CAWJames

Hi all, Just posted a new job for VLE technician over in the job section, though I'd let people know over here in the VLP section! Its primarily Moodle based with eStream integration in Huntingdon, Cambs VLE Technician Thanks James

Hi all, Another post at our college, VLE is Moodle: The College of Animal Welfare Due to continued growth in the use of the College's Virtual Learning Environment we have a new position based at our main administration office at our Huntington centre. This key role will be responsible for the day today management of the College's Virtual Learning Environment (moodle). In conjunction with academic and administration staff you will act as the contact for VLE queries from staff and students at CAW. You will also work closely with the members of the development team. This is a hands-on role that requires an enthusiastic and innovative individual. You must be able to think on your feet, work independently but also as part of a team. Ideally successful candidates will have experience in administering a moodle system and working with IT in an educational establishment. You will need at least a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS and importantly the ability to resolve problems and explain solutions. Key tasks will include; *Monitoring daily tasks and anticipating issues. *Administrating the VLE, including the assisting with uploading of e-learning content. *Resolving any user access issues. *Arranging training and briefings on functionality of the VLE. You should possess excellent communication skills, and the ability to work under pressure is essential for this post. With unique opportunities to develop your career and a good salary this position is an opportunity not to be missed. For further details and an application pack contact [email protected] or phone 01480 422060 Thanks James

Hi all, A new post has been offered at our college, see below, when it goes on our website, I will post a link: The College of Animal Welfare Due to our continued growth and investment in our IT systems we have a new position for an IT Support Technician. This role can either located in Leeds or in Huntingdon, we are flexible between those locations. The role is the first line of support to users of the College IT systems and to maintain our systems to ensure consistent availability and also to improve the quality of user experience. Daily duties will include; supporting staff on site and over the phone at our four centres across the UK including network, server, printers & computer support. There will be travel needed between centres, so a driving licence required. Technical experience: • Microsoft Windows Server/Network Services installation and administration (Inc TCP/IP, DNS, Group Policy, DHCP) • Solid understanding of LAN & WAN network infrastructure including DNS, DHCP, WINS, TCP/IP, and Active Directory. • Exchange Server 2010/2013 • System Center 2012 R2 • ICT skills to a professional level in Microsoft packages (Windows, Office). • Strong communication skills as well as strong analytical and problem solving skills. This is an excellent opportunity for the successful candidate to develop their knowledge whilst getting involved in new projects, participating in the design and implementation of creative solutions and making a positive contribution in the quality of the IT services available. For further details or an application pack please contact [email protected] or telephone 01480 422060 Thanks James

Excellent, and is the stating of a salary optional or a hard requirement? Thanks for all your help, James

Thankyou! I assume by schools it means establishments with education as a primary focus? or does it mean only schools, no FE,HE,colleges etc?

Hi all, We have a couple of technical posts (1 general IT, 1 Moodle) available at our college, is this something we can advertise here? If so, where? I don't want to break any terms! Thanks James

Rereading my reply, I think I should have expanded with: if you have an agreement with Microsoft, ie licence a desktop with core or enterprise CAL's, you cant go wrong with free... I made the assumption that people would have the education desktop with an EES agreement. Thanks James

If you have an agreement with Microsoft, you cant go wrong with free for MS System Center Endpoint... I don't think you even need to licence System Center, you just lose the central management, so deploy with GPO with a config file for each client/server type

I just lost an hour and a half of my life on the spring wallpaper tutorial, what a way t...ooh shiny...

After a 'fishing expedition' we are looking at vWorkspace from Dell Wyse, and XenDesktop. They mentioned a price for the Dell platform with server, I mentioned education and OVS and he said discount could be hefty, we will have to wait and see!

Another vote for virtual, plus with 2 hosts, you can have a 2012R2 cluster and give yourself some redundancy too I love being able to shift my victuals to one host and then reboot the other and vice versa!

Health and Safety rules here, considering we are semi-medical training Vet Nurses. We even have a physiotherapist visit once a month for staff(ok we have to pay, but we get the time for it)

Ok yes, 20k is on the high side. but we use £700 as a ball park for admin PC's, usually an i5 with a large adjustable screen and a second smaller screen. It usually come in much cheaper when I go out for quotes, but it gives us a standardised figure to work with in speculative conversations! Hope that makes sense of our arcane ways here in the land based sector!

