Linfit

I also get extremely annoyed by this rhetoric. The media seem to believe that public sector workers get gold plated pensions at other people's expense, but there are a number of subtle issues around this which are lost on the average Daily Mail Hack with a political agenda. Whilst some top end public sector chief exec type pensions are ridiculous, and these get highlighted in the media as a general example, this is also true in the private sector, and most people in the public sector get small pensions because they are part time or only have a limited number of contribution years. There is also a distinction between the various local government schemes, which I suspect most of us are in, which are backed by an investment fund, and the NHS, Teachers, Fire Service (and others) schemes which are Pay as You Go - in other words, if the amount coming in from curent employees does not match the amount being paid out to retired members, the shortfall has to be funded from general taxation. Historically, this was a net benefit to the government as most people who paid into the schemes died before they got their money back, but these days people are living too long and buggering up the arithmetic. Whilst the LG schemes backed by a fund may have a long term structural problem which they need to address, the outgoings are not paid from Central Governent funds, so the real issue is with the Pay as you Go schemes, as cutting them would be a direct saving for the Government.

All exam boards recommend that for on-line exams or those involving extensive use of IT (such as the Business Studies Practical) technical support is readily available, but they leave it up to the centres to make detailed arrrangements about how this is done. "...the centre will need to identify how they will ensure that when tests are being operated, the necessary technical support can be provided at short notice to handle immediate software or hardware problems." is how Edexcel phrase it. This does not mean that technician support needs to be available in the room, merely that it is easily and quickly obtained. There is also a clear distinction between being an invigilator and being there to provide tech support; if you are there as an invigilator you cannot do anything else whilst you are in the room, and should have had appropriate training and a briefing on the exam and its requirements. One person cannot act as both; if you are problem solving you are not invigilating, and so the two roles are mutually exclusive.

We have to book out when we leave site; there is a small exercise book kept at reception and we have to book out with date, time, where we are going and then when we return we have to book back in again. People can just leave without signing out but most people generally do it helps that at the moment (big BSF build in progress) you have to go past reception to get out of the building. If we have a fire alarm the book is taken outside and used to check who should be accounted for.

We use MDaemon and I would recommend it. It is very easy to configure, runs on relatively low spec hardware (we have ours vitualised now but it ran for a long time on a very low spec box) and the support and documentation are good. Not free, and licences depend on the number of mailboxes, but it works well with Outlook and has its own Webclient, called Worldclient, which is very easy to use. We have used it for about 10 years now and it is effectively install and forget once it is set up.

I have not come across an IWB that would fold down from the ceiling, although I suppose anything is possible if you want to pay enough for it. Have you considered using a wireless tablet ? - this gives the interactivity but means you can use an ordinary screen to project the image - motorised screens which drop from the ceiling are much cheaper.

We have found issues with permissions on the SIMS/Setups folder when updates roll out in the past, that seem to require write permission on it,so we have ours set up that way, but I think this is the only place where most SIMS users would need write permissions these days. Most of our SIMS users have read/execute on the main SIMS folder, Exams Officer has read/write/create on the EXAMIN, EXAMOUT and EXAMHOLD folder. MIS Manager has the same on LEA and the subfolders (for PLASC and CTF files and such) Timetabler full control of the SNOVA folder. In normal use, I'm not sure that there is anything that a typical teacher user needs to access in the SIMS folder at all, apart from connect.ini if, as on our system, there is a redirect to a central copy. When we moved SIMS to our new shiny server just before Christmas, these were the only folders we copied over; on our old server the SIMS folder was full of junk going right back to the old dBAse files. ....it was a simpler time when you could correct most SIMS problems by deleting the (very many) index files.

Edexcel/Promissor testing software. In use every day here at the mo - have to restart the server most mornings (good job its virtualised) breaks every time you do an upgrade, painfully slow, requires admin rights on the workstations and the client software is called "Administrator !" Add that to the appalling Edexcel online website which you have to use to enter the candidates; awful design, completely counter-intuitive and apparently running on a 386 with 4M of RAM in a datacentre in Nepal...

Wireshark is a good place to start. If you use it to monitor your network in normal operation it will give you a good insight into what is happening and what devices are generating traffic. Once you've looked at the captures you will probably find a fair bit of broadcast chatter that you can find ways to turn off. Network printers are notorious for this; they might have manufacturer specific protocols, IPX and all sorts of other redundant rubbish that can be simply turned off. Once you get a better feel for the normal traffic you will start to see potential issues that you can get into more deeply.

