staff getting annoyed or worse for wear and tear. The big Kyocera we have, the screen is rather daunting with all the options, the Papaercut Follow Me is also a little flaky on it, the smaller machines where it seemed more fully embedded we had no issues. Go for card readers and stickers no matter which option you choose.

When you sysprep the drivers should be removed anyway, so the image should be clean. Personally I would disable all the drivers and disable the unattend. Then reimage, two things are likely to happen, either you sucessfully get an imaged computer (without drivers) or you get stuck in the same loop. If you get stuck on the loop then I think the original image is liekly the cause of the problem.

13GB, that would be a near dream for me. We have teachers with 60GB! Our students get upto 2GB depending on the year they are in (noone really goes near it) and our staff have no limit because it is impossible to be controlled as you are expereiencing. Staff keep documents from 15 years ago just in case they need it, photos of GCSE coursework from when I cna only assume the first ever digital camera was used! Deduplication solves the problem for us.

We currently use approxiamtely 80% of our leased line virtually all day everyday. The daytime caused by staff and students, but come 18:00 backups start being sent offsite amongts other things, like OneDrive syncs etc. So we have increased our Leased Line this time. I looked at alternatives and currently there is limited options for us but a leased line.

We pay upfront to get the discount. The year of the web-filter renewal is planned ahead and we plan a lot less of any other non-essiential spending.

Indeed @zag it is the price which is surprising, I know fo a lto of companies offering fibre and I know how to research thanks John!

We get mousemats free when we order things from companies if I need them, I just ask and most have some they don't want.

They will probably beat most other providers, I haven't looked at this process due to the timing of it but on the tablet procurement last time there was in excess of 5000 iPads being bought for example, which gave a massive economies of scale, whetehr the process is worth the savings is another issue entirely. Ignore the RRPs they use, just put your max price you are willing to pay at 5-10% less then the best deal you can get and if they don't beat or match it you don't have to buy.

Don't touch Squid, endless problems, we gave up after 9 months!

A 3rd party reseller. To be fair the price for iBoss was cheaper then Smoothwal (just), but I needed a firewall application as well. Also changing vendors over minmum price differences wasn't worth it

Palo-Alto si meant to be good but was to expensive when we looked. iBoss was good as well but was to much when considering we needed a new firewall. If I had a firewall already, I'd go for iBoss personally, as I didn't I went with Smoothwall due to costs.

They don't cover Manchester, nor London, nor Birmingham from what I can tell. 3 biggest cities in the country. very annoying!

The "standard of driving" is probably virtually the same as it always has been. As it people have the same skill levels to actually drive as always, the issue is probably more cars on the road, so those mistakes you could have maybe got away with 10 years ago you can't now, more distractions (phones etc even handsfree) and then lack of patience, problably caused by congestion and then people being tired because getting to and from work takes them longer so they get less sleep at home or are more worn out. Then they are more likely to make the mistake in the first place! If we had bigger roads, we would just have more people filling them, I think it's tiredness that causes mistakes, and lack of patience, everyone knows if your tired you are more irritable and irrational. No idea how you solve that though across the country, probably worse for peeps round London, but the M60 around Manchester isn't much better.

Secure web searches stop you seeing what they type in the full URL they go on is usally visible. That said, we have HTTPS decrypt and inspect on all our students, we don't have issues with personal devices as students don't have them on the WiFi and if they did then yes I would force decrypt and inspect on them as well, even if it required me to make them install a certificate. We are moving to have out current Smoothwall setup moved to be inline, so there is no avoiding all the traffic in future as well, and I am going to tighten the https decrypt and inspect up as well to include staff in certain areas (such as searches), but only small areas. I am sure I have read somehwere that you can infact get a 3rd party certificate for the decrypt and inspect part of smoothwall although it isn't a simple process and might take some intevention from the support team. Which would remove the need to install the schools our certificate, they would merely get the message saying they are being intercepted. Being as though my smoothwall renewal starts in March maybe I should burn my support credits and find if anyone really wants to know?

As much as cheap hardware unable to handle all the conenctions it needs it is yes.

We did the CCS procurement for tablets last year, it was hard work to be fair but we got savings. I haven't looked at the current one but the one we did you agreed to purcahse if they met a certain price. The indicitive pricing I just ignored but in what I could get what I wanted for and then sent it off, they came back beating the best price I could get and we bought the stuff. It's slow and a pain to do but we saved about £600 on a £12k order, so probably worth it if you can wait.

The issue with using each others PIN is tough really. You get issued a PIN everything printed on your PIN is charged to where you chose, if you give your PIN someone else and they charge it to your department its your fault. If you told the bank you gave your PIN to your friend and then he stole your money, they would just laugh at you. If you give someone else your login and they access NSFW material online, it is your fault as well. Your staff need to take repsonsibility for their own actions, the students are expected to, the adults can lead by example. Share your PIN, your department gets charged more, didums your departments loses the money is the rule here. We have mifare stickers (all staff) on ID badges and manual PINs for most others, your locked down on which departments you can print too. You can have individual PINs remember now just departmental ones.