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I am trying to make a decision about this right now! We have been licenced under Select with perpetual licences. We now want to move from XP to 7 and 2003 office to 2007/2010 as well as 2008 server and new cals. The rough cost to buy again under select would be £60K! For schools agreement it's around £18K a year. The schools agreement is a lovely way to manage the money by having an annual cost and is very attractive for this. However, we are also considering running a student netbook scheme (1:1 access) and the cost of licencing this under SA is prohibitive as you have to have licence evey computer in your school under SA even if you already have a licence for them. At the moment i am investigating leasing the cost of a select licence purchase.

Every teacher has a laptop, locked down with Group Policy which i introduced 2 years ago after a long time with teachers having full access and installing loads of crp and unlicenced software - got a lot of grief. Have recently been thinking about phasing out laptops for desktop in every classroom, but I would anticipate monumental amounts of sht hitting fan if we went down that road. I would need support from some key staff to push that through and although it would save money on yearly laptop replacements, it would cost more the first year due to the large number of desktop installations in classrooms.

Yes please! My creative photoshop skills are limited - but stealing and amending... that i can do.

We run SIMS for 1800 pupils and 300 member of staff (ish)! At the moment the physical sims server is a HP DL380 dual quad core with 4gb ram, running server 2003 and sql 2005. Mostly SIMS runs fine for our users, although some reports have taken an excessively long time to complete. We have yet to determine the cause of this.

I can't comment on FMS, but with SIMS - I spoke to Capita support only last week about this and they said it would be fine for us to virtualise our SIMS server. They said they support the application not the hardware; if you have a problem that they can't replicate on physical hardware, they won't be able to support you, but that is v. unlikely. They're all using VMs up at Capita anyway right?

I've had this situation before, the xp machine wants to format the disc - I then put the floppy into a windows 98 machine and the disc read sufficiently well to copy the data off. We even kept an old 98 machine in the corner just for this purpose. However, that was a little while ago, and with space at a premium in my current school, this would not be practical. On the basis that xp is less tolerant of floppy discs than 98, would linux better at reading the disc?

This is the next thing I need to work out with Papercut! - with photocopiers obviously a teacher can have 2 codes for 2 different subjects, but wth printing they just click print. a lot. Is 8p based on real figures, or tweaked to deter printing? Does that also include the cost of paper?

We have the exact same problem here. I brought in papercut to track printing from september and am just about to inform departments how much they would have been billed if I had charged since then. We will then bill departments for printing from april (with financial year) in the same way as reprographics does. I actually overheard a teacher compaining to our repro tech that the toner in the staff room was out of toner and that she had to come and get stuff photocopied!

Thanks for your responses. It is a windows network and we've got a nice centrally managed Cisco wireless, so i don't think that will be replaced any time soon. I think a big fat AUP or even a contract will hopefully protect the school from claims by parents and I will look into further securing the unused wall sockets as suggested. I can see the logic with a sixth form - there is that assumption that they are adults (ish) and may even have paid for their machine as opposed to parents. The aim for us would be years 7 to 11! The licencing is interesting. i would hope to avoid interacting with windows servers and just use the VLE. Though internet access might require some thought - might end up needing CALs just to get out to the internet!

Hi all My school wants to see every student with a laptop in lessons. They wanted to start a scheme where the parents pay for this, as the school has no money. The parents have politely declined this, stating (mostly) that their son/daughter already has a laptop at home. SLT’s response to this was to ask me why we can’t allow students to bring their own devices in to school and access the internet (and VLE) through the wireless. I have explained that it is a terrible idea, etc, etc, but I can only come up with a few technical issues with the concept: I know that I can secure the wireless pretty tight, but my concern is the myriad of empty wall sockets across the school allowing access to my un-VLAN’d flat network. MY question is... Does anyone here allow students to use their own personal laptops in school? If so, are there any modifications you make to the laptop or your network? If you don’t currently do this, but were asked, what would you say?

Cheers Guys, this is what i thought, i shall stand my ground! Responses much appreciated.

