Face-Man

On the flipped side if the contract is writern correctly the managed service provide will need to provide x amount of computers working 99% of the time so it will have to replace those stolen/vandalised computers quickly or be in breach of contract. The capital is also to put in CCTV,VOIP but it really is all down to how well the contract is writern and if the lawyers can make the company stick to it. I can't wait to see a realistic price to support a laptop for a teacher. I suspect it will be allowcated on 3 laptops a year per teacher depending on how close the pub is to the school. Sorry I've just had sony told me they don't cover water damage to their motherboard as part of the warrenty !!!

Just to throw another thing in to allow you to get your head teacher listening to you about it. Steve Moss the leader of the BSF program has said publicly that school results in BSF schools will go down for at least the first 3 years of the program. So I expect Ofstead to close down most of these schools and reopen them as academies

I to like moodle but have one big problem with it sustainability. I know of two schools that had brilliant VLE's made with moddle that have just slowly died when the "expert" left for a better job. One of them had a brilliant hand over to the new manager but they were over worked and something had to give. If you are in london this time they are not imposing the solution but allowing LA buy in (mainly through BSF) and synetrix do offer a moddle product with the added services a large company can add. Come the revolution and A true PLE that allows a student to wake up and decide if today is a good day to do their GCSE math exam online or not then we will have finally delivered on what ICT can offer.

It's a one off cost but you can buy a yearly mainenance that mean you get tech support and upgrades

And the winner is .... Fronter http://www.lgfl.net/lgfl/accounts/news/web/archive/issue61 Though in parnership with LogicCMG so there must be some serious money knocking around

The Head of ICT makes me do the binary lesson in her GCSE class because she doesn't get it (or should that be ICT) the kids are fine with it though .

I've found out a bit more about the fragmation of the VLE/MLE offering on the LGFl. They will continue to be Digital Brain (though they may not have any staff left soon). Synetrix the infrasturcture provider will offer a moddle solution "I2Q" and another service based on M$ sharepoint. The LGFL are about to annouce it own prefered MLE (which I've heard may start with the letter "f"). And then BSF is coming the loads of LEAs who will then get to decide on their own ones... PS.. It's amazing you can get wireless in the BB house

The LGFL have just gone through a biding processes for an MLE to replace digital brain. (This is because they didn't even bid for it). The prefered bidder is due to be revealed at Bett. Also synetrix who run the infractructure for the LGFL are annoucing their new VLE that schools can use. Interesting the Becta spec for MLE may be challenged by the EC see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/08/becta_ec_complaint/ As the moved the goal posts after the tender. However I think the digital brain contract still has a couple of years to run. If your LEA is part of BSF it will have to tender for a MLE/PLE as well so anything you invest time in now will soon be replaced anyway.

arrh but a least I'll be able to pick one up on e-bay.... :twisted:

If you give us a bit more detail we can probably help. 1) Are the two network currently on pysically seperate network infrastructures ? 2) If you want to connect the two in some way. Will this be location based or user based ? My experiance has been that Vlan work really well if you have manged switched from one suppiler. They can go pear shapped really easily if you don't

MP John Pugh has launched and early day motion (what ever one of those is) to stand up against BECTA and The DFES stand against free and open source software. for more details check out. http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=31752&SESSION=885 and http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39284874,00.htm?user_rating=1

You may want to use becta tco spreedsheet to asses were you are and what budget you will require to move forward. It takes some time to fill in but it was great to get the school to agrre to double the funding and sustain it over the next few years http://schools.becta.org.uk/index.php?catcode=ss_to_pr_su_03&rid=10964&section=pr

Thanks for all this (again) come the revolution we'll all work from home.. I guess the picture is mixed but thouse establishments thatwant more than just firefighting need to invest in staff as well as kit

Thanks It looks like a real spread of computer to tech ratio but basically always less than 4 bodies interestingly BSF suggests that all schools have 1 technian on site for every 200 students ... so they are going to have to put a bigger office in the basement..

