Linfit

I work in a Rochdale school, beeswax, and I'm not aware of any outsourcing apart from the EDIT/impact partnership deal. I've worked in Rochdale for nearly 20 years and been involved in IT since the early days of TVEI: I wouldn't hold up their strategic management of IT as an example of anything, except perhaps for bumbling incompetence.

Would suggest you get SIMS updated to Sept (or August) release first and iron out any snags with that, if not already done so. If you are intending to use full fat SQL 2005 you can install this in parallel with 2000 on the same server without affecting the working system. Once this is running OK, then use the Capita tools to migrate the database over to 2005. We have done the first part but not the second....... Beware that the install requires a few restarts and it needs to be patched up to SP2: took us about 2 hours in total one evening last week. We use full fat SQL, so not sure about whether SQL express will install in tandem with the desktop engine if you are using these.

We have used Pugh Computers for the last three years. They have been competitive for us on price and are very helpful with explaining some of the intricacies of the licensing, sending out media sets etc. Having said that we will probably opt into our local CLC's licensing scheme at the next renewal as they get better value with the larger volumes. (Several secondary schools in the scheme). Might be worth checking if your LA has a VL scheme you could join in with -ours had one for years that would have saved us loads, they just never bothered telling us about it !

TeddyKGB, you mentioned about connecting to Netgear - we have a Procurve 4865A as a core switch and its connected to Netgear switches in the comms cabinets (GS742T's mainly) with mini GBICS on 62.5/125 fibre. It works fine, but Netgear GBIC modules won't work in the HP switch. So we use HP GBICS in the Procurve, Netgear GBICS at the Netgear end, all works fine, and saves a bit of cash as the HP GBIC modules are significantly more expensive than the Netgear ones.

I would highly recommend the Xerox models - we bought 65 last year, no failures or problems at all, just bought another 33, so all our 3 large IT suites are now equipped with them. Very solid and they look good. The price premium is not that much - the last batch cost us £113 each from A2Z.

The finance database is two different files and the services are different. You can start it and stop it using the net stop and net start command in the same way but the syntax depends on what the database instance is called. Ours is: net stop SQLANYs_SIMS_SQL_DB_Server but the bit after the SQLANYs will vary from system to system depending how it was set up. Look in the Services list on the server and see what name is assigned to the SQL Anywhere service - thats what you need to use. Like the main sims database, there are two files to copy, but their location and name may vary. By default, they are SIMS.db and SIMS.log

Easy to do using command line. Just stop the service first to make sure the database files are not open, then start them again after the copy: net stop sqlagent$sims net stop mssql$sims Copy /y /b "Location of .mdf file here" "Backup location Here" Copy /y /b "Location of .ldf file here" "Backup location Here" net start mssql$sims net start sqlagent$sims We run this batch file as a scheduled task every night. Then use BE remote agent to copy the backups to our tape drive. No SQL agent needed.