JCB

I'm late to the party here, but wanted to chip in and agree with Jawloms here... I'm very happy with the Schools Broadband service we have here. From my experience, initial installation and customer mgmt, support availability and response on the phone, filtering and security, planned (and inevitably a couple of unplanned!) outage comms, and our recent line upgrades have all been top-notch. Been with them >7 years and they are way better than the provider we had previously, and I know neighbouring schools also using them agree. Contrary to some of the posts above, I find the Netsweeper solution far better than the previous Lightspeed system which I hated - it's actually possible for me to get meaningful reports out of there (though we are pure Windows environment which may help) and the filtering is very hands-off and well adjusted for pupil/staff use so to be honest it doesn't need a lot of interaction. Yes I've had a few tech reports 'go to the NOC team' too but in my experience that results in the issue getting fixed. I've never had issues with the first point of contact when I've phoned, and on the rare occasions I've called regarding an outage I've not needed to be transferred to someone in a higher tier - if it's an issue that affects more than my specific school all I want is a ticket logged and a phone call later to let me know it's all sorted (which is the service I have received).

Thanks Andy, That all seemed too good to be true, so clearly is - I'd have been buying a package for myself too

1802 seems OK to me - just replaced my site server and have been getting SCCM up and running on a new VM over the last couple of weeks. It was nice to install from fresh a shiny new version, and seems to be working fine (as opposed to last instance that had been upgraded and upgraded over the last several years). No major problems with PXE and OSD yet - just the usual two steps forward one step back until it's all going ok .

Docklands Light Railway is an example of this already happening. More trains would be driverless if it wasn't for the might of the train drivers unions. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/davehillblog/2012/feb/29/boris-johnson-driverless-underground-trains

Docklands Light Railway is an example of this already happening. More trains would be driverless if it wasn't for the might of the train drivers unions. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/davehillblog/2012/feb/29/boris-johnson-driverless-underground-trains

Hi, We've got several laptop trolleys here in school (one of each year group 2-6, with 16x in each). A couple of the trolleys are struggling with old laptops and in need of hardware refresh. I was looking for a way to check usage patterns to determine whether we need to buy a new set of laptops or if there's a way we can consolidate a couple of the trolleys to share between classes, saving several thousand pounds. Does anyone know of some software that would enable me to see how many machines are on the network on a given day, week, etc? For tracking purposes I have all network logins reporting user and computer data to individual text logs (so I can see all the machine logons by user, and user logons by machine), but consolidating this into any kind of useful information is proving difficult. I have also recently deployed SCCM (still getting my head around it) and have a historical Spiceworks install that is used more for Helpdesk now than anything system related. Unfortunately we don't have a managed wireless network so not able to pull any reports from there. It would be great when teachers come to me complaining they don't have their 'own trolley' any more if I can then show them simple stats showing how much the laptops were used previously, hence our decision to not replace 1:1. Thanks for any hints or tips you can give. Primary school so cheap/free suits me fine

I use Spacesniffer, at home and at work. Very useful, fast and freeware OK This doesn't check for 'inappropriateness' as such, unless you have said 'no music on the network, no videos on the network' in your policies... But it will help you locate the drive space hogs. Just point it at the drive or folder you want to view and go. It shows a visual colour coded representation of the drive. I've set mine up so it colour-codes video, pictures and general 'big files' (mainly all my build images). Very handy and I use it to show users how much of the entire network they've just hoovered up!! Just to go off-topic a little, I then use FotoSizer (freeware, again) to mass-reduce picture folders to a manageable size, by bulk-downsizing image files to 2-3 MP. I swear the 12-megapixel cameras producing literally thousands of fuzzy but massive 12Megapixel shots that then get dumped on the network, is a major source of concern to me that simply won't go away. Fotosizer reduces those 5Mb files to a teeny speck in comparison with no real drop in quality (No-one's printing A2 posters of these shots ) HTH!

Hello all, I'm using AD and assigned GPOs to send application installs to our laptops (90) and desktop (60)computers. This technical process works a treat on wired machines, and also works just fine on wireless machines as they pick up the package before the logon prompt appears. I work in a primary school. All our class and ICT suite desktops are fine - they pick up the package quickly. Even the teacher laptops work fine as they are switched on at staggered intervals and our wireless is strong enough to cope with pumping out a quick install package per user. But ... (you knew that bit was coming! ;-) ) We have three laptop trolleys with 16 laptops in each. The nature of these is that they are taken to a classroom and then the laptops are all switched on at once. Suddenly a 100Mb install package becomes 16 times bigger and all the machines (and sometimes the WAPs too) grind to a stop. This is even with each trolley having its own pair of dedicated WAPs on a separate SSID that are plugged into wall points in the classroom when the trolley is used. Is there any way of throttling the install behaviour of MSI deployments via GPO? I'm finding that any time I need to do an install of more than a few Mb, out come the 3 trolleys, so that's 48 laptops for me to nanny a few at a time through the install process (log on, run gpupdate, reboot and wait for install to finish. then shut down and pick the next few.) Any solution you can suggest appreciated, even if it means moving to commercial software, though this would need to be a very affordable solution due to the nature of the site. Note that I'm using BITS to successfully throttle patch (Windows update) downloads to prevent the same problem occuring on Microsoft's monthly patch day, but that doesn't seem to affect the app deployment side. Many thanks in advance Julian