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It's okay though because there are "paper copies of the important stuff" - I think the Senior Leadership need to think again about how their data is managed and protected. Ditto Roberto... words fail me.

@dhicks - Agree with you completely there. Bizarre how some places have a less than adequate system for backup/recovery and DR. Can i ask what system you employ for this?

Or point to point to an external site to avoid having to download critical data from the cloud. In the event of a disaster, bring your offsite target onsite and initiate recovery. Cloud is still expensive and personally not yet convinced that we should be pushing sensitive data this way (Might be just being old-fashioned with this). Currently using Barracuda Networks Backup Service (point-to-point) backs up all servers without having to do major setup, emails daily reports. Backup runs incrementally to the backup server with deduplication and compression prior to replication to offsite. Expensive at £24k for 5 years but it is an insurance policy. I feel that DR is not taken seriously enough in Education (imo).

Had the same issue just over four years ago when we moved into our new school. Absolutely no provision for Technical staff, rooms way too small and under spec'd in terms of space for racks and people. Effectively had two rooms, one for servers and patching and switch stacks and one room for technicians. In techies room there was enough room for two people at a push (we have four). No room for testing lab etc. Make sure you shout loud for a proper room otherwise you will be left to fend for yourself. We spent months living out of the staff room, a makeshift classroom offsite and now have a small (ish) office for me and IT Leader.

How much data do you guys have? We currently have around 2.5 TB and use the Barracuda managed backup service using point to point replication, data deduplication and compression to an offsite location. The service offers us 24/7 support, bare metal and message level restoration. Backup takes around 1 hour per day but clearly data is growing on a second by second basis. How would you restore all your data in the event of a disaster, how long would it take and have you tested it?

CDN Networks. Just installed ours - works really well. Call Don - 07976931007/0161 241 0556 or email [email protected]

Correction to above post - The upper limit of the SO1 scale is £26,276 and not £28,636 as mentioned. Apologies for misinformation.

Pay scale is NJC Scale 6/SO1 2011/2012 rates for this are £22,221 - £28,636 but as specified the post is subject to Job Evaluation. Long commute from Brisbane!

Person Spec sorted. Thanks for the heads up. Corrupt PDF!

The following vacancy has been advertised today. Closing date for applications is 21st March with interviews taking place on 23rd March 2012. Any questions, please feel free to ask. Failsworth School - IT Leader

Is this an ICT Manager post or a Senior IT Techncian?

Agree, but one would be naiive to believe that this doesn't happen. In this case who knows whether the job has been changed or not, other than the school. All I know is that the Network Manager was made redundant and that this post has arisen not long after.

Apparently the previous incumbent was made redundant (network manager) hence it can't be readvertised as such.

To add further to this I tried just the first two lines and saved it and it worked! I then entered the AD Connection information including the student group and it worked! Onwards and upwards.

Nick I've moved on from the last error and have uninstalled it all three times. Restarted the server and cleared all cache so I'm as clean as can be. Re-installed (IIS6 variety) and all went well. Browsed to the HAP setup and got the screen as I should. Entered the School name and website and entered the UPN with username and password which has now been accepted and allows me to browse AD for the Students group. However when I go to save this I receive the following error. I'm making progress with it but keep hitting snaglets. Many thanks for your assistance on what looks like a great project. The following error appears: All advice welcome Chris

Thanks for the response Nick. After removal of the code mentioned in your post I am left with the above and the error still prevails.

I'm installing V7 for the first time. I have the app pool in IIS6 I have the HAP folder under web sites. I've made the configuration changes as specified in the help but receive the following error: System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException This occurs at the point of entering my UPN/username/password. Any advice welcome on what this could be.

ICT Support Technician vacancy at Failsworth School, Manchester - closes 15 July 2011

@SpuffMonkey Most data centre online backup services will offer you a 30 day recovery of data (versioning) (effectively they are providing you with 30 days of Previous Versions. In general you would make a single full backup of your data and thereafter new and changed data is uploaded and depending on what your requirements are and which provider you use you can do multiple backups per day on this basis and some will do a backup as you write option. They can be expensive but we are looking at backing up around 2050Gb of data from our network which would cost in the region of £1200 per month but this again is dependent upon which provider you use, the cost could be even less. I don't buy this, what if your internet connection goes down scenario, I think the worst option would be if your onsite backup was burnt to a cinder then the poo would hit the preverbial. We currently back to disk on the same site but in an alternative location that is deemed fireproof but is it really? I'll add to this when I have gone through the process and advise how it all went.

Looks like a good remuneration package for the minute network size and of course is dependent upon the hours which are not specified. Nice little job for someone in that area.

Not bad that, they are interviewing before the closing date of the post!

Phil There are a couple of issues I see with logging behaviour through LM. One is that not all users use LM (ie incident occuring outside of a classroom environment). A second is that when you are in LM you have two separate boxes that refer to behaviour "Behaviour" itself and "Behaviour Management". Behaviour provides the appropriate details for teaching staff in a lesson to be able to submit an incident. The Behaviour Management link allows them to raise an incident but does not have anywhere in the boxes to enter a house so therefore a staff member has to come out of this box (ie close it) find the house and then start again. Further on from this when they are booking a detention, if a student is already in detention on that day they have to click next to choose the next one, and if the individual is a persisitent behaviour problem or has a really bad day in terms of detention submissions could be waiting a week before the detention is served and the impact lost. This is the element where teachers become really frustrated as they have to click next so many times they give up after a while and hand it to pastoral who are then burdoned with adding them manually via the other method which doesn't display a house. I don't think there is much wrong with the system itself but just needs tidying up in terms of the number of hops they have to do to register a detention.

I agree with your last post completely and it is probably due to the latter that we are considering the move back to IRIS ourselves. Many of our teaching staff and in particular Senior Management prefer the more detailed analysis provided by IRIS. Somebody summed SIMS Behaviour vs IRIS for me the other day. You guys specialise in Behaviour Managment/Analysis whereas SIMS Behaviour is but a container on a cargo ship. To be fair to SIMS like you say, for the basic use it works 'ok' I've got one of your guys looking at single sign-on for us through SharePoint at the moment which will also be a deciding factor for us.

I think you are partially right there Ed. Many schools will never have used IRIS and only had SIMS to work with. My point was really that having used both and teachers having moved back from IRIS to SIMS around a year ago they are struggling to get to grips with what they consider it to be "laborious, time consuming and complicated for booking detentions", "easy to book an incident" and "reasonably good for analysis". Comments in quotes are from teaching staff. Personally I don't see the difference between the two in terms of performance as there are plus and minus for both. From my perspective as a SIMS Learning Gateway user would prefer to keep it in house with SIMS. Unfortunately we are in a position of having to consider the majority that use SIMS Behaviour for logging incidents and detentions. I see you are from Rochdale, I didn't know IRIS employees lived so close? I live in Littleborough so a passing interest. Chris

Looking through the incident process again since the last update it would appear that the house system has been added as an option when selecting the detention. Phil I am a SIMS advocate and have had no problems with it in the past. My concerns are raised when my customers the users of the product are providing me with a list of information that tells me that they are disatisfied with any part of it. I'm sure as a SIMS/Capita representative on this forum that you will understand this. I am wanting to keep it as we SIMS Learning Gateway along with the SIMS package so have a vested interested in retaining the SIMS Behaviour. The problem is that they have experience IRIS and its reporting and analysis are superior to this particular SIMS module. This is understandable as this is the only focus IRIS have whereas Capita SIMS have a complete MIS to consider.