Bromcom_John

Its similair with a few areas of their service provision. For instance, if you take up the offers that include mobile phones you're actually taking up two seperate offers from two seperate companies. Virgin Mobile (who provide your mobile phone) are a seperate operating concern to Virgin Media (the provider of your cable and tv). So thats multiple direct debits, support numbers etc. and get this... Virgin Mobiles "Free calls to Virgin phones" section of their package.. doesn't include the Virgin Media technical supprot line!! Maybe they aren't their own service provider Your situation does seem slightly worse however as at least Virgin Media & Virgin Mobile appear to be capable of communicating with each other.

There are always two Duck Lords of the Sith, a Master and an Apprentice. Darth Scrooge and Darth Donald.

A Star Wars trilogy with the storytelling chops that the Pixar guys have would be good. They even have a good track record for making emotion filled robot characters... We could get a fight between R2D2 and Wall-E for most cutest film robot evah!! Not to mention the much awaited Darth Vader vs. Emperor Zerg battle royale!

Been having an issue with a crash on my first run through. It seems to freeze up when loading the first Muton (I think) video. I have the save "immediatellY" prior to the first appearance of the new aliens safely tucked away, so when and if it gets fixed I can happily continue that one. Have restarted the campaign and (fingers crossed) heres hoping I don't get it on this run through. My favourite littel nuance so far are the soldier nicknames. Especially since my first soldier to get his nickname was the sole survivor from the tutorial mission who ended up getting the rather apt nickname of "Prototype".. Colonel Hector "Prototype" Gonzalez, we salute you! Hardest mission I have encountered so far (not too far in I suspect) was the first Alien Terror attack which saw the introduction of the Chrysalid's . Didn't make the connection between them and the "eviscerated corpse" from mission one, ignored the "zombies" and a few turns later "BAM" Chrysalid numbers went up by 3!!

See what happens when SIVADAM retires

Unfortunately we also have a major fox population locally (nearby railway line doesn't help) so free range poultry is a big no no.

The weather this year was terrible for our garden. Fruit literally rotting on the branch due to the excesive rain at the wrong time. (apples, cherries, pears and plums) A severe late frost all but wiped out the peach blossom. An extremely unusual failure to germinate on the part of the peas, beans and mange tout. A small spurt of sun to bring the grapes along and then a total failure to follow up with anythign more than a few hours of sun meant lots of small unripe bunches. Cucumbers both inside and outside failing. and SO MANY SLUGS!! At one point I had what I like to call Arboreal Snails. One evening I went out and plucked 6 of the blighters out of the upper branches of our apple tree. I need to nematode again next year as we skipped it this year and coupled with the weather it was a proper nightmare. The only "success" stories were the 5 pounds or so of Tomatoes my greenhouse did deliver (this has now been converted into a few jars of homemade pasta sauce) and the bizarrely successful despite everything golden raspberry canes, which have been delivering fruit solidly for about 2 months.

It has two levels of cool. 1 - It is an amazing little bit of kit (the resolution is incredible) 2 - It is totally leveraging the Apple cool device look. It's an innocuous little black slab that looks a "little" bit like a mini iPhone. Item 2 would see it achieve unprecedented sales figures alone! Just by fanboi's mistakenly buying it on impulse Wonder what the height map is on it. If you could just have a keyboard layout printed on your desk (or on a sheet of acetate) and the thing was sensitive enough to detect your typing locations... Shiny.

Well we have a history of dealing with "getting data packets as small as possible" so I tend to notice a reasonable compression ratio when I see one ;D It's a hold over from when we used radio transceivers and built the kit ourselves. The engineers at the time could literally tell you which "bit" of the message related to what without referring to any documetnation. It was like that scene in the matrix where he shows Neo the blonde and the brunette in the code!

Indeed, the important item is to ensure you're mobile tariff is appropriate. I couldn't comment before on Emerge transfer rates but "now" I would just like to add, very nice compression rates there Lawrence.

No Cake for you. Please continue testing for SCIENCE!

Well, as Vik and myself have pointed out, the basic data packages shoudl cover "standard" use on most mobile products. It's only if you are considering the use of the more data heavy aspects of these products that you need to start worrying. I can't comment on the newer addition to Emerge (especially if your teachers start getting video evidence happy) but the basic data transmittance of that and our own products should be well within the standard download tariff of most contracts. To give you some REALLY rough ballpark figures (and these are from our product couldn't comment on Emerge) each register uses approximately 72kb. If we multiply this up for 6 period day, 5 day week, 4 week month it comes in at just under 9mb. If you use the options for pupil photo's then it's approximately 12kb per student instead of the 72kb for the entire register. But you can see that even that won't really cut into "most" download tariffs.

