gshaw

It's ridiculous W10 has been out for the best part of a year and still no-one from MS has come out and given any clear best-practice advice over which edition is a) supported and b) recommended by Microsoft. The fact we get both Education and LTSB is interesting in itself and the split of people using either edition is almost 50:50. Almost seems to come down to this... Do you want an OS that works without shedloads of bloat but isn't the official way of deploying? > LTSB Do you want an OS with MS new features but isn't built correctly for the environment its being deployed in > Education It's just crazy to ship Education and even worse, "Enterprise" editions of software with Candy Crush on the base image, would love to hear what big business make of that! There's a good OS in there somewhere but MS really aren't helping people make the most of it right now imo.

I remember reading somewhere they'd already trademarked Windows 365 and some talk of subscription based OS. Nadella also talked about SaaS being the main focus in future and Windows effectively being reduced from a core product to a runtime to get people into the ecosystem. May end up being some sort of bundle to stay on a supported branch of W10 or crippled feature set if you don't subscribe. Edit: here it is http://www.computerworld.com/article/2881899/microsoft-files-for-windows-365-trademark-hints-at-future-service.html After seeing some of their recent behaviour with telemetry etc. nothing wouldn't surprise me now, which is a shame as W10 as a product is generally pretty good and basically what Win8 should've been had MS listened at the time.

You know something is up when MS resort to a) spyware tactics and b) changing basic functionality of the UI to try and push this upgrade. If a user explicitly opts out of an action MS have no right to force their will against that choice. Another ill-advised decision, probably from the same bunch who came up with Windows 8.0, always-connected Xbox DRM, OneDrive storage reduction and forced W10 upgrades. Every single one a shoot-self-in-foot moment that erodes whatever little trust users had left in MS and their products. The way MS are trying so hard to get people on W10, along with their recent form on OneDrive means I really don't trust them not to do a bait-and-switch on W10 going subscription based in the not-too-distant future...

And sells off private data now, avoid like the plague

Hi all, We've had a few issues with e-volve exams hanging on a blank screen part way through, has anyone experienced similar issues? We've had a few support tickets that eventually come down to Flash Player but wondering if there's anything else that could be at play? Seems to affect random machines rather than whole rooms just to make things a bit more difficult Edit: resolved via C&G support, a mixture of AV exceptions on the SecureClient folder and a couple of known issues with the latest version of Flash

Me too Avast at home but may move that to ESET as the popups drive me mad

Fewer isn't good enough for business and education. The correct answer is none... nada... zero. Having gone to the effort of making a whole separate SKU and ISO for education how long would it take them to give a out-of-box clean base without resorting to LTSB? Back to Powershell and DISM it is then *sigh*

Wouldn't it be nice if MS listened to our feedback and stripped out the junk from the Anniversary Edition Education image by default when it gets released... I know wishful thinking Login speed improvements would be enough to make me change over, all versions of 10 until now have been hopeless creating the initial profile and seeing as most of our users do just that when they move between machines it's been a no-go thus far.

Trouble is not all cloud products are created equal. W10 will go subscription at some point as a local wrapper for other services as Nadella even mentioned himself that Windows isn't how MS see their future. Not all cloud products are better than local versions, especially if said "cloud" offering is just a hosted version of a legacy product. All you get there is slower processing on shared infrastructure, tougher integration (no APIs) and the fear of losing the service if renewal isn't paid. Good cloud products, great Bad cloud products, run away! The challenge is explaining the difference to the business and peering behind the curtain of the sales veil to see what's really being offered.

Bit of a pointless setting really, the domain is where we don't want to sync due to space issues on local machines. What we need is per group control of who can and can't sync data externally. Don't want to restrict students on their own devices but do need to protect confidential data staff may be storing.

One of the changes we accepted and changed our SLA around with O365 is that data is recoverable for a set period of time and after that it's "gone". If you want to actively back up email then there's products like EMC Spanning http://uk.emc.com/data-protection/spanning-backup.htm that basically flips the hosting model on its head so MS run your live service and you keep backups in-house. OneDrive \ cloud file storage could prove more interesting; generally we get very few calls about lost emails but plenty about lost files. Right now the majority of that data is in-house so we can retrieve from long backup windows. Right now that just won't happen with cloud storage so I think an area that may need further thought...

