Graham001

Although we offer a complete range of managed services, which can be tailored to an individual school's requirements, my own experience is that generally primaries tend not to require a great deal of dedicated ICT support. In fact, our Primary school team equates to roughly 1 technician to 5 primary schools, with additional support provided by an additional team if required. Generally, 1 day a week for each of the schools is more than enough, with additional support only really required if one of the schools has a specific project to complete - this is where the additional support comes in. There are also a few secondary schools that we provide assistance to, who have their own dedicated ICT support staff. To reduce their costs & ensure that their ICT support resources are fully utilised, some offer their ICT support staff to local primary schools for a small charge. This enables them to sustain plenty of work for their ICT staff, whilst providing some income to partially cover ICT salaries. Sharing ICT support staff with another school may therefore be very beneficial to you, depending upon the regularity of your need for dedicated support. From your original post though, it would appear that your needs are quite small, so might be worth your while bringing up the subject at an ICT steering group to see if any of the other schools local to you would be open to selling you some resource.

Hi, I'm Graham and I'm a public sector procurement specialist, employed within a large company providing goods & services to a number of local authorities. One of my main roles is providing advice & guidance to educational establishments with regard to hardware & software requirements. Most of the schools & colleges that I deal with either fall under the local authorities that we support, or have a managed service agreement with the company that I work for. I won't disclose the company that I work for, simply because I am not here to advertise them or sell anybody anything. I am however, quite happy to share with users my experiences good & bad of products that I have come across in my day to day work and share the feedback that I receive from schools that I deal with regarding products that they have purchased through me. I am also happy to share prices with users on the forum, purely to help them with comparing market pricing with the pricing that I am able to secure. I am happy to share details of suppliers that I have either dealt with or deal with on a day to day basis and happy to put people in touch with them if they feel that they are getting a raw deal with their current supplier. I will not emblazon any suppliers details all over the forum, but will quite happily PM any users with a contact name, number & email address to put them in touch with trusted contacts. So whats in it for me? The opinions of users on this site with regard to products that I am not as familiar with gives me some insight into any pitfalls that I should be looking for if one of the schools that we look after were to ask for said goods. I get first hand experiences from people at the coalface who are using these products on a day to day basis & in turn can share their experiences with my customers.

Some manufacturers (Dell definitely do, as do HP I think) will supply PCs with Chassis locks to prevent internal components walking. As far as the cables are concerned, there are plenty of inexpensive options on the market to prevent tampering & theft, such as locking network cables, locking VGA adapters etc, costing little more than a couple of quid each. General rule of thumb is that if somebody wants something badly enough, they will get it no matter what deterrents are in place. There are a few schools that I deal with regularly that have problems with theft of keyboards, mice etc. I generally advise them to buy cheap keyboards & mice as these are less attractive to the thief, and hold a couple of spares. For example, one of the schools I deal with buys all HP kit. Rather than HP keyboards & mice costing around £12 each, I tend to supply them with Logitech OEM keyboards & mice at around £3-£4 each. They are decent quality & do exactly the same job as the HP ones, but for some reason, tend not to go walkies as often as the HP ones.

Cost of Windows Server Standard 2008 R2, purchased through a typical Academic Select agreement would be around £56.00 Academic CALs are also not that expensive, although it would really boil down to how the school choose to purchase - per device, or per user. Generally, for schools I would tend to recommend purchasing on a per device basis as this is something that is likely to stay relatively static, although this just a general statement provided without really looking at the school's individual circumstances, as in some cases, a per user solution can be the more cost effective option. The important thing to get across to anybody who throws the "4GB stick only costs a few quid" argument at you is that a USB stick is very easily lost, along with the data that is stored on it. Secure USB sticks, such as the Kingston Datatraveller DTVP, Iron Key etc are significantly more expensive, but do provide an extra layer of security to your data by way of encryption. However, surely the best place to store data safely, is centrally within a dedicated SAN, where it will be secure & regularly backed up. Also remind them that if data is lost along with a USB stick, they have nobody to blame but themselves for being stupid enough to put it there in the first place.