sahmeepee

Interesting thread. I am currently in a state of misguided denial about BSF! It seems crazy that schools are being given a financial incentive to make an IT procurement decision which simply wouldn't stand up on its own merits. This gov't clearly has a hard-on for private business whether it's cost effective or not. From that thread: I'd be interested to see some numbers on that to get an idea of what the ongoing costs are. Pinning information down beyond "visions" and "potential" seems to be pretty difficult with BSF until the brown stuff hits the spinny thing. Their website for example has no section covering support staff (someone in here or schools-it brought this up) and the documentation is mostly woolly tosh about becoming e-confident with e-learning in e-schools. I have sifted the Wave 2 overview document (MSWord .doc) from the BSF site and the main area of concern for me was this paragraph: With rose-tinted specs you might say that the LEAs could push all school IT support departments to provide/meet an SLA and that would meet the "ongoing service delivery" bit. In reality, they'll be in partnership with private companies who'll see the support contract as a fat, juicy cheque that they don't want to miss out on. My concern is that by going down the FITS / SLA route in school now I might just be packaging my staff up ready for an external company to one-up our SLA and take us over. It worries me from self-interest, quality of service and value-for-money perspectives.

I do that too, but it's not so hot for (offline) laptops unless you sync the resources folder.

Definitely interested. I'd rather not do it at 1/2 term, but I guess it might be the only way to escape for some.

We block all these types of sites now as they all do pretty much the same thing and all seem to end up in some form of online "bullying" (based on a wide range of definitions). The biggest difference I saw with Bebo was that you had to be invited to join a school by a member of that school, making it very hard to monitor what was going on. Definitely not what our school network is for. This may be of interest for doing the same thing in a more structured way: http://learnerblogs.org/ I can't say it won't end up in "Gaz'n'pete sez that Hayleys a proper slag n there rite", but at least it'll have moderated comments etc.

This seems like the sanest approach. Let any program run on C:\ (say), but everything else is restricted. Then deny them access to browse the C:\ drive using group policy. (you could go tighter and allow only "c:\program files", but there's bound to be some piece of educational software written circa 1992 that you have to put in c:\ because it hates spaces in paths) Obviously if you need to run apps from windows shares etc., you can just add them to the path rule in software restrictions, but just make sure they can't write to anywhere they can execute from.

We only provide limited support for laptops for teachers, because they're supposed to be supported by the manufacturer/vendor (ahem, yeah right). Other than that, laptops bought by departments/teachers/us can be put onto the network with offline files etc., with the caveat that they cannot be connected to any network connections outside school (otherwise they'll bring viruses in). Their group policy settings are tweaked very slightly to allow offline files (disabled elsewhere) so the laptops live in their own OU. If they don't want them networked, that's up to them and it means they can use them with their home internet, fill them up with viruses, install crap on them and bring them to us for ultra-low-priority fixing. Generally, laptops are more troublesome than desktops by an order of magnitude. Offline files is definitely better given to the technically switched-on staff members.

You might want to try sticking Caffe1ne v1.5 into the startup items for all/some users on your whiteboard PCs. (I haven't tested the software myself, so I can't vouch for it) Personally I just increased the timeout slightly (to 15 mins i think) in group policy for the whiners. I'd rather not make exceptions for individual people as it makes GPMC all untidy ( ), but sometimes it's worth making exceptions for an easy life.

The description suggests that this won't work with Server 2003 - does it work with server versions of Windows or is it desktop OSes only?

We've renamed the admin account on all our servers (at install time) with no problems. I'd think all Microsoft stuff will reference the domain admins group or the Administrator's SID (the user part of the SID is always the same for the builtin administrator)

Ours is from a company called Infineer. It works fine mostly, but does have a few technical hitches from time to time. Support is fairly quick and they aren't afraid to visit, but they often want to charge for fixing problems which I would deem to be their fault. I believe a lot of the problems our school had initially were caused by slightly overkeen sales reps selling us features which hadn't been implemented yet. People buying from them now could probably expect an easier ride.

There's not a fat lot in friendly, free video editing software beyond Windows Movie Maker (or iMovie on the Mac). Adobe's Premiere Elements (ie slightly cut-down version) is only about £35 per seat in ones, less in bulk, but for a suite of machines I'd be loathed to fork out for it.

We also have Eclipse2 and the fingerprint scanning gubbins, as well as the door scanner which locks the doors when someone tries to do a bunk with a book (perhaps that belongs in the ICT white elephants thread!). We've had a few database corruption problems with Eclipse 2, which has either meant sending our database off to eclipse to get it cleaned up or running fix tools they send us. Their tech support is pretty clueless and the person we spoke to contradicted herself about 5 times during one support case. The problems were sorted in the end though, so it's not all bad news. As for usability, the librarians and their little helpers seem to find it quite simple to use and featureful. No complaints there. I'll PM you if our librarian fancies showing you our setup.