I would seriously look at the Netgear Smartswitches; we use them extensively here as edge switches and they are a good compromise between the fully managed and dumb option; they give us enough configurability (is that a word ?) without the need to splash out on the fully managed option; they are also much cheaper than the equivalent procurves. If your backbone is gigabit it would seem reasonable to put a 10/100/1000 switch in now; assuming you will eventually replace the clients they will have gigabit ethernet cards and so you are doing a bit of future proofing now.

I would echo Timzins' view on this one. We do not currently provide laptops for our student teachers, but we have fixed workstations in classrooms for IWB's and registers so it's less of an issue anyway. If I were asked to provide them, I would expect the funding for them to come from the monies the school recieves from the training institution for having the students. I suspect that in most schools this money is simply subsumed into the general school pot, and is rarely all spent on actually supporting the students, (or even given to the departments that host them).

We use the .sch.uk domain. It does create long e-mail adddresses but people have got used to it. I feel its helpful if there is a coherent naming system for things like this; having a .sch.uk domain clearly and unambiguously identifies us as a school and I think this is generally helpful. It still surprises me though when giving my e-mail address on the phone how many people who apparently deal with schools all the time seem unfamiliar with the format, and want to finish it off as co.uk.

I’m not one to defend the corporate monoliths against the little guy, especially when it comes to Capita, ( some of their activities in other areas I find dubious) but I’m not sure anti-competitiveness really is the issue here; its more that the product is not bad enough to make it worth changing. When SIMS was actually SIMS, before Capita took them over, they got their product in on the ground floor in the majority of schools because it was the only game in town so people went with it. Once you are using a system, it becomes increasingly costly and difficult to change, and you still end up with an MIS that doesn’t do all you want, its just different things it doesn’t do. You have to have a huge issue with the software then to make the change worthwhile. Some people would call this ‘lock-in’ but actually its more to do with the product having been first to market, and gaining the benefit of that, and the fact that it is ‘good enough’; in other words it does enough that most people don’t find the cost of changing to gain any extra features worthwhile. I would add, as an aside, that I am also involved in UAT testing and field trials for Capita and the people that I deal with at these events are desperate for their product to work well and for it to meet the needs of the schools; a lot of the issues they have are because they are working to very tight deadlines, don’t get as much feedback as they need from schools, and are often not aware of just how the product is being used, and they are also not always in control of their own destiny; for example, last minute changes required by Government, and poor communication channels within exam boards have often cause issues with functionality in the past.

I work on the principle that if we don't actively need it, we switch it off. It makes only a tiny difference on a properly configured infrastructure in terms of reducing the number of packets, but I just like things to be tidy; If I have a spare half hour I will look at the wireshark traces and see if there is anything that crops up that can be turned off. It also makes looking for dodgy traffic easier on Wireshark if you have all the harmless chatter removed. The main culprits out of the box seem to be network printers; left to their own devices, they will chatter away with all sorts of out of date rubbish, like IPX, Netbios, HP's own protocols...they are always a good place to start for reducing background chatter. Sadly, we cannot remove Netbios completly, as our VLE requires it still at the moment.

1000 pupils. 100 FTE staff, we spent £9100 last academic year on printing through the network printers.

I would have to say Hayes Smartrmodem - the origin of the Hayes Command set that came to be used in all modems and important to those of us who used to have to solder custom RS423 leads for Acorn machines and send raw command strings to dial your local bulletin board. (Internet, whats the Internet ?) Epson FX-80 9 pin dot matrix printer; anyone remember inserting raw printer command codes into View or Wordwise documents just so you could do this ? You should remember those days Andy - I recall a certain amount of illicit on-line gaming taking place with our state of the art 1200/300 baud Hayes Modem at Siddal Moor !

We give latops to GTP students as they are members of staff. We do not give laptops to PGCE students as it would be expensive (we would need a pool of around 25 machines) and in practice most of them seem to have laptops anyway. The only plus side would be that if they used our laptops we would have control over the anti-virus and security on the machines they were using; the vast majority of the viruses that Sophos reports coming into school are doing so on PGCE students memory sticks.

