rich_tech

I think the issue we would have is getting people to report stuff full stop at times, but thats with every school I think, it is under development with me and in fairness ManageEngine has made it easier with one or two click reporting being the option for any normal faults.

Its always suprising how the normally unflappable people flap when something trivial happens I find, I have had ridiculous issues about email access and emails not sending over the years, to go along and change a , to a . in an address or restart outlook, makes me realise - Email = Serious Business

I have been looking at Helpdesk's recently again in work, primarily my motivation was to give staff the option for an email address and access to a ticketing system - i.e. helpdesk@school to log faults, we are hovering about 800+ kids at the moment and 60+ staff. Though I think we are a little small to be rolling it out with our staff. I have been looking at and used helpdesks in the past, I used spiceworks for a couple of terms to basically monitor how much support some departments were demanding (Gareth knows as I do, that some departments here are a lot more vocal and demanding on the support issues and I wanted to keep tabs on the time they were taking up) I used to use spiceworks, but recently discovered it seems to be clogging the network and driving up the CPU on our core switching, even with all scans turned off here, which isn't ideal in any way and I find that I don't trust it all that much to do as its told. I have since looked at ManageEngine ServiceDesk+, which has superior features as it is a more specific helpdesk product and it works with AD integration out of the box with minimal faff which I had with Spiceworks, though it takes a bit more time to setup as it is an all singing all dancing helpdesk compared to the simpler spiceworks offering.

cant see a link to a free version here, it wants $300 a year :/

fair play, that looks infinitely better and lighter than spiceworks

Hello All, I have fallen out a bit with spiceworks, as even though I have turned off the majority of scanning, it appears to be giving our network a bit of a kicking in places and I was wondering if anyone could recommend a better network inventory scanning software ? thats primarily all I use spiceworks for is our IT Asset Inventory in its current guise. Thanks, Richard

The Honor 6+ doesn't seem a bad phone for an Android, a staff member here had one I was looking at when I got it onto our WiFi

I have it on an old Dell Netbook at our school with 2GB ram and there isn't any noticeable slowness using it compared to my office PC.

Interesting night last night, horrible for the general paying supporter with he over-inflated prices, commentary before the game was ridiculous on ITV I thought, it was all England England England, ITV have been really poor on the neutrality stakes with pre-match build up and commentary compared to BBC that we are used to I felt throughout the tournament so far. It was very nervy the game watching it here as a Wales supporter, England were in it until the second half I thought, Australia look like they could go all the way based on last nights performance, I think the second try that came out of nothing was arguably a contender for try of the tournament there, it was very, very clever play and it cut through the England back line before they could react to the switch of direction. I thought England were going to come back into it and finish close (they didn't look like winning it to me) right up until Farrell got binned for the swinging forearm, they were lucky that was not two people binned there with Burgess as well, though Poite was and is an awful international referee I believe and didn't have a good game for both either. I am glad in a way that Joe "45 Degrees" Marler was picked up on his propping, because he's been doing that for a good while now and hasn't been picked up at all on it, where we got nailed a couple of times for him getting away with that all game. Facebook and Twitter have been quite comical in respect of the result too Its an interesting week for us now, I don't know what to make of it, I am not a fan of putting 2nd string sides on and resting players on an international game, but I can understand the logic behind doing it, if Australia play like that again, we are going to have a hard time of it I think as is anyone in the tournament, they have been the most impressive southern hemisphere team so far for me.

Seems a little unsporting to me that Scotland seem to be putting a weaker side out today with the 10 changes for SA game, though I will say so far in this world cup, there isn't a single team that has looked invincible so far.

I would disagree with that personally about leading edge, if you are EES covered in a school there isn't a bar to you being at the leading edge of the technologies in terms of MS based software, your coverage there gives you access to everything at release. I think a lot more schools will also be looking to adopt cloud services in the coming years too as it saves major money on storage costs, that much is clear. Office365 can make it a no brainer there, schools can't afford to give staff or pupils 1TB of storage each, but MS can , management isn't a major issue as it can all be done through the web console the same as being on a server, Azure AD can even help make it seamless in its integration. I look back at Windows 7 when we went to that from XP, It had a few minor issues for us in that there were basically a couple of packages that flat out hated Windows 7 and had to be upgraded when we evaluated it initially - Sibelius 5 which we were running back then was one that refused to work with any compatibility mode and also our SuccessMaker software had to go from 1.3 to 1.7.2 to accommodate that upgrade. The older software that refuses to die on our network - i.e. ActivStudio3 still runs, just looks awful and dated, but the staff are happy with that as long as it works for them. (Though the use of that software is a moot point with our department and others in the school as Gareth and I well know)

