As someone who has been involved in IT for over 20 years, I am going to come down on the side of RM here. While many people advocate that a school is a business, its not, its a school. Resources are limited as we all know. A business I consult for employing 350 people has 15 IT support staff and a dedicated support line. It has a custom built server room and recently invested over £400,000 in new equipment. A school I work at part time has 350 users and can only dream of resources like that. There is me and my part time assistant to manage the entire network. When I first went there from the commercial sector, I wondered what this RM thing was doing sitting in front of my active directory and locking down GPO's. The reason its there is because probably 90% of schools cannot aafford to emply an IT professional on 50k per annum and have several assistants to back them up. Its not a skills shortage but a monetary one. While IT is critical in schools, they simply cannot afford the competaive rates to employ IT professionals from the private sector. RM put a nice simple interface in front of an other wise scary environment to allow the technicians etc to effectively run a network with backup from a huge company with excellent support. A vanilla network in a school requires resources that the school cannot afford. I note with interest that bigger schools are setting up vanilla networks and offering the resources out to smaller schools. I think this is a terrible idea but one that many smaller schools will consider as it will certainly be far more cost effective than employing people like me, but of course a lot less flexible as well. RM do a good job and CC4 has many improvements that will make it even better. Sure there are challenges. Show me a network that does not.
