Roberto

As spelt out fairly clearly on the Microsoft website, Exchange 2007 requires Windows 2003 x64 standard or enterprise, and can run on both the R2 and "normal" versions of Windows.

Right. Adding site-wide email for all staff and students is a big issue that will certainly add to your department workload, and your overall responsibility however it is managed. This is important and the angle that I would attack from, I wouldn't rattle on about how it's exchange server and you saw a job advert for a full-time exchange admin once and it said the salary was.... The platform is irrelevant, the work is what is important. If your school hired a full-time minibus driver here they'd be focusing on the amount and type of driving involved, not on whether or not the vehicle came from Ford or Vauxhall. Absolutely. You have the right to fair compensation for your qualifications, abilities and experience. Sadly, your employer is not obliged to be the one who gives you what you deserve (I'm diplomatically reaching for 'your boss may be an idiot' here), so you should pursue this but you might also have to be prepared to find the only way to get the salary you deserve for the work you're doing is to move on. You might find searching public sector trade rags or online public sector jobs, and the like, find some comparable jobs to yours with a more suitable salary and use this as evidence that you deserve that rise. And good luck. I know my replies probably sound a bit biting and cynical (I prefer to think of myself as 'experienced' but still) but I really hope you can get that fair day's pay for your fair day's work that we all deserve, but these are questions / attitudes you will have to answer to get that payrise.

Im more interested in how they adapt it for the UK, if they sell it as is then they are on to a loser right off. For once I hope they are delaying its release here because the end result will be better I think the adaptation for Europe and Asia will be the 2.0 edition I'm thinking of above. 3G is really expected over here and I think it's actually a basic requirement over much of the Asian markets. Hopefully they'll fix some of the other major gaping holes too.

Perhaps the obvious answer here is to turn this on its head and only do what is currently listed as a responsibility for your job title?

I'd certainly support the need for training having your job re-assessed and I definitely support you wanting to be paid what you're worth but running an Exchange server isn't a full time job in most places unless they have very large and very specialised deployment. At the end of the day it's just another email server.

From a website that plans on selling the device - no conflict of interest there then..... PCWorld.com is the website of a major US computer magazine, you might think of it as being like PC Pro in this country. It's not pcworld.co.uk of the stores in this country. My opinion, for what it's worth: At the moment the iPhone is a great statement of intent but in terms of what it can do for you today it's a SmartPhone for people who don't know what a real SmartPhone can do. iPhone 2.0 will be really interesting.

we've been running a pilot on providing staff (ok just SMT so far during pilot phase ) with smartphones tied into our network. In case anyone else is interested, I've posted a summary on my blog. I hope this helps someone, and if anyone else is doing or has done the same thing I hope you can help me by posting your thoughts either here or on the blog site. I'm obviously interested in tips to make things more productive, and of course any landmines people might have found in their attempts at this.

No specific advice about what to set, but surely you can get ideas from the teachers that the post will support about common problems? I'd also suggest using the job description / person spec that the job is being advertised with as a framework for this... Not only might it help you but I'd say it was essential to work within these documents; a candidate would be perfectly justified if they complained that a test or task based on stuff that wasn't listed as being required or desirable for the job is flawed, and you have to be _very_ careful at all stages of the recruiting process these days.

This job description looks "broken" to me. One years experience, for a network administrator with *staff supervision experience*. I don't buy it. They aren't sure if they want a technician or a manager, and they've compromised by offering the manager's job with the technician's salary.

*blink* THAT's a bit naughty. Seems FireFox on the Mac uses .ini files to hold config info. Now I've seen it all. Anyway, seems to me that if you were doing a reload of the prefs with a login script, you could add a few lines to parse the contents of ~/library/application support/Firefox/* and grab the bookmarks.html file off somewhere safe, do what you have to do then replace it. I realise it's darn sight easier for me to say that than it is to roll a working bit of code, but it ought not be too difficult either. something like ls the path above to grab the folder name holding the profile info, pipe that to a cp command to give the full path to the files inside the folder, copy out *.html, then much the same again after?

Hey Steve, not spoke to you in a while, hope all is well! We're happy enough with ISA server, a bit of a pain with the macs (which switching to firefox cured anyway) but then these make up a very small portion indeed of what is otherwise a Windows-based network. I can't remember if I changed the authentication method on ISA server to accommodate the macs though, I remember having a look at it but can't remember if I edited anything or not with this in mind.

We're sticking with firefox and (needless to say) rolling with the template method at my place. Works very well. Safari just doesn't seem to play terribly nicely with MS ISA server regardless of how you populate it with the proxy address (Or possibly more likely, ISA server doesn't play nice with anything except IE and open source projects that have deconstructed how it does this, such as firefox)

If the machines are going to be disposed of, I'd go with Elsie's idea. There really isn't much point in going to a lot of bother if it's a detour on the way to the bin anyway.

We're happy stone customers and they've been happy to take away old kit regardless of pedigree whenever we order something from them. They _do_ supply 90% of our desktops though and get orders for several hundred a year without fail, which might make them more lenient on us than they might be on others, I don't know. What I do know is, it's free, they just want a list of what it is you're giving them, and they will come when you like and get things done. It's no hassle.