Just a general point to consider. A lot of schools go down the 3G connectivitity route without doing any kind of proper evaluation on the bandwidth costs that using a mobile enabled device (with whatever software solution you choose) will create. Obviously you're probably only talking about minimal bandwidth on all of the basic services but most of the mobile enabled products have facility for tranferal of images or extra data in some way, shape or form and this tends to get a bit overlooked. We've seen a few schools hit this hurdle so we tend to bring this up to ensure that the added comms requirements are accounted for. I mean, you would hate for the PE staff to get all efficient with taking their registers only to find the Bursar asking where this new bill for excessive bandwidth usage is coming from

I "would" have had simialir photo's but for the fact that I think I had the ZX81 before we got a reliable family camera or at least a camera that's snaps didn't fade massivley (damn you early Kodak instants)...

For this situation I would suggest our WebFolder product on mobile devices via the secure gateway. Same function as webfolder but going via a secure 3G link.

That definitely exists as a winword issue. We experience the same thing with our system sometimes. Doesn't always need to be based on a report fail either. Sometimes word just doesn't shut itself down correctly and leaves an instance of Winword.exe running in memory.

Why would I be ordering someone elses MIS

This is another one you should also check the IMLS framework site for additional guidance. The framework included a robust financial provisioning as part of it's coverage. So everyone in that may have ticked the boxes required.

I'll mention us "again" See Viks response above We fulfill all your criteria. I won't post a link to our website this time as I believe that may have qualified as marketing and got my first response lifted... And.. I just spotted Vik's response as I was posting this.. Thanks for the mention VP

Almost all the schools that have adopted our parent portal (MyChildAtSchool) chose to distribute usernames and passwords face to face. TIming the launch to coincide with the usual round of parents meeting allowed them to maintain a degree of security "plus" it raised the profile of the delivery of the service to a very good degree.

@matt40k. Good luck in your new role. Thanks for your kind words and don't think you'll escape the Geek clutches.. as long as you're in IT I am sure that someone on here will manage to find some questions or work for you to get involved with.

IIRC The DPA guidelines indicate that the Head of School is the defacto Data controller until they "actively" delegate that role to another individual. So even if the Head is utterly unaware of how their MIS works, if they haven't told someone else to take responisbility "they" are the Data cotnroller for all information entered into the MIS (or affiliate system). But otherwise localzuk is correct it is usually one of those mentioned.

I suspect that, given the timeframe mcchord17 quotes (over ten years) that he may even be talking about our standalone registration product that was available before SIMS even went SQL. However the software has developed far beyond those halcyon days. CAPITA SIMS provide access to the same interface objects that they themselves use, in order for third parties to develop their own applications. This is where WebFolder SD comes in. Thus the WebFolder SD product will suffer "none" of the synchronisations issues that mcchord17 remembers. John

Numpties!

Not wishing to hijack the thread off into a direction the Op hadn't intended but, in these instances then the cloud system had better not rely on a single point of access for that data. If the school want additional redundancy then it can be easily provided with a cloud system to ensure that any and all "legal" data collection requirements are provided. Essentially with the correct service setup a cloud installation is no less prone to failure than a locally hosted system. In fact the argument could be made that a cloud system is, by its very nature, more robust as it has a stronger tech backbone (assuming a professionally hosted data center), superior infrastructure (economies of scale providing tech use that asingle user school would otherwise have no access too) and greater degree of communication flexibility (Web enabled out of the box so to speak). That being said we (Bromcom) would never advise a school to take a cloud solution if they did not have the appropriate interent provision to cope in the first place. As a Cloud advocate we'd be cutting our own throat to do so. It'd be like advising a school to use a locally hosted solution when their only available server was a Pentium 2 with 1024mb of RAM. That said the availability of reliable, fast and above all robust internet provision is starting to become ubiquitous. John ps. Not that I expect my word to be taken on this but in defense of mariefolan, they are a 100% genuine, happy (If somewhat inexperienced in forum ettiquette) Bromcom user. I can't give any details obviouusly but if they were bogus then the mods would have excised her post by now.