Thanks for the reply, We have 100 odd staff, around 50 concurrent, spread across a hub and spoke VPN on at least 10 meg leased lines at 4 UK locations. We also have 10 people at anyone time logging in from home, we also have a few hundred student use PC's around the centres too(not to mention 100's of netbooks, that would benefit from a nippy server side desktop), to give you a better idea of size. Its not really a question of cost, just what is the best way to spend that 20k! In terms of home workers and people of site at other centres, and simplification of admin tasks, VDI sounds like a winner, but I still need to do all the comparisons and ask the right questions. A server to handle at least 100 VDI desktops will not be cheap, then there will be licensing of course. To be honest I do not know how far £20k will get us in the VDI world. I used to deal in Citrix Presentation Server, and that wasn't peanuts!! Thanks again James

Morning all, We had our monthly IT meeting yesterday and the question of staff PC refresh came up. We first decided that 30 PC's would cover replacements and a certain amount of future proofing. BUT then someone piped up that this would be about the £20k mark in shiny new boxes, is there a better way? In a simple world, use the old computers as thin/fat clients and invest in server side technology, ie VDI In the past I was a user and one time re-seller of Citrix technologies, even having a working desktop on my work phone over gprs in 2003!! Is this the way to go these days? We have EES, so VDA should be covered by SA under that agreement. This would only be for the FTE count, but who knows, BYOD desktops on student devices? Any insight into this? VDI-in-a-box has been slated for the chop(although not for a time yet) with no replacement on the horizon(no pun intended), so what other options are there? We licence System Center, so ***-V technologies could be an option. Thanks James

It came along as part of the 6.2.0.0 platform update, which was on early release. We are currently running 6.2.2.0-12n successfully. Thanks James

Hi, it got solved with one of the last updates to the SonicOS software which added Portshield to the higher end units, which I always found weird it was only the little units that had portshield! Not sure that would help with Smoothwall though. Thanks James

Hi all, We currently run Lync Online as our video conferencing system, and find it to be a lot better than the other main providers(not to mention free for eduction ) I digress though, we are piloting running a Lync on-premise farm to utilize Enterprise Voice, and thought that as we licence the Enterprise CALS we would get all of Lync included for my users for the just the price of a server licence. After some extensive reading, it turns out that the Lync enterprise CAL does not include the Enterprise Voice component and that we would need a Lync Plus CAL. Does anyone know if this is FTE based or per user, and how much/ballpark? We will stick with Asterisk if its going to be silly money, I just thought as we use Lync already, why not integrate?(don't you just love that word!) Thanks James

Hi all, me again! We currently use Lync online across the college, and it works very well for video conferencing and general "at-desk collaboration". I now want to add an on-prem server so I can hook our PBX into it, and then move some users to the on-prem for phone support. Has anyone done this, all the guides and posts I have seen work from an on-prem then add online scenario. Do I just: Setup ADFS on top of DirSync(we already DirSync but dont federate). Create an on-prem mirroring the domains we already have in online. Set up a Hybrid. That seems too easy, as the DNS is giving me a headache. If we already have meet/admin etc setup for online, what happens when the on-prem expects to be contacted via this too? Any O365 experts around? Thanks James

Thankyou for the replies, although I thought I would go and read the Ja.net terms again, and Clause 5 of the Eligibility Policy states: Rules for the Choice of an ac.uk Domain Name 5. An eligible organisation may take out as many names within the ac.uk domain as it wishes, subject to the name conforming to RFC1035 , conforming to the following rules and the payment of a fee if applicable: https://community.ja.net/library/janet-services-documentation/eligibility-policy So it seems, we may be allowed to have more than one after all! Thanks James

Question, do we have to use our ac.uk address for the students or can we use any of our assigned domains in 0365 for them to be eligible for ProPlus? I assume we can only have 1 ac.uk per organisation still, unless Ja.net have changed the rules(would really love one for staff and one for students!)? Thanks James

All sounds good so far Thanks again James

Thanks for that, any idea where the Alumni options are, or do we have to have them added to our account? And I assume that we can assign them, the same as we would using Powershell? My head hurts just thinking about all this, and the more zero touch we make it the better! James

Morning all, We already have a 'faculty' O365 account, and now that MS are offering ProPlus to all, we want to get our students into the system. We are strange in that all our students are held in an SQL database and not in AD, but this we are living with, and will either powershell straight from our DB to O365 or add a "middleware" fake AD syncing with SQL(which would be overkill for just O365, but gives us more auth options for other systems in the long run). So the question has arisen, and I can't quite seem to find an answer, what happens when a student leaves? Do we have to prune? or from a marketing view can they keep the address perpetually as an alumni account(oh, think of the mail shots!!)? How do MS view a person who is no longer in education with us, but we allow them to keep the address? We also do continuing CPD over a former student working life, so people tend to stay on our DB for a loooonnnnngggg time. I assume we could prune using powershell, as easily as making addresses? Simple table/view with additions/deletions in I suppose, love SSIS! Thanks James

See my above reply, LACP over crossover seems to work fine. Live migration works well, at least for small test VM's. Moving the bigger ones around may be another situation entirely!