Ashers

I used to drink loads of tea and coffee, previous job Gas Engineer, One in the yard to start the day, terrible machie coffee, then a couple in the Cafe for breakfast, then 10 jobs a day so 10 cups of tea or coffee, then a couple at least when I got home. Found out that I was sensative to caffine about 15 years ago so started on the decaffe, and after a lot of research I have found my favourite brands for both decaffe tea and coffee. I have stopped drinking it at work, I now drink squash and at the moment I am finishing off apple and blackcurrant (fruit and barley) and tomorrow I will be starting the Pink Grapefruit.

Sophos AV and firewall, and I scan every two weeks

We have V2 of Impero and it is great, easy for teachers and loads of features all in one tool. We paid about £2000 for a site license as many desktops as we like and I think off the top of my head 20 Teacher consols. We were offered an upgrade to V3 for about £1000.

All done, and one question about your statement above, did this include the increased cost of data centre space, power consumption, air conditioning etc?

We used the paid for version of papercut, it has paid for itself many times over.

Sophos WSA to add another

This has been a problem for us for years, we installed Impero class room management last summer and this has a feature that locks the screen when it detects that a network is not available. The problems with getting the PC to shut down is that if you have a switch failure then the it will log all of the students off.

I used to work in corporate and these were one of my suppliers, they used to be quite approachable, give them a call and get them to remove you from their mailing lists

Well said, that's why I letting the county bods deal with those decisions.

The problem still comes to where they store your data, In the US I believe that the law means that the severs must be on US territory (not sure if this was a federal law or a particular state). The universities in the article were all UK based (Article) I know other Universities have gone down the Google route, but if a Uni can't get the information from Google to satisfy them, then I'm guessing I don't have a hope in hell. I haven't gone through the process myself, but the county have spent the last 8 months or so looking at a number of solutions, including MS and Google. The decision seems to be Microsoft, the final trials are going on at the moment, so should find out their decision in the new year.

Setting up the domain etc is quite easy, have you looked at changing your email naming format instead. Also remember that google scans all emails and uses the information to build user profiles etc, possibly other things that they haven't yet openly expressed. Also you need to consider your data security / information retention / administration / email monitoring. I recently read a report in a magazine (can't remember which magazine at the moment) where a University looked at Google and Microsoft as their email solutions, the biggest point against Google was that they could not say where the data was held, and that not all the users on the domain would be held in the same place. They asked the same questions to MS and they said that they could arrange a visit to their data centre and actually show them the devices that held the data. This changed the way that I was thinking of going.....Security comes first on my list....

I've looked long and hard at a number of "Solutions" for reducing printing costs, but after completing my own calculations I've found that the best way was to put my own printer management software in (Papercut - chosen after advice from other Edugeekers) this made the biggest cut, then spending a lot of time finding the best toner supplier, mine is based in the Isle of Man keeps beating other supplier by 5+%. The final part which I came to late after setting up Papercut, was work out the cost per page of the Printer before you choose which one to buy, I went for the one with the cheaper cartridge, but then found it only printer half the pages of the other printer, so ended up costing more to run. Hope this helps and get in contact if you want to hear more of my printer cost reduction woes......

OK I'm not in Surrey or an independent, but only a short train ride to Basingstoke and we do run SIMs on site at the moment. We have 1500 students and 120 staff, we have just under 700 desktops (Admin and Curriculum). We run and host our own web and Moodle VLE site, We are just about to run a pilot on our video streaming service, and if all goes to plan we will be piloting our TV recording service a few weeks after. We run a web based helpdesk, an SSL VPN to give users secure drive access from outside of school, USB encryption and laptop encryption as part of our data protection installations (which includes document content scanning, looking for removal of confidential information from the network). I know there are other services we run, but I can't think of them off of the top of my head. Let me know if you are interested in a visit, the school is open late most evenings and I can make myself available, I will just need to give our site staff notice. Could possibly arrange a Saturday morning as well, but not until after the Christmas break.

How did you get around the data scanning issue with Google and what about keeping potentially confidential and personal information on unknown servers, possibly not even on the European continent?

I have a female apprentice, who is due to finish and be fully paid up member of the team next April.