Roberto

Given how iPads are seeing substantial take-up in businesses, that attitude may well come back to bite Microsoft, and those of us who have to support their bad decisions, in the ass. Still at least they've got rid of the idiot in charge of this debacle so maybe they'll sort something out...

I dunno about that but the product ads I see on edugeek have reliably been for products we've already purchased at work. That seems like someone's missing an opportunity somewhere to me...

What, precisely, is wrong with anything that encourages students to think of numbers in different ways? While I'd be concerned if that was all the homework someone was getting, I don't think there's anything wrong with it per se

Do you really think Samsung or HTC or Microsoft would be any different if positions were reversed? Or that this form of apology is another paving slab in a road that's been well trodden by both 'sides' in other industries before? They're all like primary school kids pulling hair in the playground.

Fair enough. My comments might have been made in my usual flippant tone but there was also a serious side to them: more than a few places (business as well as edu) I've seen have implemented BYOD purely because one of the big cheeses read an article about how lovely and fluffy BYOD is, and didn't want to discuss any boring details other than "When can you do it" and "why isn't it done yet".

I suspect they've read an article on the BBC that says mauve is the best colour for BYOD as it has the most RAM. And that was the beginning and ending of their training, unless the LA sponsored a day for them to listen to someone who last stepped into a classroom in the 80s and who thinks "Bring your Own Desktop" is a way of getting woodwork back on the curriculum wax lyrical about it.

We have an Aruba system here. We're connected to AD via a RADIUS server and this is how staff and students authenticate to use their personal devices, and it also allows us to manage accounts for 'true' guests locally on the controller.

At this point, especially if what you had set up was what was agreed with your SLT as the one true way of doing things, I'd suggest that they enjoy the valuable learning experience on how you can't always get what you want. Our current RDP solution doesn't natively support mac clients which is a PITA for me personally as a Mac user, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. I'd agree with that. It is a case of evaluating the risk v. reward as you stated earlier. It would be a shame to stop people being able to work on lesson plans or other innocent stuff how they want purely because of what someone else might do, and whether you put a ban/block into place or not, there's still a training issue as to why which for me suggests good quality training and a reasonably open stance are the way to go.

We supply staff with a remote desktop service that's available over the internet from home for precisely this reason. Data files never needs to leave our site. It's not for me to say what the right answer is to this online vs. USB (or email attachment or whatever) issue. Just that you should be consistent; if you block dropbox because people might abuse it then you should block USB sticks because people might abuse them. The threat hasn't changed just because the method has.

Perhaps not, but are you saying that if their device isn't perfect out of the gate they might as well not even try?

Yes it does. If you allow staff to use memory sticks, I bet you don't subject them to a full body search each day to make sure they're not mis-using personal memory sticks to take confidential data off site. That's substantially the same as taking data off site via dropbox really, is it? While there can be specific legal nuances in some cases, the issue is what they're doing, not how they're doing it. If your safeguarding procedures say that no student data should leave site then how it leaves site is less important than the fact that it has. This is a human resources issue, not a technical one.

On that account creation screen, they don't shout about it but there's an option to skip the Microsoft Account. We've certainly got domain members here without that problem.

I work for a college and as such don't need the sort of support I guess you're talking about. We do have contracts for specialist support however. What I would say, on reading your post, 3 things spring to mind: Don't take this the wrong way, but if you don't know how the business side of running a consultancy works (the contracts, tenders, etc. that you mention above) then you're going to struggle. Running the business is every bit as important as being able to deliver on the technical side once you have the contract. As an individual, how will you prioritise 2 schools that both develop a serious issue that's preventing teaching taking place first thing Monday morning? Come to that, how will you handle sick time, etc? How good are you at writing Service Level Agreements? We've all met people who only want to pay for a Lada and expect Rolls Royce level service?

In what way? There was a lot of rumours and sharp practice from other places that they could have covered but as they've got to keep out of the court room they were always going to limit their accusations of criminality to people and companies they could actually prove were criminals. They were never going to name names on anything subjective like value for money. And lets be honest, while there's no excusing the behaviour of the firms discussed at all, their 'victims' didn't exactly come out of this smelling of roses (claiming the salesman "refused to leave" until the deal was signed indeed. Love to see them try that where I work...) It kinda harps back to my point about people who are ill-equipped to take those decisions taking them without reference to their advisors... and even for primary schools, it is perfectly possible to have good technical staff around to give advice - some of the high profile members of this forum are from primary schools and very much prove the point about the quality of technical advice that could be available to primary school head-teachers if they looked for it.