We are one of the first two BSF schools in Rochdale; we are just at the last stage of finalising provision before Financial Close. Our new(ish) school will not have any thin clients in it; it will be about 50:50 mix of fixed fat clients and laptops/netbooks. This emerged as a result of looking at each crrriculum area in turn and picking the most appropriate solution; neither I nor the service provider had any idealogical preference, and the decision was driven about 50%by curriculum need and 50% by the fact that there is little physical room in the new building for workstations that require a permanently fixed screen/keyboard/mouse. Becuase they have to provide initial costings, they made an assumption about the proportion of laptops/thin cleints/fat clients in their initial costings which would have given us up to 100 thin clients (out of 600ish end user devices on site) but it worked out that they simply weren't appropriate for what we needed to do with them. We will be using the Virtual Desktop functionality that would have been avaialble on thin clients in school to provide more external connectivity for staff and pupils, than they originally anticipated. I must say that I have been pleasantly surprised by the process so far it terms of equipment: they have much more flexibility in their approach than I thought, and in terms of end user devices there is going to be quite a mixed economy throughtout the Rochdale schools, I suspect. Of course, the central sevices are a different issue, but these are things that either do not directly concern delivery in the classroom, (such as centralised IP telephony) or just make sense to do centrally (such as e-mail and web filtering). Earlier this year (as part of gearing up for BSF) we went and had a look at some schools in another LA near us where BSF was more advanced (Bradford) - now there you had the other side of the coin - you could have whatever device you wanted as long as it was a SunRay thin client box.......when the Business Manager of a secondary school starts talking to you in quite technical terms about issues with LDAP integration then you know there have been problems....

Its Ramesys - but I just asked our Deputy to confirm -hes been in all the meetings for the last 2 years and he says he can't remember; so that bodes well then. Oh well, here we go.....

Ajaz, you may find that local FE colleges do the CISCO course relatively cheaply - I have just completed a Foundation degree which included the CCNA as part of the first two years and I know the college ran that part of the course also as a stand-alone; it was nowhere near the cost you have quoted, and in some areas there are subsidised courses and grants available; some of the people on my course had access to funding even though they were doing the course part time becuase the college was in a targeted area (I did my course in Manchester).

We have this also. Priced up a system from scratch that would have been more flexible and completly within our control for about half the money we paid, but the Deputy Head concerned was dazzled by the sales guy and went for lifchannel instead. I would very much echo most of the previous comments; the harware and the ability to add your content is limited and the provided programs are rubbish. Not impressed. We have four screens and the kids just ignore it. Might as well have not bothered.

If the reports are using the standard reporting engine, you can increase the text size by simply editing the report template. If they are 'built in' reports, such as those generated by Exams, then I think no. Some of these reports are effectively 'hard coded' and I believe rely on some pretty basic Delphi libraries from yesteryear.

NovaT4 is going to be around for a while yet, but one option might be for you to have a satellite install of T6 on your machine. This can be run on its own without going through the SIM.net screen. You can then have a stand alone copy of the timetable file to mess around with as you wish, stored locally, which should alleviate your timetablers concerns.

One of ours has become a mobile workshop for the site manager - robust steel cabinet for storing tools in, plenty of power sockets, nice stable flat top for a work surface, he's mounted a vice on it; ideal. Far more functional then when we used it to store laptops in !

Would agree totally about the air-con. You will need it as soon as the servers are up and running, and it will be easier to fit it during other building work than retro-fitting it later. As for UPS, redundancy is the key. Better to have several smaller capacity than one to service the whole lot, expecially if you have redundant power supplies in the servers.

We had a shared staff area which had grown to huge proportions over the years and to which staff had full access. I despaired about doing anything about it and all proposals to do some thing about it were met with the "But its so convenient", or "Thats how its always been...." Last term we had a disc go weird in the server which resulted in many of the files on the drive being corrupted or inaccessable. We had a backup, but rather than just copy it all back we took the opportunity to start again. We were quite restrictive on access permissions: created new folders for each department, with full access only to teachers in that department. Some limited access for certain admin staff to other folders. No-one with full access to the folder root. Then we told the staff that if they told us what they needed to copy back we would do so into the appropriate location. Before disc failure the share was 169GB, after the dust had settled, 42GB, an all nicely organised, with no-one able to add crap into the share. After about two weeks requests to retrieve stuff from backup tailed off. Conclusion: most of the stuff was redundant. What you need is a disc failure.