Medium_Dave

Although I work in Somerset, the school on whose behalf I am asking is significantly further to the North. And also - as I work in Somerset - I can absolutely 100% guarantee you that getting any kind of support for the server in general, or SIMS in particular, is murderously difficult if not impossible, unless one can quote the gold sticker number. Which, of course, you only get if you buy your hardware from County. The rule book might technically say otherwise, I have no idea - but I have far too much first-hand experience of this, on more than one site. I am not misinterpretting, or mistaken.

Indeed - I phrased that badly. Nevertheless, Country are neither. Were it not for the fact they tie their office support to their hardware sales, they'd not sell so much as a floppy disk.

Thanks for the help so far - very informative, and quite a lot to think about. By the by - County are adamant that they won't provide any support, at all, to any system they've not built and sold (at somewhat over market price). I've not misinterpreted this; the question has been asked repeatedly, and at length. I don't see how they are able to do this when in every other instance, schools are obliged to get three quotes and use the cheapest... Does anyone have much experience with having SIMS hosted for them? I'm pretty sure County do not offer this - is it correct to assume that Capita do? If so, what sort of support do they offer? I can't find much about it other than a contact number - very little in the way of facts and figures. Cheers, -dave

Hello, all - wonder if anyone could help out a long-term lurker with a SIMS server question... A school with which I am acquainted has recently been told that their SIMS server will shortly become obsolete, due to the fact that some upcoming, unspecified update will not work on it. I don't have the exact specs, but it's a competent (albeit unexciting) machine running Server 2003. It's in an average-sized primary school, and only two people there use SIMS. I can't find out much on the system requirements for SIMS - and I imagine it depends to a large extent upon how it will be used - but the machine that the County ICT people are peddling seems ridiculously overspecced - 2xQuad Core Xeon, 16gb memory, 6x 146gb HDD, dual hot-swap 750 watt PSUs, etc, etc - for the low, low price of nearly 4k. I cannot believe that SIMS is going from something what will run upon a fairly generic PC, to something that requires this overblown behemoth, in the space of one update. So, my questions are - what would be considered a decent machine for a primary school SIMS server? What update is in the pipeline, meaning that the SIMS servers all have to be updated (it's not just this one school - all the other primary schools in the area are being told the same thing)? What about remote hosting of SIMS? Is this a good idea, and if so, who would host it, and for how much? And last, but not least - how can it be considered fair, moral, or even legal for County to insist that a small primary school buys its over-specced, over-priced juggernaut if the school wishes to retain support from the SIMS helpline there? On no account will they offer SIMS support to any server not provided by themselves... Thanks for any advice, -dave