hailstorm

Thanks for the replies and those that contacted me. After checking out info on Unifi I'm going to test this out. Pricing is competitive with an unmanaged system. Not something I expected.

Hi Hoping someone can provide a recommendation for an installer of Rukus in the Gloucestershire area? Is Rukus the cheapest of the managed solutions available? Normally install unmanaged wireless in the schools we support. For the most part it works but we have run into problems in some of the larger primary schools. We did give the Netgear WMS5316 and the WG103 access points a try in several schools but the WMS5316 seems to suffer from some pretty awful firmware bugs. The D-Link DAP-2553 is our preferred AP at the moment. Thanks for any help.

Do you know if the county councils provide IT support for those schools or is it a outside firm? The one thing I'd like it to get more experience in mixed environments but the council I work for will only touch Windows only networks.

Well if it's like most schools I deal with the teachers are very much creatures of habit. Just moving from Office 2003 to Office 2007 has caused some to freak out. Can't imagine what it would be like changing to a completely different OS.

Just a question I wanted to ask to satisfy my own curiosity. It's not unusual for a school or uni in the USA to be all Mac. Think they are fairly dominant in some states. Any schools in the UK gone down this route? I work for the county council and I've only ever seen the lone 1 or 2 Macs in a school. Even then they are usually just standalone with no connection to the school's domain.

Well RAID 0 is unreliable, in that if one drive fails then you're stuffed. I've owned a SSD in the past. The 2nd gen Intel 160GB SSD. I didn't see as much benefit as I was expecting for the £300 odd I'd spent. Yes it was fast but it didn't make everything magically instant like I was expecting. Reliability of SSDs is a bit of an unknown at the moment. They have a finite life span when it comes to writing data. How long it lasts depends on how much you hammer the thing. In theory you should know well in advance before the thing fails as it can keep track of how many writes its done. Some good choices of components there though. Make sure you get a quiet CPU cooler. Long list of recommended ones here Recommended Heatsinks | silentpcreview.com

Microsoft SQL server is unsurpringly Windows only. I'd hardly say Capita are much of a victim as there are many credible alternatives to MS SQL, most of which run on many different platforms. They seem to be slowly moving some parts of SIMS to web based. Learning Gateway being one thing. The full functionality of SIMS via the browser is a long way off judging by comments on here from Capita. Learning Gateway carries some pretty hefty hosting fees from what I remember from a presentation I've had on it. Most schools have just gone with installing the full Sims client on their curriculum teacher's laptops.

What irritates me most of all about SIMS is because of it's dominance it forces schools to run Windows if they want to use it. Linux, Mac don't get a look in.