Smoothwall came in cheaper than competitors for us, interesting in light of the comments above. Filtering wise it's got some nice features but also does some silly things that our previous Bloxx unit handled better. When looking at options it always seemed to be that the firewall-first vendors didn't have quite as flexible or education-focused filtering as the more specialist vendors. Watchguard I believe have Websense providing their database so slightly more intelligence there if you can only get the one device. Otherwise a combo of something like Fortinet or Palo Alto (if you have £££) along with a Lightspeed \ Smoothwall would be best of both worlds. Also filtering in-line at the edge is preferable to using bridged proxy appliance but again the in-line high-spec firewalls tend not to have the more advanced filtering & Safeguarding features.

The more interesting one from a staff perspective is data leakage if OneDrive gets synced to personally-owned devices. Last time I checked there's no provision for this in OneDrive, short of disabling sync for all users - not sure if that's changed at all?

Some of the times we see people accessing VLE etc would surprise many, lots of night owls out there doing their work at all times of day & night

Just highlights the difference between cloud services that make sense for the customer vs those that are put there for the sole purpose of driving profit for the supplier. If it's going to cost more and add uncertainty to put a classic server on Azure it either a) shouldn't be forced up there by licensing changes or b) migrated to something more efficient / cloud native MS are taking a big gamble if people go for the latter option and end up moving away from the ecosystem completely.

Just tried this on my W10 machine and clicking Previous Versions on a mainly blank document causes a crash: See the end of this message for details on invoking just-in-time (JIT) debugging instead of this dialog box. ************** Exception Text ************** System.ArgumentException: The path is not of a legal form. at System.IO.Path.NormalizePath(String path, Boolean fullCheck, Int32 maxPathLength, Boolean expandShortPaths) at System.IO.Path.GetFullPathInternal(String path) at Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO.FileSystem.NormalizePath(String Path) at Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO.FileSystem.FindFilesOrDirectories(FileOrDirectory FileOrDirectory, String directory, SearchOption searchType, String[] wildcards, Collection`1 Results) at Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO.FileSystem.FindFilesOrDirectories(FileOrDirectory FileOrDirectory, String directory, SearchOption searchType, String[] wildcards) at ExamWritePad.Form2.PreviousVersionsToolStripMenuItem_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e) at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.RaiseEvent(Object key, EventArgs e) at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripMenuItem.OnClick(EventArgs e) at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.HandleClick(EventArgs e) at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripItem.HandleMouseUp(MouseEventArgs e) at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStrip.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs mea) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.ToolStrip.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.MenuStrip.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam) ************** Loaded Assemblies ************** mscorlib Assembly Version: 4.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 4.6.1078.0 built by: NETFXREL3STAGE CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework64/v4.0.30319/mscorlib.dll ---------------------------------------- ExamWritePad Assembly Version: 1.9.3.0 Win32 Version: 1.9.3.0 CodeBase: file:///C:/Users/GShaw/Desktop/ExamWritePad.exe ---------------------------------------- Microsoft.VisualBasic Assembly Version: 10.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 14.6.1038.0 built by: NETFXREL2 CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/Microsoft.Net/assembly/GAC_MSIL/Microsoft.VisualBasic/v4.0_10.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a/Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll ---------------------------------------- System Assembly Version: 4.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 4.6.1075.0 built by: NETFXREL3STAGE CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/Microsoft.Net/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System/v4.0_4.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.dll ---------------------------------------- System.Core Assembly Version: 4.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 4.6.1038.0 built by: NETFXREL2 CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/Microsoft.Net/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Core/v4.0_4.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.Core.dll ---------------------------------------- System.Windows.Forms Assembly Version: 4.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 4.6.1038.0 built by: NETFXREL2 CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/Microsoft.Net/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Windows.Forms/v4.0_4.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.Windows.Forms.dll ---------------------------------------- System.Drawing Assembly Version: 4.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 4.6.1078.0 built by: NETFXREL3STAGE CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/Microsoft.Net/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Drawing/v4.0_4.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a/System.Drawing.dll ---------------------------------------- System.Runtime.Remoting Assembly Version: 4.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 4.6.1038.0 built by: NETFXREL2 CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/Microsoft.Net/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Runtime.Remoting/v4.0_4.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.Runtime.Remoting.dll ---------------------------------------- System.Configuration Assembly Version: 4.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 4.6.1038.0 built by: NETFXREL2 CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/Microsoft.Net/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Configuration/v4.0_4.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a/System.Configuration.dll ---------------------------------------- System.Xml Assembly Version: 4.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 4.6.1064.2 built by: NETFXREL3STAGE CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/Microsoft.Net/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Xml/v4.0_4.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.Xml.dll ---------------------------------------- System.Deployment Assembly Version: 4.0.0.0 Win32 Version: 4.6.1078.0 built by: NETFXREL3STAGE CodeBase: file:///C:/Windows/Microsoft.Net/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Deployment/v4.0_4.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a/System.Deployment.dll ---------------------------------------- ************** JIT Debugging ************** To enable just-in-time (JIT) debugging, the .config file for this application or computer (machine.config) must have the jitDebugging value set in the system.windows.forms section. The application must also be compiled with debugging enabled. For example: When JIT debugging is enabled, any unhandled exception will be sent to the JIT debugger registered on the computer rather than be handled by this dialog box. Edit: just noticed the DefaultBackupPath string is blank by default, is that what causes the crash until a value is provided?

