Roberto

I think you're right when you say you can only do this if you admin the boxes or you have the permission and co-operation of the users (and lets face it, a student who wishes to do something 'dodgy' will simply disable or remove your control app, even if they co-operated to start with). Not only is there a technical issue here but there's a legal and ethical one, if its not the organisation's device. Your new member of staff can "demand" what they want, I mean I'd like to demand a winning euromillions ticket myself, but I suspect both they and I will remain disappointed.

Both personally and at work, I'm finding that the newer systems 'age' better. In fact I'd say this goes back as far as the Core 2 processors; unless you're doing high end video or design or other workstation tasks on a works system or playing top end games at home, older systems are holding their own much better now than they ever did, if that makes sense.

Not sure what you mean by "broken" here. Microsoft have older operating systems available to download to MSDN subscribers and a lot of the larger Linux distros keep at least some older versions around on their own websites in my experience.

That's a very poor justification for breaking their T&Cs imho. It's the "they were just asking for it" argument rewritten for piracy. Assuming we're talking about educational use, we simply tell people "No. It's against the T&Cs".

I don't know if they're available for anything other than evaluation, but if they are then yeah, they'd be even better for sure.

You know you can create an .iso image of that disk and greatly reduce your time to deploy a new VM right? We download all of our client and server OS and applications as .iso files from Microsoft but even just creating your own image is really worth doing to make it easier to get at the media for new deployments or when you need the deployment media for adding a server role.

Not sure why you're saying that. We've set up two hyperV farms with about 60 or 70 servers spread across them, and at no time during deployment of the hosts or the guest VMs has any of the servers had any physical cd/dvd media of any kind loaded.

Well if I'm travelling on behalf of my employer I claim all that I'm entitled to. I don't think it would be fair of me to criticise others for doing the same.

This is why we don't let random people order stuff and don't support it if they do. Still that doesn't help you... What outcome are they expecting? If it doesn't have an EPG as you say then what are you supposed to do? It can record in advance by setting times rather than programs, in combination with a copy of the radio times?

In any case, I'm always a little suspicious of these kinds of 'studies' as anything other than marketing fodder (of course, to a college or other place that has to compete for students, marketing fodder can be quite valuable). For example: "75% said Wi-Fi access on campus helps them earn better grades". That's nice and everything but how much of that 75% are correct, how many are talking out of their ass and how many are making an honest mistake in their claims?

How does putting something in the cloud help secure data once it's been pulled down to BYOD desktops? "Cloud" and "security" aren't like sprinkles on top of ice cream.

As has been noted, the switches you have do look like they're rack mountable, but for the future its worth keeping in mind that the 'rack-ability' of something isn't just about whether or not you can find a way to physcially squeeze it into a rack, but about such things as it having adequate airflow when mounted in a rack, etc.

I've often said that any person or company can make a mistake and its how well they move to correct that that shows their true worth... or lack of it in this case. Still all's well that ends well by the sound of it.

Documentation or CPD. There should always be something to do in those areas...

Yeah. Comparing the two, printerman looks decent but less capable than Printer Installer, but its the difference between a Ford Focus and a Merc, so if printerman meets your needs and costs that much less then its crazy to splash out on extras you don't need.

... saw the ping from @Norphy It's a subscription model. What they quoted us (and it might be different for schools as opposed to colleges) is 1000 dollars (so, about £600) p.a. and that covers us for up to 100 printers. Given how much time its saved staff, students and IT people, I consider it some of the best money I've ever spent for the college. As we all know, each time someone rings for support it disrupts both you and them, and this product greatly reduces the number of calls (and reduces the complexity of the calls we do get) along the lines of "my printer's broken, how can I map another one?", "how can I find one with colour?", "Can I see what printers are near me?", "Can I print to the photocopier", "Can I always have printerX mapped wherever I am in the building?", etc... I know I'm probably over-doing it at this point but it honestly beats me why Microsoft aren't driving dumper trucks full of money up to these folks' office and begging them to become part of MS so this can be bundled in Windows Server. Installation of the overall system and importing our current printers was a breeze (As Norphy will tell you, he left for vacation before we'd even started worrying too much about printing in our Win 7 migration and came back to this product fully deployed and working) and deploying brand new printers out of the box and allocating them to classrooms or offices is both simpler and more reliable than we found fiddling around with GPPs for 80+ printers to be.

That's great for us geeks but its hardly as discoverable for novice users as it was before. The fact is that Microsoft have made it that bit more difficult for people who don't already know about these features to find them and use them. I'm pretty much forced to use it at work because I need the RSAT tools for Windows 2012 servers on my local machine, but I am so enjoying not having to put up with its awkwardness again at home since I 'upgraded' back to Windows 7 recently.

Except that this doesn't always work properly, and when it does, it assumes you already know the name of what you're looking for. Now I know that my college has photoshop installed on all the computers but we have 1500 new users this year who don't know that, and yet would still like to edit a picture file. Of course, if they're editing a photo and start typing 'photo...' then they'll be fine but there are lots of places where instead of photoshop they'll be using the gimp or paint.net. The idea that search excuses all the problems with the start screen is very much a red herring

Can you promote another DC in that domain and get things working through that? If not (and I appreciate this may be unaffordable) this would be the time to phone Microsoft support and open a case.