Echoing what others have said, I think you have to spell out a lot of those issues to your management about the potential for major failures, thats a basic part of any role that we have, if there is a potentially dangerous weakness that could impact the day to day business, don't be afraid to get cases together to put to your SMT about these issues, it demonstrates that you care what you do and have the initiative to find solutions in advance of problems that are hovering around the environment. It doesn't mention how you are licensed, but if you are EES covered and not perpetually licensed and within contract that should allow for upgrading of your entire estate potentially, depending on what you picked for coverage, we love the fact that we can give our staff and students the latest office products on the desktop, even allowing pupils to have it installable within the house, because of Office365 which is outstanding on Microsoft's part I think as I no longer have to show and help pupils get things like Libreoffice/OpenOffice for their computers when they don't have office removing any disadvantage for them now. Hardware - ICT Direct have been excellent with their equipment and they have already had their praises sung by many members here. I would also say don't be afraid to take things on yourself and train yourself where necessary, especially if its for the benefits of your school and making your life easier, I have spent lots of time as has @garethedmondson with researching, developing and investigating solutions and technologies to fit in and upgrade our systems, at the point where you first look at stuff, you will know very little about it. As he mentioned our virtualisation cluster that we built was a massive upgrade at the time to our aging RM infrastructure which was predominantly 2003/2003R2 and a couple of Windows 2008R2 servers. At the start of that I knew absolutely nothing about Virtualisation, I went off and built up test environments using old PCs here with the different products available and trained myself, the same for lots of other things - Apple iPad imaging and MDM, Microsoft Imaging(MDT/WDS), WSUS, Network Inventory, Mobile Printing, VLANs, Telephone Systems and their Management, Security Camera Systems, Google Apps, Office365 to name a few other things I knew nothing about before researching and using them. I have been in this situation lots of times and I really enjoy the learning side of it with new technology myself, I like solving puzzles and working it all out. I know that working in education, it can be quite limiting to professional development at times, especially given budget squeezes that we are all enduring, but I would always recommend that you make all the use of free training you can as well especially if budgets are tight, Microsoft Virtual Academy can be an excellent free training and resource guide for learning about the new technologies, as can trial editions of the server softwares if you want to quickly learn about technology on the fly. I understand that it can be an issue getting time to do this stuff in the working day as well and it isn't easy when you have a lot going on for this work, but even an hour a week of your personal time can reap huge rewards in the workplace if you can spare it.

Theres already been a campaign to change it based on the fact that its quite bad, she's no Dame Kiri Ti Kanawa thats for sure. Thats the first ever time I have thought Wales had an awful win too, we let off the gas and nearly had a similar game to England on our hands.

I have it installed and found it a bit complicated at first, it's created lots of blueprints when I only had 1 set of confide, my main problem is that it seems to not like certain things, mine won't add apps on the machine and will only work off App Store apps and sits there doing nothing on some operations, I do welcome the additional things that can be locked off

is configurator 2 available now then on proper release ?

Got it installed here, took a longer time backing up my mac in case things went wrong.

I am in Wales and work with Gareth as Witch has rightly said, Swansea based here as is our secondary.

Worst thing after that Win, I fear that we will do something daft like lose to Fiji, which we have form for. Australia are a worry for England and us too, their playing well at the moment and their backs look very sharp

In a world cup you had no choice but to go for the win so I understand completely why England did that, you cannot aim for a draw and rely on things like bonus points it has to be a win, we came alive at 60 minutes and finished a little stronger on what was a fairly equal game throughout and going down the wire kick for kick, I even then thought that it was likely something stupid was going to happen for us and we were going to be second place until Charteris locked it down near the end that was the sign for me. I don't think England or us are particularly strong as a team compared to previous efforts, though the pressure on England in their own world cup must be absolutely horrible. One thing I liked, its the most emotion that I have ever seen out of Gatland and it was quite touching to see how choked he was after that when interviewed, our injury list is worrying and grows with every game here.

Yes it does indeed

It is weird like that, because we as support don't stick to the traditional timetable of the school for majority of our work, i have even started ignoring the bell of late as it seems to have faded into the background. Whereas everyone around us is timetabled to the 50 minute slot for everything usually.

Thats the problem we had here, we had to roll anyone still using a serial connection back from 5.9 to 5.7 on our site, (Thankfully I have removed about 15-20 USB-Serial connectors over the last year though, as our HP units we are replacing old stone units with come with a serial port to make it a lot less buggy with the horror of those drivers and cables). If the board was fitted with a USB then the user is ok here on the whole, but with serial and the 5.9 drivers onwards, it just flat refuses to auto start the board connection, so in the days after changing those units, I had unhappy staff ringing as their board wasn't connected, took a while to work out it was the activdriver. Its a greater shame, because the later drivers introduce some excellent functionality into the machines, such as inking within Office.

reminds me a bit of my old Nokia 8210, one of the best phones I owned there, except the fact that microphones kept on dying with them.

Excel ? If your bank allows you to save statements its easy enough, there was an App people talked about a while back that managed finances too though the thread escapes me now.

has the new version fixed it so Serial - USB cables auto startup again, I know a few staff here would love the features of the newer driver, but it just generates calls if I put 5.9 on their machines at present because it refuses to auto start the USB to Serial cables connecting them.