Windows 10 is beginning to make SMART somewhat irrelevant from the pen \ inking point of view and these licensing changes will only speed up that process imo

Hmmm interesting. Given that current 10 Education is Enterprise with a different badge on I wonder if 10 Pro for Education will be a lower spec version for the new cloud transition agreements...

The danger for MS is that in their rush to try and force people off their on-prem servers is that the migration may as well end up being to a non-MS product instead. If they're not careful could be a repeat of the Windows 8 debacle but this time hitting their server product market share rather than desktop, in education at least (not sure if they'll try the same licensing changes in the wider market or if education is an experiment to see what happens).

The usual Gartner & co, I guess ultimately picking on as the "best" ends up being the same as if you argue which is better of BMW vs Audi, Android vs iOS and so on. Ask the question and get many versions of the same answer! Fair do's Re: pricing perhaps that may be the case, but for those already considering alternatives this just provides another shoot-yourself-in-the-foot moment for MS at a time when there's more competition than ever in the market for ever-shrinking budgets.

Both Google and Microsoft copied Amazon if anything. General consensus as I've always read it re: cloud providers for IaaS \ PaaS is Amazon top, MS reasonably close 2nd and all others (Google included) further behind. Don't lump everyone in the "doesn't want to learn Linux" box - we're quite happy with the stuff we run on CentOS but again some products are better suited for that work than others. Also third party solutions and support will affect the choice of what underlying OS is used.

And that's the key point, same as a few years back when BSF was suggesting to run "everything" via thin clients. The sensible choice is a mix of technologies selected to best fit the use case.

This is the interesting part, will it be the case because a) the technology moves on and becomes compelling in the same way Office 365 has taken over from on-prem Exchange b) the supplier makes sneaky licensing changes to make existing infrastructure unviable If it's the second option then Google will be celebrating. There's a big difference between moving to the cloud for services because they're better than what we're doing now and moving because licensing says so. Already been discussing this to some extent with Jisc regarding cloud-hosted MIS, Finance systems etc. Right now there's a lack of products that you'd call "cloud first" that are built to be scalable SaaS systems including proper APIs for data exchange \ integration. Slapping a VM of a traditional on-prem product in Azure \ Amazon and calling it "cloud" is exactly what doesn't benefit anyone except those providing the hosting. In the meantime we have a few more years before this kicks in so be interesting to see what technology brings us by then.

At our FTE count the final 20% hike works out to be around £4k, far from insignificant in the current climate. I'm not convinced that'll be the end of it either as MS will have to force people to move certain parts of on-prem to Azure as there's very little reason to do it otherwise. Office 365 email, Skype etc are great in the cloud and makes a lot of sense (huge storage, easy management etc) and many have embraced this offering. Existing legacy apps, domain controllers, print servers etc. moving to a subscription charge in Azure, not really compelling.

Azure AD Premium still insists on trying to rip us off with per user pricing rather than FTE as per the rest of EES. If that's the future then MS won't be featuring much in it.