My apologies if this has already been covered, I did a quick forum search. I have been handed a PC Advisor cover disk and been asked to install a piece of software across our network. This software is the full version and presumably was previously on sale somewhere and is now given away ‘free’ with the magazine. The License agreement states: “Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Licensor grants to End-User a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license for the personal and non-commercial use of the software…” So… is a school ‘non-commercial’ I guess so. “… to (i) install and use the Software in object code form only on a single computer as a single end-user, (ii) make one (1) copy of the Software for backup and archival purposes, and (iii) use the Documentation only in conjunction with the use of the Software. End-User acknowledges that it must purchase from Licensor, pursuant to a separate written agreement with Licensor, a license for each concurrent user of the Software and that concurrent use by multiple users in excess of the licenses purchased from Licensor is prohibited. …” So we can’t use it across our network without additional permission anyway (or buying 500 magazines)? I would appreciate some advice, as this issue keeps cropping up and we are being asked to push the boundaries of legality, and as the licensing of software is my responsibility!

Well we went for VMWare ESX in the end and 2 months later upgraded to a second server and VMWare Enterprise (VMotion, etc) Very pleased and would recommend it, have 8 production servers, 2 testing servers, 1 XP and 1 Vista client, all running accross 2 physical servers. Obviously having spent the cash, i now don't want to hear anything positive about Virtuoso, Xen, MS Server 2008 virtualisation or open source solutions!

I’ve just been asked an interesting question by our site manager: Do I think our office/server room should have additional fire safety/precaution type stuff aside from our CO2 extinguisher? I said that as I wasn’t a fire officer I didn’t know. But it got me thinking though, I always assumed that if there was a fire – everything would burn to ashes, we’d take our backups (stored in another location) buy some new servers with the insurance and start over. What could they really put in? sprinklers wouldn’t really help the equipment, and CO2 pumped into the room would freeze us and/or suffocate us. Does anyone else have fancy fire safety/precaution equipment in their server room?

i've just purchased a HP DL380, 2x quad core, 8GB, 4x140GB SAS for £2600. We are running VMware, virtualising 4 servers and i would highly recommend it. We are able to run Exchange 2007 on 64bit windows and leave our other servers 32bit for compatibility.

Exchange 2007 requires 64bit windows server. Which is fine if all the other apps can handle 64bit.

I agree, I would wait for a bit before going for .net It was so bad at one stage our librarian was threatening suicide - we had slowness issues, data issues, all sorts. A Yahoo forum has been setup about the problems: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/eclipse-net/ Check it out for problems other schools have been experiencing. We’ve had their senior developers in on a couple of occasions, but we're not happy yet.

Thanks for your help guys, i'm starting to realise how little i know about the whole area. This is what i thought could be a problem. i want to be able to down a machine, and move the image to another server of a different spec and age and then boot the image again. I know you can hot migrate these things also, but thats not the most important thing for me. does anyone here actually run virtuoso?

I had been looking at VMware ESX I think, if that helps?

Well thats what i hoped to do, but i've been led to believe (probably by people with a vested interest) that VMware requires identical server hardware on 2 or more servers to move images between servers. I am unlikely to ever have 2 servers exactly the same so that would be an issue for me. however, I have posted with the aim of being corrected, so thanks!

I am looking to buy a new server and then run virtual servers for things like Exchange, VLE, print server, etc. I have talked to a couple of suppliers buy i can't decide between VMware or Virtuoso. I know nobody even got fired for buying IBM, but Virtuoso seems to have some benefits over VMware, like being able to swap images between severs of differring hardware specs. Having looked at several threads i know some people are using VMware here, but is anyone using Virtuoso or can help me get off the fence... i'm getting splinters.

Thanks Ric_, i'll give that a try.

We're currently running ISA 2000 on our 2003/XP network. I have purchased an ISA 2006 licence, but I have read that you cannot upgrade from 2000 to 2006. Is this true? If so, can i install over the top anyway, or am i going to have to do a clean install of Server 2003 + ISA 2006 on the server over a weekend?

One Million Dollars! Hah hah hah. Sorry :oops:

Sounds very similar to what we're experiencing at the moment. I wonder if any school actually gets a technical viewpoint before purchasing reporting software. Ours is MS Access based - not the best for 100+ users over a wireless network.