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Perhaps some sort of energy monitoring - a database of energy usage for a particular item, then a ping to a piece of equipment. Then it could give a sort of heat map where the most energy is being used.

For those with a current subscription to a premium upgrade assurance plan, you can now download the latest version (12) of papercut. A couple of really nice features - convert to grey scale (auto convert colour prints to grey scale) and auto convert singled sided to duplex. Could save a fair bit on paper and toners. PaperCut 12.0 automatically converts print jobs to grayscale and duplex – PaperCut Blog / News

Just goes to show what a mess BSF can get you into. It pretty much traps you into continuing paying the service provider to take on the replacement / updates to the infrastructure. If you want to opt out then it pretty much leaves your with leasing or loans.

I'm well aware of that figure, but I believe schools can save if a specific capital project has been agreed up front - we did this for 2 new buildings. If they haven't had the foresight to do this, then modifying the budgets to bring forward other expenses may be an option to free up the money required at the time its required. Although as this is a BSF school, I'm unsure as to what the likely large capital expenditures could be.

If you're school isn't already saving some budget to cover this then they are being a bit short sighted. I'd be working out a time line of when equipment needs to be replaced (whether that's more PCs, tablet devices, servers, switches, wifi, etc). Then present this to your SMT as they, and you, need to start planning now. If they aren't going to save now, the other options are lease agreements (as on other threads - read the small print) or loans. This would help spread the costs over the life of the kit and not require the school to have to cash up front.

They are a chargeable item from Capita. You can get some features from Salamander Software

Teachers are typically paid to work a fixed number of hours per year (1265 for a full time teacher). Their teaching / ppa / extra curric events / meetings don't usually go anywhere where near this figure. When they choose to use these is often left to their discretion - e.g. do they do lesson prep in holidays, weekend or after school - it's their choice. What you would be doing is changing the working practices of the staff, which really should be negotiated with their unions.

We set drives to be dynamic with a limit of 127GB. Most stuff doesn't get beyond 20GB. SIMS has grown with docstorage, FMS, SIMS, local backups, etc to about a 100GB vhd but now has plenty of free space after a good tidy up. All 20+ servers we have (excluding file storage but including exchange) don't take up more that 800GB.

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Niffty trick, could also just limit it to site:sch.uk for all schools. How about site:sch.uk vacancy "network manager" Or: vacancy "network manager" site:sch.uk - Google Search To limit to the last month of searches.

This situation will only become worse as we go forward with more and more academies. As schools opt out of LA control they will have fewer people to go to for advice or be unwilling to go to them as it will come at a price. While governors have some role in this, you'll find if its anything like my experience of being a governor, these decisions are devolved to the head and budgets are just rubber stamped in a sub committee. This story fits the old adage - if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

We have about 140 staff laptops and are currently replacing them at a cost of £500 per laptop for 4 years The change over to desktops would have been a massive PIN. We would have had to buy all the PCs at once including for rooms that didn't regularly have a teacher in - we have 2 batches of laptops 2 years apart, but teachers teach in a variety of different blocks. £400x150 + loss of 2 years investment on laptops. There would have had to have been 100+ new network points wired in. £50x100 As our school has 12 different edge cabs, that would have meant a fair few more switches for all the extra ports. Say 6x£900 Then the extra cost of developing remote access ?? While I'm no fan of laptops for staff and would have loved to get rid due to the support issues alone, the numbers for us just didn't add up. So we've factored in the re-use and trade-in of laptops. After 4 years of staff use, they get bumped to student usage or for training / exam usage. I am totally against an more laptops for student usage though as they are just a total waste at our place IMHO.

We run SIMS with hyper-v using vhds with no issues. One for the OS, one for the sims data. If going down the local storage for vhds, I'd see if you could split the 8 into a single raid 1 mirror for the OS and a raid 10 for the vhds. Check if you could move the 6x raid 10 drives on mass to another G7 in the event of server failure.