Yes, but try telling the sort of people who fall into that trap in the first place about that... These are the sort of educators (thankfully in a minority) who won't ask their own technical staff for help, let alone an outside expert, because in their mind a person with a degree in teaching woodwork and a text book with the answers to the GCSE ICT(*) course really does know more than any IT(*) professional. They have their counterpart in the IT person who thinks the IT tail really should be allowed to run the organisation/business dog, and either way they're a true menance to any place that employs them. (* Substitute 'ICT' and 'IT' for 'Economics' and 'Accountancy/Finance', etc. as required).

Not that I disagree with it being odd, but how many posts have we seen here over the years from people frustrated that someone in upper management has purchased something at the behest of a salesman with the gift of the gab without consulting the IT people? Schemes like this are clearly going to be targeted at people with all the authority to sign bits of paper on behalf of the establishment and none of the understanding of what it is they're signing.

Well the bulletpoints I listed are a reasonable place to start troubleshooting. Nothing wrong with being new to IT and/or being out of your comfort zone, it happens to us all. This problem happening now while the system is new will hopefully mean the installers will fix it for you without too much trouble (in fact I'd be reluctant to do too much yourselves for precisely this reason), but it should also serve as a warning shot to your school that they need to get you up to speed on this technology so you can support it properly yourselves, to some degree at least.

Well there probably is, but you've not really described the problem to us in any useful manner so no one here is in a position to advise you in detail. The question is WHAT failed Is there shared storage that might now be offline? For that matter, whatever kind of storage is in use, what state is it in? Could there have been a powercut and a few inter-dependant services didn't start up right? Could a switch be down? Cable damaged? Have the hosts been restarted? What does the 'head of IT' mean when they say they can 'see' the VMs? 'See' them from where? Are the VHD files, etc. available for these virtual guests?

I'm sorry, I must be missing something obvious. What's the actual problem here? You're creating a mail-enabled user then you're creating a mail contact with the same details - two entries in the GAL for that user is the expected outcome. Why do you need to create a mail contact when you've already created a mail-enabled user? What is this mail contact pointing at, if not their exchange account? If you don't want the user to be mail-enabled, because you want to create them in exchange as a mail contact instead, then why are you creating them as mail enabled?

You're adding them as a mail contact? What Precisely are you doing when you create a new email account for a user?

Sounds like a permissions or NTFS owner problem. As an experiment, see if you can look at permissions on the target start menu folder; the file/folder owner needs to be set to something sensible and the machine needs to be able to create and copy folders as the startup script is run in the machine's context, and the user needs to be able to edit file object attributes as the login script is run in the user context. What happens if you set "everyone - full control" on the parent (local start menu) folder and under advanced permissions set objects created inside that folder to inherit from it. I'm not suggesting that's an actual solution, but if it works you know where the permissions issue is hiding. Oh yes - can't remember if this applies to start menu re-direction offhand or not, but worth checking - on folder re-direction GPO settings there's a tickbox on some of them to grant the user exclusive access to the re-directed folder. A Reasonable setting for private folders, of course, but not a good idea for a shared start menu...

Edie, have you checked RSOP for your test user & machine to see if the policy is applied? Are there any group policy processing errors logged? Check the system log for general issues and applications & services\Microsoft\Windows\GroupPolicy log for a detailed report on what policies are applied and if any errors are generated? Can the test user access the start menu location on the C:\ drive?

You can't use the enterprise licence for the OS installed on server one to licence server two, no. You'd need to make the server running Standard the DC and go from there.

We use: 2x HP 8212zl and 2x HP 5412zl switches with the premium software installed, with the 8212s more or less fully populated with 10GBE SFP+ blades (for uplinks to edge switches, and to servers) and the 5412s populated with a couple of 10GBE SFP+ blades each (for uplinks to the 8212s) and then filled up with 24 port 1GB blades (for anything in the server room that can't or doesn't need to connect via a 10GBE link.). They work very well and I'd be happy to buy them again. IIRC we paid for the premium software as it was an add-on back then but I think it's now included in the bundle. Well worth remembering if someone offers you one 'cheap' but without the premium software add-on.

We'll investigate its use specifically in tablets or other environments where touch might be beneficial but as of yet we have no plans for a site-wide deployment.