RichCowell

Try Spiceworks... it's quite a powerful piece of kit, and won't cost you a penny!

I don't believe so... in the notes about moving the installation from one machine to another it mentions that you might be moving it after having installed it on your PC to set it up and figure it out etc. I set it up initially on a HP Microserver and it ran reasonably well... Definitely better now it's on one of the main servers though... Why would you need to leave an RDP Session open all day though? It's all web based...

Airserver started working well for us, we've also got two Apple TVs, but it's very hit & miss now... Sometimes they show up on the iPad, sometimes they don't... You can be in a classroom and it finds nothing, then walk down the corridor and it finds some/all... despite the wireless coverage being excellent everywhere... Not been able to find any reasons for this, but it's put a lot of people off using Airserver.

Yes... I should have mentioned that... but that's not bad... We've only got 2 admins here... Far better than asking 60+ staff to create new accounts... Moving over from Liberum soon...

Good Afternoon All! I've had quite an exciting morning as I discovered that the latest version of Spiceworks has been released and it now supports SSO... Got it all configured and moved from my test server to one of the main servers and loving it already!! Just thought I'd let people know the long awaited SSO is now available!!

I use Impero here and I'm able to monitor all remote connections... One of it's many benefits!

I finally managed to find a suitable time to run the battery down while I was with it working on a dummy document... It only recovered the first line of the file, but didn't prompt me to do anything with it - I had to look for it in File - Recover Unsaved Documents... Not too impressed with the pre-loaded Office 2013 so far!

There's also the worry of pupils working out/getting staff passwords... It's not been an issue at my current school, but it has at previous schools, and in some cases the teachers have actually given pupils their passwords if they've forgotten their own or to bypass filters... That's bad enough for them being able to get on their own Facebook accounts, but if they get on to a teacher's machine who's got it set to stay signed in, then there's potentially all sorts of issues that can arise... Luckily that's not something that's likely to happen at my current school, and is likely to happen less these days, but it's still a risk I'm not prepared to take... Also - it's not just a case of whether or not the teachers are trusted, it's just not needed in school... as others have said, they've got their mobiles with access to things that are filtered in school - that should suffice until they get home...

Facebook is blocked to everyone here, apart from me - as I update the school Facebook Page, and any issues arising relating to Facebook come to me too... It's never come up in discussion, other than some staff asking after seeing that I can get on... I can't imagine ever unblocking it for staff, I'm sure productivity would drop dramatically... If it did ever come up, I would strongly urge them to allow me to just unblock it before and after school, rather than any time... as others have said, there's too much risk of an increase in issues if they're on it while all the pupils are about...

I've got both keyboards, got it with the Touch keyboard initially, and it is usable, but you're not entirely sure whether it's registered the key press, so it's not as good as the Type keyboard, which is more like a laptop keyboard and far easier... Going to buy the next one without a keyboard and pass on the Touch keyboard with it...

Just wondering if anyone else has got a Surface here and had to rely on document auto-recovery in the pre-loaded Office 2013? One of the users here was working on a large Word document, until his battery died... hadn't saved it, but it didn't recover... Seemed strange to me, but I'll test it when I can leave the battery to die...

Is it / will it be possible to see multiple rooms on the same view? We currently use Devizes School Online Booking, and it's been working well, but it's quite basic... and the ability to make multiple bookings would be worth moving for by itself...

I got a Kindle Touch in August, and loved it, so upgraded to a Kindle Paperwhite just before Christmas, and love that even more... I didn't really consider the Kindle Fire, as I don't want a tablet, it's too big, too heavy, and there are too many other distractions with it (Email / Facebook etc.) and the battery is nowhere near as good as a normal Kindle... It states an 8 week battery life, based on 30 minutes per day... I usually read for several hours a day, and I only have to charge it every 2 weeks ish... I've not looked at other manufacturers, but if it's the Kindle range you're looking at, I'd definitely recommend the Kindle Paperwhite... It's the same as previous versions, but the screen's lit, and it tells you how long it'll take you to finish the chapter/book... which is nice!

That's pretty much what we needed, with a larger hole on one side to project through, and we'd thought of that, but there was nothing to bolt it on to... there was nothing existing available that we could find to solve it... Virtue's solution is exactly what we were looking for...

The guys from Virtue Technologies were in at 0545 this morning fitting the cage... should be a perfect solution...

Microsoft are already planning a fix though... Microsoft Actually Applauds Hacker For Windows RT Jailbreak Attempt - Forbes

I guess it depends how the tablets are being purchased - if the school's buying them for the pupils then licensing may be an issue, but if it's one of those schemes where parents pay so much a month then keep them at the end, then they're the pupils' devices so licensing shouldn't be an issue... As for staff use, aren't teachers eligible to buy Student editions anyway? (or was that an old version of Student/Teacher edition?) They're only going to be advantageous in schools with the Terminal Servers to publish apps to benefit from the shared drives/printers anyway, so it could be argued that Office is redundant on them, in school anyway, so anything else would just be personal use...

Aah yes... I hadn't spotted that... We've published the Office Apps on the TS, so they'll be used more than the packaged apps... If they're for students' use though as someone mentioned previously, that should cover them...

The Microsoft Surface comes with Office 2013 pre-installed, shouldn't need to be covered by EES / alternative licensing... Apparently other manufacturers won't be allowed to package it with Office... Whether that'll still be the case when the others really get going with it I don't know... Surely M$ wouldn't try to make money in any way? :-p

They definitely seem the better option for pupils in class compared to iPads because of the ease of accessing network drives / printers... As far as I'm aware, Office 2013 is only going to be pre-installed on the Microsoft devices, and not other manufacturers when they get going with it... so it is likely to involve extra licenses in some way, unless they're going to use Office published from a Terminal Server... which works nicely...

That looks intriguing... Not a great solution for general use (if we were to roll out Surface to the staff like we've rolled out iPads), but for the odd user with a specific need that can't be met using RDP, it may be worth doing... I'm still really impressed with it generally... Got a call from one of the heads yesterday asking how he prints from it and was quite impressed when I added his office printer and showed him how easy it was...

No breakages as yet, but we've only got the Head, Executive Head & myself using them so far... However I can't imagine they'd be easy to repair - other than swapping the keyboard... But then that just makes them the same as most other tablets available... I'm not sure what the repair service would be like, one thing in favour of Apple would definitely be the Apple Care - though we've never had to use it, I know others that have and it's always sounded quite quick & easy...

I've had a D-Link Sharecentre for a couple of years now, and love it... Got it without drives and stuck 2 x 3TB drives in mirrored... using DLink's DDNS to keep it accessible online too...

Surely Remote Apps will be the best way, for a while at least, of accessing the various bits of software needed on the tablets? It saves installing/maintaining software on all the devices... so far we've only got 7 apps published, and only for 3 devices at the moment (other than SIMS which is how we access SIMS across the school)... but it's already easier than setting them all up individually or imaging them...

It's the ease with which it accesses the remote apps... and the fact that you've got (assuming you get one of the keyboards) a keyboard & touchpad to use the software designed for a PC, which has always been a flaw of accessing them from devices without... (I know you can get bluetooth keyboards for iPads, but they're not as responsive, and you don't get the touchpad... ) Trying to use SIMS via something like iTapp on an iPad was a nightmare... on Surface it's just as easy as using it on a laptop... and you can access the published apps directly from icons rather than having to go through an RDP session...