Unfortunately Jen wasn't there on the Friday when I turned up, so no wifi detector for me. Missed out on the jars of BBC jam too I'm afraid. I did manage to get a bottle of wine from a fingerprint scanner guy and an unfeasibly large mug from Akhter. This year was also a bumper one for boiled sweets and rock - I'm not sure what that was about.

I saw a forum where people who'd been in the "live studio audience" were discussing its merits. Mostly they were slagging off that guy out of Nathan Barley though. I will try to dig out a link. EDIT! It's in a thread on the Cook'd and bomb'd forum - The first review is on page 2 (of 19!)

csvde doesn't require knowledge of LDAP syntax IIRC, that's LDIFDE. Out of interest, does it really want the year group and what does it do with it?

We used a similar program but ended up getting rid of it because it didn't have features to handle updates as you mentioned DF does. In that situation, you can clear individual PCs of viruses, but they're only getting them because the AV and patches are constantly out of date! I imagine you'll have to exclude all of the Office, Windows and antivirus folders for updating to work properly. Possibly other folders for stuff like SIMS which updates (downdates?) regularly.

EXACTLY the same problem here (different onboard graphics to yours).. it'd hang at 100% CPU every time we ran it after installing the newer version until we made that setting change. Very annoying and took a fair old while to figure out.

If you're interested, they've fixed that problem in Google Earth now, but it won't change the path to its cache if you upgrade an old version so you have to either do a full uninstall and then install the new version or install over the top and do the necessary tweaks (registry iirc)

I suppose it's a bit of a catch: a 19" widescreen has less screen area than a 19" 'narrow' screen (because it's less square and they're measuring the diagonal). I suspect it'll be less tall than a 17" judging by the piccy. This is probably why so many laptops are widescreen now (aside from the portable DVD-player angle).

I had a situation the other day which shows how it (unfortunately) isn't always so simple... We had a member of staff come in asking for us to go and put MS Office onto a laptop which had been provided by the council for a child with tunnel vision. The local visual impairment adviser was in school and was going to show the child how to use MSOffice with their particular disability. They had no MSOffice license/boxed copy. I explained to them the terms of our licensing and that it wasn't legal to just shove it on without paying for it. We didn't get as far as discussions of whether we would be willing to buy it and put it on another day as that wasn't an immediate fix. I then went on to give a quick demo of OOo Writer and Calc to show what a remarkably coincidental doppelganger of MSOffice apps they were. The teacher seemed to absorb the information and went off. We then had another visit from an SEN-type which covered pretty much the same ground and were told that OOo was not an option because the adviser wanted to show the child Office's keyboard shortcuts and they would all be different in OOo (they were seemingly unwilling to spend the time verifying this). At one point, whilst demo'ing the near-identical-to-MSWord "Save/Save as..." procedure in Writer, I was asked "Do you know what tunnel vision is!?" - the implication being that tunnel vision is a disease which causes people to drop dead instantly when faced with a Save As dialog 2 pixels different from that of MS Word. Luckily she knew what a door handle was and used it before I clocked her one :x . End result: Teacher exits and bad-mouths our IT support dept to anyone that will listen. Visual impairment bod goes home after achieving nothing, presumably to return when MSOffice has been procured. Days later, laptop magically receives a copy of MSOffice from some outside (and I suspect not legal) source.

We use a small script which runs as part of the login script which sends the username and computer name to a sql database (which logs the server time of the INSERT as well). Our database is SQL Server, but you could use anything. The data has been collected for about 8 months now and it's not caused any problems - it's fast, reliable and puts no strain on the server. We have a set of ASP pages (again, you could use PHP or whatever) which let us do a range of queries on user/room/PC/time and some more advanced stuff for detecting concurrent logins. I've also used it to analyse which times of day most logins occur, where, by whom etc.

Our usual suspects: Software licensing: Phoenix (after getting the runaround from Ramesys a while back) Hardware: Inmac (phones every couple of weeks, quite flexible on prices) Misco (good prices (pen drives!), emails every week or two, apparently they're a pain if you need to return something) Insight (again competitive prices, no pestering at all) Aria (good for bits and pieces, very flexible when you bulk-buy, quick turnaround, no pestering at all) ...and a new one! - TSI Europe - worryingly cheap for toners and projector lamps. Not had any problems with them as yet. That's about it. Scan and Dabs are useful as pricing benchmarks, but don't really do haggling, especially Dabs.

Dameware here... home-scripted VNC gubbins at the last place. No complaints with either really.

We get pretty good use out of our Denford, our microscope thingy and our cashless catering. A school I used to work at had laptops, tablet pcs AND pdas for the head and his 2 deputies. The head also had a PC in his office and a PC school bought him at home. In his last fortnight before retiring he tried to get a new PDA to replace the 2 year old one he had. The head's PA also had a PDA so that they could synchronise calendars. Argh. So glad to be free of that place.

Ordinarily I would laugh, but I've had the exact same thing. When told "you can just to windows + L" the reply came, "but I've got so much stuff to do when I'm leaving the office". Ack. It wouldn't be so bad, but there's a bug in the group policy setting in XP SP1 which sometimes causes it to fail.