Mr_Jiminy

Does anyone have any clarification on the below text? Local LA's are having a field day re data security at the mo. I was considering offering this as a product to schools, however I need more info on data locations prior to doing so. It's worth noting the text below came from an article published in Jan 2012. 'An Achilles heel? The underlying problem that has already caused some of our legal clients to rule out Office 365 as a non-starter is caused by US legislation in their “Patriot Act” and lawyers are not alone in recognising a problem here. The UK Data Protection Act forbids an organisation acting as a “Data Controller” to pass user data outside the European Union unless the recipient country provides guarantees as to how the data will be used. However, the Patriot Act, introduced to protect US national security, can require that any US company (wherever data is held) must disclose data on demand to the US Government without the knowledge of the owner of the data, which is contrary to the UK Data Protection Act. Microsoft has been up-front in acknowledging that they cannot give that guarantee and this applies to data held in all their hosted solutions. As a result, in December 2011, BAE ditched plans to adopt Office365 because Microsoft could not guarantee the company’s data would not leave Europe, in spite of operating a data centre in Dublin. Conclusion We have yet to see how the Patriot Act issue will unfold and perhaps it is not a concern for the average client of a law firm; or maybe even for firms of any size, but this compliance issue needs to be addressed. However, it is unlikely that Law Societies will take a definitive stance. Otherwise, Office 365 is an option that most firms should at least check out on the free trial for now, to be able to make informed decisions about using it or other similar solutions that may become available along similar lines. Other local EU-based providers of hosted solutions that don’t have to comply with the Patriot Act may well move into this space.'

Existing user. There's a UI change scheduled for the 27th, I'll keep my fingers crossed it's then.

We recently moved 15 schools from Sophos to AVG Pro Bus 2013. AVG's support have been fantastic and we got a cracking seat price. We really wanted to move to SCCM, alas it required more time/ input than we had to offer due to time constraints, largely due to the amount of sites we cover.

Does anyone have any idea as to when the old look Office 365 adopts the new look?

Leasing is a possible option. Perhaps!

Yeah admin are going to use the shared calendar facility, with an intention of also looking into sharepoint sites.

VLANs chap. For the time being we're keen to leave the admin as is, they are keen to retain the global address list for ease.

Hi Michael, the only real reason is because the networks are currently two separate entities... Although it has to be said we do want to offer the service on a whole, however we'd prefer to prove the strengths of Office 365 with the schools curriculum network, prior to offering the package to the administrative side... We see it as taking baby steps.

Thanks for all your feedback folks, it really is appreciated. Also I need to clarify, we're not actually reselling this to the school, we're simply setting it up and covering it within our SLA. We're non-for-profit on hardware and software, only charging for service. Our objective is to save the school money by offering them the free Office 365 for edu solution.

Thanks Michael, my sentiments exactly, I really couldn't have said it any better. I used to work as IT support for the council, so I'm somewhat clued up to their ways. We've been testing Office 365 Online Exchange for months, with a lot of work going into doing things the right way, largely by piloting the platform and producing users guides, one for the old look (Exchange 2010 Webmail look), the other set for the recently re-launched new look platform. However we have now we have had to to place demo sessions on hold until we get clarification. We can't see there being much truth in the council saying this, we suspect either the representative has got confused and should have advised the school on the use of gcsx accounts for key members of admin/ teaching staff. We've tried to play everything by the book, offering the Office 365 provision to only curriculum members of staff, advising the administrative team (inc head and deputies) remain with the councils email provision. Needless to say, we are less than impressed with the authorities 'possible' superficial comment to the client.

Can a local council put its foot down to a company offering an Office 365 email solution to curriculum staff at a school? I ask because we have looking to offer just this, but to only curriculum staff (teachers, TAs), not to the school admin staff who use PC's attached the councils network. The authority have informed the school its teachers could be in breach in doing so. My thoughts are to only if this was really sensitive data, which would require a GCSX address.

When you say 'send the backup exec files off to' - how are you sending? Is there an initial seed backup taken/sent or am I getting the wrong idea. feature:seed_service [CrashPlan Support Site] My understanding with cloud based solutions is that a seed backup is taken, then transferred to data centres, followed by only amended files being backed-up to the cloud. I'm looking into cloud based solutions for a number of clients, costs are obviously a big factor, so CrashPlan is certainly sounding good.

To be honest for us it's better, we have no jurisdiction over the LEA admin computers, so the less we have to do with them the better.

It was filtering or a FW at the LEA side... To cut a long story short, we decided against implementing client side on the admin network (only 5 computers)... Opting instead to get them to route through webmail... The 40 users on curriculum have the option to set-up client side, as they don't route through the LEA filtering or FW's.