Who uses the exchange box? If just staff I'd be tempted to advise management of the problem, and through them make all staff aware of the issues. As part of the advice to staff I'd suggest to them they delete all the old junk they have and backup any important attachments. This should cover your back then if the worst happens - given you've only been there a month you need to make management and staff it might get worse before it get better. On the technical side, my first thought is to try and do a physical to virtual conversion. How easy this will be depends on your RAID set-up. There are some free vmware and hyper-v tools to do this from a boot cd. The major problem here might be the RAID fault that screws it up mid conversion. I'd then run the migration from the VM, first doing DB checks on this maybe using snapshots (not sure how exchange 2003 behaves with snapshots though). If the worst happens at least you'd have the physical machine to revert back to.

We switched to HP Proliants a few years ago and have been impressed with the price / performance. Some suppliers can get extremely good deals via special bids to HP. If you're looking to do HP switches too, you should get a cracking deal for all that equipment. Never really had any issues for support, but the odd ones we have had were dealt with quickly enough. We only have 3 relatively low spec (4gb ram) DCs for a network of 700+ machines with good login speeds. I'd look at your login profiles - are they roaming or mandatory? If roaming then your network and files servers will be taking a battering if the profiles are large.

Personally I'd virtualise more: 2x DCs 2K each 2x Hyper V 6K each (SIMS, SCCM, Print, old Intranet Server,Impero Server and maybe a Virtual DC) 1x DPM 2K (use old SAN for storage) 1x New SAN for Hyper V machines + File storage (12K left for this should get you about 6TB) The Hyper-v machines can have about 100Gb RAM for that money, giving plenty of expansion room. Plus using data-centre licences will give you unlimited licences for extra servers.

Looks like the IP of the print server has changed. Find out the print servers IP by opening a command prompt and ping printserver Then find out if anything is using the printserver IP: ping -a 10.0.0.15 If you don't want to change the script, you need to change the print servers IP back. Easiest way as witch said would be to add a reservation in your DHCP server. (you'll need the MAC address to do this, which you'll be able to find in the DHCP server)

We have about 2Tb for all staff and student files. While it doesn't sound a lot in a world where 2Tb drives are less than £200, it should be noted there is a difference between basic end user drive prices and enterprise quality drives. Enterprise drives for SANs can be many more times expensive (£400-500). Also redundancy (RAID) has to be considered plus the cost of backing up that drives data (snap shots, backups, disaster recovery, shadow copies, etc.) I'd estimate it's something like a ratio of 5:1 for usable space to actual drive space needed to be purchased. So for 2Tb you'll need to buy something like 10Tb. While all this doesn't need to be enterprise quality, it soon adds up. So to add 2Tb more for us would cost about 2x £400 (core SAN), + 3x £200 (Backup SAN)= £1400 Now that's assuming your SANs / servers have spare bays and you don't need to upgrade those too......

Yep, local cached mandatory profiles are not deleted. If the domain isn't available, the user can still login and use that profile. A super-mandatory profile will be deleted on log-off. This prevents the user logging in if the domain isn't available. Super-Mandatory User Profiles - Windows 7 Tutorial

If you're using windows 7, I think profiles are only deleted if they are super mandatory

Sounds like you're using a failover cluster. To view the storage space left use the failover cluster manager and look under storage.

We use a Total Cost of Ownership spread sheet which keeps track of all our spending. We have a rolling program of replacements and this lets us plan the costs. I posted it on here a while ago: TCO

We've used these before without issue: Hills Components UK for a single 5m extension Hills Components UK for a 12m extension or more (we did 2 of these plus the 5m cable with no issue)

Have you tried within the new system manager 7 instead of old v6? Its been working fine for us for the last few months under the .net interface.

If you have - A1(firstname),B1(lastname),C1(domain - '@school.county.sch.uk) then: =CONCATENATE(A1,(LEFT(B1,1)),C1) Use this formula then copy and paste values to save as a CSV. You need the ' before the @ to define it as text. edit: Got distracted mid post :-)