PaulCooper

FIXED TERM UNTIL 31/08/2017, INITIALLY 37 hours/week, 52 weeks per annum Grade E Point Range 18 – 21 £17,891 – £19,939 per annum Closing date 12 noon Friday 23rd September - ONLY ONE WEEK AWAY IT Support Technician | Paignton Community and Sports Academy

AD can sync to Google; they even have at least 2 tools that can do it, albeit in slightly different ways. The specific issues people don't like are: 1) OWA web cache has been broken for a number of people (but not all) for about 3 months and Microsoft have failed to resolve it, despite providing good support and escalation when I asked for it. This means some staff have to manually type in complete email addresses, so we get typos and bounce backs. Even creating personal contacts for their most-used email eddresses doesn't work. I've offered Outlook as a solutioon (as it uses a different cache - Microsoft seem to have at least 3 recently-used-address caches) 2) Shared calendars on mobile devices - the Outlook apps are pretty poor with these; default IOS and Android apps handle them better. 3) Microsoft's search function in email isn't very slick and some people struggle to find what they need. I know these may look really trivial, but particulary the OWA cache issue has been driving people nuts and Microsoft really haven't covered themselves in glory. And their rebadged IOS and Android Outlook apps they bought are very basic offerings in our experience but should be flagship products.

Unfortunately SLT is led by the Principal, and she is trying to keep a vocal minority happy. I have no choice whether I do it or not unless I can come up with a definitive, no bs, technical argument against it. Some ofthe issues with OWA/calendaring I think are legit but again, my opinion here isn't relevant.

Hi, We moved email from Google to Office 365 last summer, now the leadership want to move email back to Google due to issues with OWA and calendaring, but want to retain the Office 365 portal and as much O365 functionality as possible. This includes only having one cloud storage (OneDrive) so literally swiching off all the Google bells & whistles, but still allowing Office 365 to function as a sharing/collaboration platform. As I understand it, the only way to enable Office 365 to function once we've moved our MX records is to use the tenancy *.onmicrosoft.com domain for Office 365 logins, which negates having email only in Google as we'd need to keep the *.onmicrosoft.com for sharing things in O365. Staff struggle enough with one cloud platform; two would blow their minds and support would also become overcomplicated imo. The only option I can see with Google mail as a mandatory requirement is to go fully Google, which will reduce the Microsoft portal to downloading software to install on people's pcs, and use phone & tablet apps, again using the *.onmicrosoft.com domain. Has anyone done anything similar, or looked at it and established that it just isn't very feasible to run a hybrid solution like this? Please don't ask why this decision has been taken; the SLT has spoken and I just need to look at the technical options for implementation and I need to understand what tools people will be able to use. I have put a call into Microsoft asking for assistance but I'm not really expecting much help from them. Thanks in advance!

Thanks for that John, How long has it been running?

We're reworking the WAN for the schools in our trust and a couple of bidders have specified Mikrotik switches, a mix of RB2011UiAS and CCR1009 models. These will be used to create a private WAN that will then break out to the internet at the bidders' data centre. I'm used to Cisco/Procurve/Juniper and am a little concerned that Mikrotik isn't 'enterprise class' and we'd be buying in to a world of outages with this kit. Does anyone have real-world experience they can share (good and/or bad) with using this stuff for mission-critical networking? There seems to be little review data on the web and that too is worrying us. Cheers

Shameless bump for those who missed it earlier in the week - job postings have been thick & fast the past few days and I'm relegated to page 2 already!

We are looking to appoint a full-time IT technician (not just term time) to join our team at Paignton Community and Sports Academy. Our academy has approx 900 workstations spread across two sites and we are looking for someone with good Windows 7 knowledge and recent experience of working in a decent sized environment. We are heavily into SCCM 2012 for pc management and software deployment but we will train up anyone who hasn't had the delights of working with it before so don't let that put you off. Salary is Grade E Point Range 18 – 21 (£17,333 – £19,318 per annum) Closing date for applications is 12 Noon Monday 30 June 2014. Here are the links to the spec, and the application form. IT Support Technician Job Description and Person Specification Support Staff Application Form If you have any questions please ask here or pm me and I'll get back to you. Cheers Paul

I'm looking for some suggestions, or feedback from anyone that has or has had this issue. I've about run out of things to try, and Google isn't helping me much either. We run Windows 7 SP1, Office 2010. Both are up-to-date with patches. The issue: Loading older (binary) format .xls files from our Sun 7110 storage takes between 5 and 10 minutes. Newer format xlsx files are pretty much instant. The files I've tested aren't large - about 350k - and if I save them as xlsx or even xlsb in the same share/folder in the 7110 I can then open them almost instantly. They don't have lots of furmulae Loading the same files locally from C: or from a newer NAS box (WD RX4100 which we've got running 2012R2) will load them pretty instantly. I've looked at and discounted (through testing) GPOs, netsh tcp autotuninglevel, remote differential compression, local admin access The Sun box and 2012 NAS both have LAN Manager compatibility level set at 2. This is for compatibility with other systems we have here. Any suggestions (other than ditch the 7110)? Thanks Paul

I'm in Torbay, but even that is a bit far to travel for work experience. You could also try Exeter University - they have a huge IT setup so you'd probably be best asking for their PC support team since that would probably get you the most relevant work experience for you based on what you've done.

We were looking at a solution not just for our school but for all academies in our trust. We invited Parago, School Asset Manager and CSE Asset Manager to pitch to us. Of those, Parago and SAM seemed the best 2 and we have signed up with Parago. Costs were quite similar, especially as both were keen to become the trust's chosen product. I'd have been happy with Parago or SAM but some of the schools in our academy trust don't have full-time IT staff and the Parago interface is much easier to navigate for 'casual' use so that was the main deciding factor.

We're looking for an entry-level apprentice, suit a recent 6th form leaver or someone looking to get a foot in the door. IT skills aren't that important as full on-the-job training will be given; we're more interested in the right person who is interested in a career in IT and has the right aptitiude and attitude. (One of our current apprentices has just secured a full-time ICT role with another local school, so the apprenticeship scheme does work!) Full details are on the Apprenticeships.org.uk website, the link is ICT Apprentice with Paignton Community & Sports Academy The vacancy reference if the link gets broken is VAC000331122 Successful completion leads to EDI Diploma in IT User Skills (ITQ Apprentice) either at Level 2 or 3 depending on candidate. Functional Skill English , Functional Skill Maths, Functional Skill ICT and ERR workbook. Approx £200 per week. (This is in addition to the Technician role I posted last week)

Here's the blurb from our website: FIXED TERM CONTRACT TO 31 AUGUST 2014 Grade C Point Range 10 – 13 (£14,013 – £15,599 per annum) 35 hours/week, 39 weeks per annum Actual Pro rata salary at starting point £11,381 The Academy is looking to appoint an IT Technician to provide first line support for students and staff. For further details and an application form, please contact the Personnel Officer, Paignton Community & Sports Academy, Waterleat Road, Paignton, TQ3 3WA, telephone 01803-403624 or e-mail: [email protected] or visit Academy vacancies. Closing date for applications is 12 Noon Thursday 3 October 2013 The Academy is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people

I've just had one of their guys in our school giving us a pitch. The costs vary depending on school type. For a secondary it is £1500 pa but you need to sign up for 3 years. Parago claim that they don't start to make profit until year 3. I have no comparative costs from other vendors (yet) so I can't say whether it is reasonable or not.