Roberto

I'd suggest that either it's been set up wrongly or the faulty MFDs aren't compatible. We've used NG in the past and upgraded to MF and its been very good. I won't say "flawless" but near as damn it.

These are shortcuts to previously visited locations. I think you can remove them this way cut and paste this location into an explorer address bar and hit return: %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Network Shortcuts If the shortcuts there look like the ones in question, get deleting. Enjoy $beverage of choice.

Right, so IT then, not a developer. First of all, are the Microsoft quals really what's wanted or needed - I assume you want to progress in that specific job? What are they looking for? Something to think about... Ok... have you seen this Microsoft Certifications Path and FAQ | Microsoft Learning It shows the base level courses as the Microsoft certified technology specialist (MCTS) - these are building blocks, if you like. Choose a course or two from here to qualify on technologies that are relevant to your job and your current knowledge. You could also look at the Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) courses, a good direction to work towards. Again, only you know what's relevant to you and your particular circumstances and current background. It's hard to know what else to say. I appreciate the site is a little confusing, but only you know what you want to do; I'd hesitate to just tell you "oh yeah, do cert x because its always golden".

I definitely think its a personal choice, as there are several courses and certifications that lead to several different career paths. If you want useful advice, you might reply with where you are now, career-wise, and where you're hoping certification will lead you to.

You're obviously entitled to your opinion but I don't see what's sad about it. An IT professional who happens to work in a school saying "No I won't teach; I'm not a teaching professional" isn't very different to an IT Professional who works for a law firm saying "No, I won't advise company clients about internet law; I'm not a lawyer".

Got to agree with Witch here - if you're not qualified to teach, you should be running in the opposite direction from this as fast as possible. Have they offered you a suitable payrise to reflect your new teaching responsibility?

Not a nice turn of phrase huh. As for suppliers ringing up, there are some that we have built a relationship with and don't mind talking to. The others... not so much.

Keep in mind with the enterprise kit, you're not just buying a bunch of access points - you're buying a bunch of intelligently managed access points, with a central controller to do the managing. This should greatly reduce APs interfering with each other, improve load balancing, handing of roaming clients from one AP to another, make it much easier to secure and manage your wireless infrastructure... all kinds of stuff. This is what costs the money, and if you have the money and the requirement for this sort of managed environment then its money well spent. I can't discuss what we paid for our Aruba deployment, but it was significant and it was money very well spent imho.

Heh. I still really like Apple computers for personal use. It's just that it's clear that they feel the same way about having their products used in an 'enterprise' setting that I do about using OS/2 or Lotus Notes. And I'm not comfortable betting against the bank with my employer's money.

Because this process becomes less and less manageable as the value of X gets higher. My college has got better things for me to be doing with my time than messing around with the app store trying to buy 75 individual copies of each thing we want - is that even possible without 75 accounts, or will it just say "you've already purchased that..."?

I understand that it's the "Apple way". The point is that none of us should (and we certainly will not) work that way with any supplier. Essentially, my employer's position comes down to: proper licence agreements or GTFO. Software companies don't get to make dire threats about piracy on one hand and then not bother with proper licence agreements on the other, as far as we're concerned.

That's the impression I get too, which is why we're not bothering to upgrade from Snow Leopard and have no plans to invest any more in our mac infrastructure. If Apple don't want to sell stuff to us, we don't see why we should struggle to try and force them. As I'm from FE, I'll say we've heard a lot of stuff but no-one has ever shown me something written in black and white that confirms what my college can and can not do with OSX licences in this regard. This is crazy - you can't base a major deployment on rumour and hearsay.

I suspect, because they don't think they have. Fancy tricks to hide browsing from explorer give the illusion of security, but you still need to apply correct permissions to shares to ensure they actually are safe, at which point hiding their existence becomes moot. I know other people think and work differently and that's fine too but I'm kinda with them on this one.

I think I'm somewhere between this, the re-tred and the bofh - the last one not defined here yet but, well, I think we all know.

To their credit they do appear to have taken prompt action once they found out about the problem. We all know that no matter how "apparently safe" a website is, there's just no substitute for parental supervision of a child's Internet use

Remove CC3 and replace with a vanilla network infrastructure and install Windows 7 on 1500 or so PCs. Upgrade numerous servers to win 2008r2 Hopefully fix our Bloxx deployment. Upgrade firmware on all our switches Convert science rooms to normal teaching rooms with PCs in them. Convert teaching rooms to science rooms (Yes, I do realise what I said in the line above this. No I don't want to talk about it) Install new TV signage system

It should be something that's known at all senior levels of the org - you need permission to use personal info and should be very careful about where and how its used. The obvious example is a child that's been removed from bad parents and placed into foster care for their own protection being traced by family that's not supposed to have contact with them through this kind of leak. This could potentially have tragic consequences.

I can't recommend Bloxx at the moment. We deployed it in January and we've had no end of problems with it ever since, both in terms of general use and specifically in how it works with wireless devices.

I think the point I'd hang on is this whole "Need to replace our current system" thing. If you don't have a pressing business case for unified comms, presence or shared cabling infrastructure, etc. then you probably don't have a need to replace your current system with a VOIP system. However, if your current phone system is shagged and needs replacing with something anyway, then I think it certainly makes sense to replace it with a modern system that enables all the nice features that an integrated VOIP system makes possible.

Do you need to "re-brand" your service? Perhaps launch a nice new system with more feedback, a blog, improved (or at least, more publicity for something you're already offering) service desk opening times and services offered? If people are upset at a lack of replacement hardware, are you as open as possible about the replacement process? (This is something that could be talked about on a blog, for example). One thing we did was offer an "IT Surgery" to staff - a time slot in the college's CPD programme where both myself (senior engineer) and the NM were available to talk to staff about any concerns/ideas/questions they might have in a less formal setting outside of a service desk call or whatever. This was a chance for them to bring issues to us, for us to tell them about things, and for people to discuss and understand one another's ideas... this helped us understand where something that sounded trivial to us was actually quite disruptive to the learning process and helped teaching staff understand that something that sounded like a simple request to them actually required a good amount of resources and couldn't be done 'just like that'. This really helped.

I'm not sure what the problem is here. If you made it a Global Catalogue server then it will show up as a Global Catalogue. That's the correct behaviour. A GC is a superset of the DC functions, not a different type of server.

I can see them having their uses in certain areas as kiosks, and suchlike. However, I can't imagine replacing our current classroom sets of computers with classroom sets of chromeboxes of any kind. And if sales don't take off, I also can't imagine that they'll continue to be made.

Yes, but due diligence is never an entirely bad idea. Consider the effort of applying it to suppliers that probably don't need it so much as a rehearsal for applying it to those who do.

Considering how much educational software is apparently coded by a blind drunkard who wears boxing gloves to type code, I don't think it is that strange to question the suitability of anything that claims to be for education.

Microsoft always use their beta products internally, its a process known as "Eating your own dogfood" at Microsoft. It gives them a chance to not just beta test things informally but to test some very specific workloads and scenarios (e.g. they can route a specific amount of traffic to their IIS8 cluster and test how it fails under load). They used to have all kinds of build labs there that can test specific scenarios in the lab, and they liked to compare these tests to results from live traffic. Can't really say more as I think I've signed a NDA covering most of what I know about their datacentres.