Roberto

To follow on from @Norphy's answer, we require staff, not just students, to use our guest portal for BYOD devices. I wouldn't entertain letting untrusted devices connect directly to the LAN via an unfiltered, unprotected wireless connection, and while I agree with irritable tech's comment about the arguments against letting people use their own devices becoming weaker, I would still stand firmly behind the idea that it's better not to do "BYOD" at all than to do it badly.

Legally you don't have any right to a refund/exchange of the laptop once you've had it for a satisfactory length of time to inspect it and ensure it's as described (including up to quality standard). The law is vague on precisely how long it should take for this "inspection" period to take place but I'd suggest that "just shy of 6 months" isn't really going to cut it. There are a number of things a seller can do under the sale of goods act to rectify a fault with an item, including refund the buyer's money or replacement of the faulty item. It is the seller's choice, not the buyer's as to which option they choose. Sale of Goods Act - Which? Consumer Rights There may of course be other conditions that the laptop was originally sold under which improve the buyer's right to a refund, or give them more say in the choice of how a fault is dealt with, but that depends on what terms the sale took place under.

I would suggest that it costs less to fit a suitable solution in the first place than it does to fit the wrong solution because it was cheaper, spend a considerable amount of time discovering that it's never going to come up to standard, removing it and then fitting the suitable solution.

They got thrown into our email blacklist years ago. Spamming the people who administer our email servers is a very grave mistake for sales people round these parts.

You probably would, yes. Some people - usually know nothings who like to stick their oars in - seem to think that VDI and remote desktop are miracle technologies... and lets be clear about it, there are scenarios in business and in education where they make sense... but essentially you're taking the money you might have saved by deploying "thin" instead of "fat" clients and you're investing it in infrastructure. Not just the servers either - the comms between the clients and the terminal server/vdi farm need to be able to handle the change too.

I know it's not the done thing to comment on jobs here but isn't this below the national minimum wage?

Netgear for business wireless? You'd get better performance by writing a string of binary on the side of one of their access points with a marker pen and throwing it at the person you're trying to communicate with than you will from plugging them in.

Not sure what the problem is here. Computers are, or certainly should be these days, far more than electronic typewriters for producing coursework.

Mint is nice - it's the one Linux install I've done that I've actually wanted to keep - but if someone's expecting a Windows re-install then giving them something unexpected out of the blue won't end well.

To be fair, "pricy" depends very much on your needs and requirements. On one hand, I'd totally suggest the free Spiceworks system to organisations that are a good fit for it, on the other we're spending about £20k on helpdesk software and I don't regard it as "pricy" for the abilities of the system we're getting.

There's nothing wrong with moving on from the start menu. I'm comfortable with it being time for a change. I just think the change should be an improvement on what it's replacing, and so far the start screen doesn't meet that criteria, at least for "traditional" computer use scenarios.

Couldn't agree more. I'm not sold on the idea of a "laptop strategy" myself but the point is that a school needs to pick whatever IT strategy it feels suits it best and then make a commitment to implementing it properly. There's an element of doing "just enough" and then praying it will be OK on the day that exists in education even more than it does in a lot of other businesses (education often reminds me of a small-to-medium enterprise business being run by someone with a "cottage industry" mentality) and educational establishments need to understand that this kind of nickel and diming will come back to haunt them in the end. The ultimate cost of not being able to deliver a lesson is far higher than the cost of buying a spare laptop or two.

This is the issue. Education isn't the only line of business in which people hire experts and then not listen to them, to be fair, but it is one of the places where the attitude is most subbornly entrenched.

We actually use ops manager, as it was mentioned and screenshotted earlier. To be honest, the live map for us turned out to be one of those things that sounds good but turns out to have little practical use. It might not be as sexy, but we have tended towards using a graph to represent service issue alerts on our live screen - this, for us, turned out to be far more informative - do you want a picture of an exchange server with a red cross next to it or do you need to know which exchange component has fallen over and why (e.g. see alerts for "information store dismounted" and "drive that contains the exchange DB logs is full").

Yes it is. But if educators want to play on the grown up's golf course then they need to accept that they might have to pay grown up greens fees.

We've just placed an order for a Dell Equallogic PS-M4110E & a PS-M4110X with a new blade chassis to put them in alongside 4 fully loaded M910 blade servers. Time to update one of the virtual farms...

What you're doing there with issuing organisation-owned devices to people, by the sound of it, isn't BYOD, so you can't really cite it as a problem with BYOD. Have you considered making sure that the data that pupils (and staff) need is available in an open, platform agnostic way so that people can bring their own device in and access data that way?

We're indifferent to their passing, though some more up to date central stats would be nice. Becta didn't do much for us - we were already looking at ITIL and had most of our IT staff ITIL certified already before FITS took off, and we already had network provision far in excess of their suggested quotas, just to give two examples.

Remote access to a terminal server or VDI cluster. Our data never leaves our site(*). (* assuming people are also sticking by the rest of our policies on data... ahem!)

I'm looking forward to seeing the xbox specs. At one time I'd have just said "Xbox" because I've had a dislike for Sony as a business, but this time it feels much more open for discussion either way. Truth be told, all the blahblah over specs will be misleading - from that point of view they'll both be superb consoles... so the question is which platform's "exclusives" will float your boat the most?

I wonder if that was an intentional test, taking the temperature of the water before deciding whether to jump in or not, as it were.

Indeed. Nor does one wrong, so why would you defend people being taken advantage of? Because outside of the odd "mistaken" call, that's what this is. It's one thing to have to pull a late night or even a weekend every now and again to fix a big system problem or get a rollout done on time, I've done plenty of those even in education, and there's no place for clock watching in this profession. But it's not right to expect people to answer the phone outside of their contracted hours or any agreed 'on call' time.

If you don't want to be bothered by calls from work, buy your own phone, don't give the number of that to anyone and return the other one to work. Or just switch it off outside of your agreed times to be available. If you're not ready to take that step just yet then ask the person who okayed you having it what their expectations are and (assuming you agree that they're reasonable) ask for their help enforcing those expectations with the people who keep calling at all hours. Clearly someone has handed out that number as the number to call for IT support and has some kind of expectation that you will answer it out of hours - either explicitly because that's why they agreed for you to have the phone in the first place, or implicitly because are failing to set other more reasonable expectations when giving the number to others.

Oooh I know how this story ends. Well written as ever, Norphy!

Clearly inspired by Blakes 7 there...