I've been asked to get a "feel" for how many technical staff are need to run our network as it expands. Currently we have 3 1 network manager and 2 Technicians of different grades We have approx 500 workstations and 1200 students. how does that compare ... I'm trying to argue that we need a "speciallist" on SLT as with a "burser" after all who would have a teacher looking after the schools money... (I know you can't really assess as people have differnet needs but it would be good to get a feel for what works)

I know this has come up before but I'm lazy and I can't find it (search for help desk and you get over 2000 threads). But can anyone recomend an electronic teacher freiendly system for logging tasks preferable webbased. I've had a quick look at http://www.zoho.com/ and it looks quite good but would like personal recomendations... as I'm struggling to get an intray big enough for the paper system.

As mentioned BSF is comming my key objective is to makesure I'm part of the decision making process. Most heads don't have a clue about ICT technical stuff and to be honest why should they thats why I'm here. I'm going to try to makesure that the valued added that I bring is to much to be disgarded. Unfortuatly I know of to many secondary schools with just about working ICT who are being held to ransom by shocking network mangers and so the gov solution is to throw the baby out with the bath water and centralise the lot. I have also resently heard of a school who empolyed a network manger through an agency he got their systems running perfectly and then they dumped him and got two cheaper techs through the same agency. BSF will cost jobs and cut inavation unless we stop decisions being made by thouse who look at £ signs not $ shares.

I've been looking into BSF quite a bit and think what is going to happen is bog standard ICT. This will be good for school that have nightmare system but bad for thouse that are using cutting edge. The only way to avoid this is to get involved in the writing of the spec for the bidding process. The template can be found at http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/_doc/6372/LEP%20ICT%20spec%20v3.doc I would suggest that we use edugeeks to improve this document and also use our skill to point out prcaticallities from it. For instance every teacher is to have a laptop to control their whiteboards and work from home but what happens about supply teachers ? the school is surpossed to have on site 1 memeber of technical staff (ict technitian) for every 200 pupils I would love to have that kind of ratio now. The bidder has to integrate existing ICT systems (especailly admin) into the new setup but if school a use X software and school b uses Y how is that going to happen. The only downtime is between 00:00 saturday to 06:00 sunday My plan is to make my job esestial to the bidding process raising my profile with the LEA and School. So that anyone that wins will need me or the LEA will need me to hit the contractor over the head for not doing what it says. BSF is coming (after all what Head is going to ignor more money) we have to alline our rolls to achieve what we want.

My boss asked me if I wanted to go to Handheld learning 2006.. Before I knew what it was I agreed as it was two days out of school..anyway any body else going to be there.. Anybody got so taxing questions I should be asking about mobile devices... personally I think it's hard enough to keep things you can lock to the desk running bits of kit you can walk around with just give me nightmares... 8)

We allow it but with the strict search on.. however there is always yahoo image search, altavista, alltheweb and then video from youtube, blinkz, searchforvideo... If we try and stop all the tools some kid will just find a differnet one. I just makesure we have a strict AUP inforce like a dictator (1 kid lost his internet access for 6 month). After all Guns don't kill people People do. We need to educate kids as to what is appropriate and what is not and when they come accross inappropriate things what to do. Though I don't advocate a open internet I do think we sometimes throw away great teaching tools due to potential problems... Rant over...

I take it money is tight if not have a look at the website http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pedge_sc1420?c=uk&l=en&s=bsd&cs=ukbsdt1 It looks like it can have a raid card factory installed and can have upto 4 hard drives. why not have it included in your purchase and get it covered under their warrenty

We have been using a terasation with robocopy for non critical data fro a while. It works welll with robocopy (or backup software hung when trying to connect to it). I would suggest that you buy a seperate switch and nic's if you can afford it as you may be moving a lot of data. The only thing I would say is that backup onsite are just as risky in fire as original data and so you still need an offsite soloution for critical data.

Has anybody got a policy that complies with the current laws on the ethical displosal of old kit. We obvioiously try and recycle as much as possible internally and then externally but don't have that writern down.

We have 2 domain and 2 vlans at present but are moving to a flat domain with multiple vlans for the differnt rooms and admin etc.

From my experiance veritas keeps taps on its licence keys and you can definatly only use one remote server key on one server (hence your original problem). I suspect that it is still assigned to your first server hence the second problem.