Don't shout if it isn't "you". Even if you do feel comfortable with it, I personally would try to avoid over-using it. Authority comes from being confident of yourself and your knowledge and position, so try and remember you're there because you know what you are doing and you are a valuable part of helping shape the future of these kids. Be yourself is the most important advice you can have, and I've seen it mentioned already among the good advice you've had already. Be the "you" that is responsible, in control, and knows what is going on around you. Things will certainly improve with time and practice, but I'm sure you have it in you already.

Why not move towards supporting Macs? I appreciate it's something new and difficult to learn if you've got not ready starting place, but either they'll come to you anyway like it or not or your organisation might as well pour coins down the drain and set light to £50 notes now to get a head start on wasting the money the macs will end up costing your organisation if they're "unsupported" and they end up having to call out an engineer from the nearest apple centre each time someone's mouse is 'a bit funny' or they can't find the any key. I'd second Tony's suggestion for a Mac Mini as a server. With a RAM upgrade, this really is all you need to allow basic authentication and workstation lockdown. If you're not going to let them use the Windows network for storage however, then you're looking at buying lots of firewire/USB hard drives or a xserve server and xserve RAID storage box. Expensive and troublesome to setup for just 10 clients.

We don't. There's a gui version of ClamAV on them for forms sake, but the boxes are very tightly locked down for end users, and we'll worry about virus protection when there's some there to protect against. General "It's a bit slow..."? This is part of the nature of virus scanners. This is what they all do. We tolerate it, perhaps never notice it, on a Windows box because we're used to it there but on a Mac AV is unusual (so people are not used to the slowdowns) and on the old PowerPC chips at least, the UI responsiveness always did feel a bit slow so small changes can make a big difference. Specific "This machine is actually un-usable. Look, it takes 2 mins to open safari..." First thing I'd check here is the AV settings. Is it set to scan every file, regardless of whether or not the file is likely to be infected (e.g. not much point in scanning text files, etc.) Is it set to open archives and this is eating up disk and processors resources perhaps? Are the apps giving you trouble Java apps, and the AV is set to always open and scan the contents of JAR files? (this is a good way to kill performance on a PC that uses Java apps, btw...)

Fair comment. As for the "little harsh", maybe that too but anyone who knows me well will tell you I never waste much time with sugar coating things. I guess I was, still am actually, disappointed to see technical staff pull the same kind of stunt we criticise teachers so heavily for pulling on us. Two wrongs don't make a right and all that. Buying a suite of Macs to use iMovie does seem like a poor choice to me. I'm sorry but it does. Whatever people think of the ease of use of the various packages on various platforms (and let's be clear here, for my own personal use I would pick iMovie), the fact is that there isn't enough differentiation between iMovie and packages available on Windows to justify purchasing Macs to run it. Purchasing Macs to run Pro Tools type software would be another thing again of course. Here the gap is wide enough to justify people having to learn a new OS and apps.

So with this logic there's nothing wrong with teachers introducing things at the drop of a hat and without speaking to the technical staff that have to make them work? As a big advocate of using Macs where appropriate I'm delighted that someone is trying to do so, but the way it's been approached is shockingly unprofessional and when teachers have done pretty much exactly the same to support staff, the subject of several long rants in various forums here.

As much as I "like" Macs too, my sympathies are with the 'other staff'. Either you've left some important parts of the story out here or you're honestly saying you purchased 30 computers because you 'like' them with no idea how to integrate them into ICT delivery and no provision for training staff as part of that? The mind boggles. You'll excuse me if it sounds like I don't have much sympathy for you, because I don't. As far as I'm concerned, Apple Training is spelt Solutions Inc. I'm honestly not sure how you think this would work from Apple's point of view. Convert an entire (large) school from one platform to another and you've got a story. Buy a room full of computers and you've got a room full of computers and no story to tell.

*blink* And you accepted this as a suitable warranty repair?

ph33r teh l33t!

We say... IT Labs are labs. It is not suitable for ANYONE to be eating in ANY lab at ANY time. Tough one this. Is this content legal? Are you responsible? Remove it if you are. This isn't a discussion point. Either it's 'legal' in which case it's a simple matter of how the organisation chooses to spend its resources (*all* of our staff and students get a quota, and within the terms of the AUP can spend it how they wish), or its not legal in which case it goes, end of discussion. Yikes. Oh my goodness. NO ONE here, not even us in IT Support, has an unfiltered connection of any sort at any time. We're line managed by a director, not by IT department head or anything like that. IF you're delivering a service across the whole organisation then you should be managed and funded at that level in the organisation.

I'd have to agree. There's nothing in that story that explains why outsourcing to RM Saved The Day ™ over and above simply hiring people from anywhere who actually know their ass from their elbow

At the risk of sounding like i'm ducking the issue, I'd start with defining the scope of the support and the users expectations. Money being no object is still of no help if you don't know what direction you're supposed to be wasting it in! I'd then define tiers of support * Self-Help (e.g. online user-searchable kbase, system status/availability, etc) * 1st Line helpdesk aimed to deal with incidents * 2nd Line escalation to deal with troublesome incidents and problems * 3rd line escalation to produce changes to the environment in order to properly solve problems. I would have service level agreements defined for all tiers (even self help sites need one, a guarantee of availability) and I would use proper helpdesk software to track the lifecycle of Incidents, Problems and Changes. Even with the money to buy whatever you want, you still need to define the exact problem before attempting to buy a tool to solve it.