You need one of these... Aside from anything else, they wouldn't be so obvious, were there such a thing as them

* How easy is it to procure significant ICT infrastructure for your school/college? Piece of cake, to be honest. Frameworks have actually made it more difficult, if anything * How useful was the old ICT Services Framework (or indeed frameworks in general)? Never used the old Becta thing, the OJEU procurement framework was used for our campus rebuild and refit... but note the careful avoidance of describing it as useful. * How easy is it to get reliable advice about (a) what to buy, and (b) how to buy it? Again, piece of cake. We have plenty of sources of advice, and it's not difficult to ring up a vendor and say "I want to give you money, how do I go about that?" - even those that don't deal directly with customers will have a list of resellers handy * To what extent do you think your local requirements could be standardised (assuming that was a participative process) and to what extent do you feel that your local requirements are unique? We don't have that many unique requirements but we have a few. We've tried consortium bids in the past and they just don't work; everyone has their 'few unique requirements' same as us, and by the time these are accounted for the consortium either supports so many options that the cost savings are negated or the consortium machine spec is a horrible Frankenstein's monster that nobody wants * What are the main pitfalls that you need to guard against when procuring significant infrastructure (e.g. companies that go bust, proprietary lock-in, lack of pricing transparency, poor requirements analysis...) * What is your perception of the benefits of aggregated procurement as a way of saving money? I've never been convinced about consortiums as either money saving devices or as protection against risks * How important are OJEU (EU) procurement rules, which kick-in for public procurements valued at more than £150K? OJEU is a pain in the neck but it's one we have to deal with. * How easy is it to get information comparing the performance and value of competing products? This has never been an issue for me * How valuable would it be to have a "G-Cloud for Education" - i.e. an online catalogue of IT products for education, with transparent pricing, certifications and star-ratings? Not in the slightest little bit. We're already part of one and from what I've seen, it costs us rather than saves us money overall, especially when you consider the time and resources spent managing our membership of it.

If you're comfortable with the Quest AD extensions for Powershell then you should probably give this question and answer on serverfault a look to solve the user and home folder creation too. I've not tested it but it looks about right.

Hopefully whoever we stole it from here can chip in if I'm misunderstanding this and making a complete twit of myself but it assumes that this code is saved in a batch file in the root of the folder where all your user directories live, and that the home directory folders are equal to the user's AD user name (e.g. so I have a user for myself named 'rob' in AD, and the user 'rob' has a home folder in d:\user shares\rob on my file server. So if you have 'd:\user shares\' containing folders for each user's home area then this code is saved in d:\user shares as a batch file, then run it then loops through each directory it finds at that level and sets the correct permissions and ownership on that folder (e.g. sticking with my example above it takes the name of my account, 'rob', from the d:\user shares\rob folder and sets ownership and then file permissions on that folder to the user 'rob', then moves on to the next user share name in that folder, say 'd:\user shares\roc' and sets permissions on the roc folder correctly for a user named roc, then for the next folder it finds 'd:\user shares\rod' it sets permissions for that folder to allow the user 'rod' to have access, and so-on. This can also be done with AD Manager plus or other similar tools, which allow you to set permissions correctly on the user's home folder when the home folder is created as part of user creation.

Sorry about that, I should have put it in a code box in the first place.

I would personally question the wisdom of that advice, which I've seen repeated here a few times, but no matter. Export a list of usernames to a CSV file on the old system. Use it as a template to create new users on the new system. There are countless tools around to do both so I'd just say use what you find comfortable here. Migrate data by restoring the relevant part of the backups you must have on the old system onto the new system. There are, again, countless methods detailed here and elsewhere for setting up this kind of thing without having to resort to hacks such as "log every user on". There are, again, countless tools to do this but I personally like AD Manager Plus as a tool for creating accounts and properly provisioning their home folders from a CSV file, among the many other things it does (You could probably use it for your immediate issues during the trial/demo period and then decide if its worth paying for to use on an ongoing basis), and as for fixing permissions, running a script like the one below in the root of the home folders on the server should do it (based on/stolen from one that was posted here in the past): @echo off icacls "e:\User Home" /inheritance:d echo Inheritance removed from home directory icacls "e:\User Home" /remove:g Users echo User read permissions removed from User Home root for /D %%i in (*) do ( TAKEOWN /f "%%i" /r /d y > %%i.txt echo. >> %%i.txt ICACLS "%%i" /reset /T >> %%i.txt echo. >> %%i.txt ICACLS "%%i" /grant:r "INTERNAL\%%i:(OI)(CI)F" >> %%i.txt echo. >> %%i.txt ICACLS "%%i" /SETOWNER "INTERNAL\%%i" /T >> %%i.txt echo. >> %%i.txt echo %%i Permissions all reset >> %%i.txt )