cscott

Teams incldues a "class" template, which you can tweak and customise to fit your environment. MS also have a load of resources here https://preview.education.microsoft.com/en-us

We're using it within an FE College very successfully. We hold half-termly FE learner forums, class reps from every 16-18 year old course, they've given good feedback on Teams, much prefer it to our VLE. Growth has been organic, delivered training on how to use it to teaching staff and let them decided if they want to use it - currently got about 400 active Teams

You may want to consider Microsoft Teams instead of Sharepoint, i know of a few FE colleges in process of moving from Moodle in favour of Teams

Hi, did you get anywhere with this? we've got same issue

Hi Tom, yes we are, works really well. Wireless access points are configured for 802.1x authentication against a RADIUS server, it's only used by devices owned by us which are all joined to our windows domain and we have our Smoothwall configured for transparent authentication. Really I suppose best thing I can say is "it works" doesn't cause us any bother.

You configure this using Group Policy as well

Hi, we're considering the same thing ourselves but haven't made as much progress as yourself. We use SharePoint for document collobration already and have departmental document libraries, was consideirng using My Sites for individual users which will give them their own private document library

We use App-V for 95% of our app delivery, best thing since sliced bread, and under MS Campus agreement it costs next to nothing. Setup I'd recommend would be to install the app-v management server somwehere (could be on a PC), the apps are hosted on a UNC share or https site on the management server. When a suer logs on the app-v client checks with the management server to check what apps the user is assigns and stick assocaited icons on their desktop, when a user clicks an icon the app-v client streams the app from the management server ( pulling it from the UNC share or https site Setup one of your servers as a remote desktop session hosts (aka terminal server), stick the app-v client on it and setup the thin clients as termianl server clients - we used to run 300 wyse thin clients this way, worked OK generally, some issues with video play back and the like.

Yep - you need RDP Gateway install to do it, clients connect via 443 to teh gateway which then proxies there request to the host server on port 3389.

Group Policy preferences can be configured to do this - have you checked to make sure no one has created a preferences policy you don't know about?

Yep sounds like the terrastations full...

yeah, sounds like you to add some disks to your DPM server!

Just read your error message - it's a complete different issue from what I assumed. I thought you meant your physical disk was full, this just sounds like DPM hasn't been able to autogrow a volume. This could be cause by the disk being full so probably worth checking you've got space on your disk by going to the "Management" view and selecting the "Disk" link, check how much free space the disk has. Assuming you've got free space on your disk the error message your getting just indicates that one of the volumes on your disk is full and DPM couldn't autogrow it. Go to your protection groups and locate Server XYZ and select the resource that it can't back up (will be shown in red). Right click and select "Modify volumes", same window as before but it will only show volumes for this server, go to the replica volumne colomn and increase the size of the replica volume by at least 25%.

DPM estimates the amount of disk space it needs for replica and recovery point volumes estimated on what it thinks the growth rate will be, as a result I've found it can often allocate that volumes that are too large, especially if you enabled auto-grow - you can shrink the volumes though to recover this over estimated space. You could try right clicking on one of your protection groups and selecting... a dialog box will open showing how much space is allocated to each replica & recovery point volume, there should be a "Shrink" link next to each recovery point volume, if you click the link DPM will recalculate the space needed for that recovery point volume and if possible reduce the volume. Also have you got anyting under the "inactive protection for previously protected data" protection group? depending on how you removed this items from your protection group they could still be using up disk space - tends to happen if you removed them via modifying the protection group as doesn't give you option of deleting the replicas from disk.

They start from the basics (i.e. installing WIndows Server), if i recall correctly they recommend experience of Windows Server (any version above NT) before doing the course but that's about it.

We’re looking in the process of setting up a VDI trial, if memory serves some of you already have VDI up and running, if you don’t mind me asking I’m curious as to… • What spec hardware your running it on? • Ratio of users to processors/core? • User perceptions of VDI – we did a small terminal server/thin client deployment a few years back and the users didn’t like it much which lead to it being retired early! Thanks in advance

I'm in the middle of doing the Windows Server 2012 MCSA courses, 90%-95% of the material applies to Windows 2008 R2 as well - you may be better going for 2012 and future proofing yourself!

we haven't bothered to create contacts for the students, most staff use our VLE (Moodle), when they need to send e-mails students, also lets them send SMS messages as we found most students never bother to check their college account!

We use Googlemail for students, different product obviously but concepts and issues similiar. Easiest route we found was to create a subdomain in DNS for students i.e. [email protected] whilst staff are all under [email protected] got round a lot of problems with address books etc...

Smoothwall! Microsoft have announced that they have ceased further development work on Forefront Threaht Managment Gateway (TMG), so it's a bit of a deadend product now. We moved from TMG to a Smoothwall UTM-3000 box about a year ago, fabulous product.

have you got offline files enabled on the laptop? if the laptop thought it wasn;t connected to the network it would have saved the file in its local cache and would sync it to the server when it was reconnected to the network

We've been using SCSM for about 6 months now - needs a reasonable about of config but useful for ensuring staff follow correct process for service request and ensuring your change requests are properly documented and authorised before being implemented - was great when auditors came in a couple of weeks ago, just pointed them at that as evidence, best audit report we've ever had. Microsoft have designed it along ITIL best practice guidelines so if your Helpdesk processess & procedures map to these it should be pretty straight forward.

We used to have same problem with online exams - exams being ran in different rooms everytime, students given the online exams accounts, conflicting requirements from different exam boards etc... Fortunately when we looked at the exams timetables we discovered that about 70% of the time we had at least one online exam or test of some sort running in the College - this gave us a good case for having a designated online exams room, as it didn't really have any cost implications. The PC's in our exams room have Microsoft Virtual PC installed and have a seperate VM for each exam board. The physical machines are tightly locked down, we set Virtual PC as the shell and configured them to autologin, so basically they sit showing the available VM's - students them start the appropriate VM for the exam they are doing. To get round the online exam password we generate a unique online exam account for each student for each exam - some of the exam boards we use actually require this be done. Where required the accounts are placed in an appropriate group to give them admin rights on the relevent VM. Sounds like a complicated setup but online exams used to be anightmare, complaints from stduents, letters to the Principal etc... Since introducing this system they run like a dream, not a single complaint

We're ran a 3 server Windows 2008 file server cluster connected to an iSCSI SAN for 3-4 years with no issues - average 800-1000 comcurrent users with peaks of 1,200-1,500 concurrent users - replaced this with a 4 node Windows 2008 R2 cluster, same SAN same load figures about 6 months ago, no issues so far. Really need a bit more info to provide any help, i.e. is your SAN iSCSI, Fibre Channel, what sort of disks has it got, what's the RAID configuration etc... and as deano said number of network cards - we use 4 in each server, 2 setup as a team to service clients and 2 connected to the iSCSI SAN in a multi-path IO configration - during busy periods we often see 60-70% utlisation on the network cards

We delibrately run two KMS servers, just in case one has a problem, doesn't cause any bother as long as you have enough clients to ensure you hot the activiation levels