I'd go with this option, should be straight forward enough for you.

Hi all, Currently in the early stages of a pilot phase for Office 365, the main focus is the Exchange Online for shared calendars and obviously email. The school this is being piloted in, has an admin network and a curriculum network and has a Cisco 5505 box configured to allow the admin clients access across the curriculum file share and managed print solution. As it stands the admin clients have their gateways pointing to the ASA box, their primary DNS points to an admin file server which has an instance of DNS configured (pointing to the LEA's DNS). On the whole, the pilot is going swimmingly for curriculum, however this is far from the case for the 5 admin clients. As it stands when we configure the Outlook client on an admin computer, the setup procedure sometimes authenticates, other times it chooses not to, re-prompting for password. On the occasions when it does authenticate and the Outlook client opens, the client will eventually time out with a yellow exclamation mark, signalling not connection to the exchange. I know that the LEA is using smoothwall, also that this could be one of their ISA server firewalls detecting and prevent access... But I just need your thoughts before I take this up with the LEA. Any ideas?

Normal, neither mandatory or roaming are used. I suspect the issue is more related to the issues experienced in the link I posted... Which suggest Folder Redirection. As a temporary measure this GP has been unassigned and will be tested without for an interim period. I believe the issues came about after I renamed several user intake containers, including user profile paths. One thought has been to also run delprof2 on all suite based clients, as the issue is only affected pupils and all pupil network usage is performed through laptops/ computers in this large area. Fingers crossed!

Just found this; http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-7/53531-windows-7-deleting-users-home-directories.html Staff and student home are on the same file server. Different shares. Files aren't viewable on the server (only from backup restore). Folder redirection is/was used. Offline files only enabled for staff, it's disabled client side for pupils.

Hi all, I would appreciate some feedback to an issue I'm experiencing with a file server in a 2008 R2 domain. The problem concerns the sporadic loss of pupil work, from individual home folders. I've included two screenshots, to give an idea of the before and after scenario. I have to state that nothing has been changed within group policy, other than to correct an issue surrounding folder redirection, the issue being it unexplainably stopped working (no fault log info to provide). I'm finding it very odd that it isn't happening on mass, nor or any of the staff folders affected... Only pupils, and there certainly isn't a pattern... For example, an entire class could log in and only 3 out of 30 would find their home folders missing folders/ files. Please feel free to bombard me with questions. I will say I have disabled the folder redirection as a last precaution... My suspicions are at this stage, possibly folder redirection, a client computer issue or some underlying issue with the server (last guess). Top image is before, bottom image is after.

Figured it might be proxy, no I've not requested an unblock. This particular school are in the process of having the routing reconfigured, so it will be interesting to see if this resolves. *It works perfectly at other sites where re-routing has taken place.

I wondered if anyone knows why some internet pages are not being rendered problem (screenshot attached). Probably an easy one to fix - I'll likely hold my head in shame. Thanks Jez

Yes, hmmm, well the 'orrible devices I'm ranting on about were not quite as advanced. Compaq tablet pc tc1000 Compaq Tablet PC TC1000 - North America/U.S. QuickSpecs Sent a cold shiver down my spine when I google'd it.

Brings back 'unhappy' memories of circa 2003-4 when a client of mine (middle school), invested (wasted) 15k of ICT budget (all of their ICT budget for a year), on a provision of Compaq tablet devices. Oh how I larfed (in despair). I advised the client not to buy said devices, and to strongly consider going down the laptop route, which would double the provision... Needless to say, the above text suggests I was largely ignored. The client ended up with a device which was unresponsive, with a screen so pathetic, it made the device mostly unusable. Anyway, the point I'm making is this - whilst the school had a vision of the future, they had in fact invested a large some of money in what were in affect a one trick pony... The one trick part being the aesthetics, which is where the ipad ties in. I look forward to Microsoft releasing the Surface, as well as the offerings from Dell and the like... Interesting times a head.

Hi all, I'm getting an 'autochk not found' message after image deployment using WDS. I suspect it is more related to either image corruption or partition issues. Has anyone ever experienced this before? I seem to recall having had issues with partions when I imaged a suite of Dell Otiplex computer, however I can't recall it being exactly the same... Sure I resolved quite easily?! Thanks Jez

We 'currently' (emphasis on the currently) use a Trapeze system, which although has been quite reliable in terms of hardware functionality, the same cannot be said for other areas of the provision. I'll be very interested to see what most people have opted for... Also if people have used/ are using a Trapeze system - their thoughts.