CyberNerd

These historic applications will be replaced in time. Old fashioned companies/developers will realise they open up their products to a wider audience by making them platform independent. The service industry will force it. If a web based product has a fraction of the total cost of ownership over a traditional programme you have a competitive edge. The company that uses the traditional programme will become uncompetitive as their support costs rise. Also, with regards to tablets - Sme Chromebooks are combined tablets and Laptops - best of both worlds, with a proper management system. The hardware, software and support costs are a fraction of Windows. It's a "rolling " operating system so I don't have to reskill on every release. I think (hope) this is what MS are aiming for with win10. Pitty they didn't do it 5 yrs ago when Google did.

I'm doing this with smoothwall. I've not setup a watchguard, sorry if I was misleading.

Authenticate through AD: definitely. Home drives are more difficult - we moved ours to Google. edit: you could try this but I think it's still in it's early stages: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/file-system-for-windows/mfhnnfciefdpolbelmfkpmhhmlkehbdf

You have to pay the Google licence of £19 (one off) and the neverware license $59 (lifetime) or $25 annual

Our NC10's ran terribly with 2GB ram, we spent ages stripping win7 to bare bones, fitting SSD's and it was still awful. Eventually we installed Neverware and they run perfectly.

Perhaps there is a gap in the market then; cut out the corporate licensing costs with a custom chrome app.

I use on from everything to programming (python) to full on system management of the entire school. The tools are there if you look for them.

I got in a taxi just last week and the driver was using an EPOS on his phone. ePOS suppliers in schools aren't exactly at the cutting edge, it's been around for a long time now (cites a two yr old article) 7 Cloud-Based POS Systems for SMBs | Street Fight

Terminal services at the moment. These are getting fewer and fewer though as web based applications get better and more available each month. SIMS is still a barrier. It's only really the large MS partner companies (autodesk, Capita, Microsoft themselves) that are holding out and even these firms are dipping their toes in web apps. The new startup companies see the issues and the venture capital follows them.

We spotted this trend a few years ago and began planning for it by moving towards web apps. We now have pretty much all our apps web based and have saved huge amounts of money and time because we can use these mobile technologies. The idea that windows has a lower cost of ownership is absolute rubbish and this school is living proof. There is no way on earth we could fund or support 1200 windows tablets but we can do it quite easily with chromebooks. I am also sure Microsoft will get their act together, but in true MS style they will be late for the party.

In Meru add a radius Accounting port 1813 in security > radius then in the ESS profile add the radius profile that you just added as the "Primary RADIUS Accounting Server" Then on your Radius server (NPS?) add the watchguard as a remote radius server. In connection request policies (on NPS) add the watchguard to forward accounting requests. Thus any devices should authenticate to NPS and it should send an accounting request to watchguard.

Just refer anything that worries you to your designated CP officer, like you would if it is a school laptop. It's not a big problem.

Yeah - when I said we do this for all our students that's what I was referring to. If they screw it up, they re-image it themselves. Works for me.

Basically what she said. We do provide support for machines provided to looked after children, but then again we also provide support for all devices given to all of our children.

1) it is possible 2) VLAN's will help but contain broadcast chatter between networks, but they won't help in discrete areas (that the access point is in) because all VLAN's are still using the same frequencies. Thus if two clients are on separate vlans but in range of the same access point they will not see each others traffic but will be competing for bandwidth. VLANs will help stop machines across the other side of the school from getting broadcast traffic so are a good thing to do. It really depends how many clients you have. We setup 6 wireless vlans with 500 hosts in each.

Basically, without writing a howto, you need to log into the admin console and create an admin role for your teachers. The admin role should only allow access to certain parts of the vault and nothing else. Provided your students are in a different ou you just delegate staff access to this. Provide them with a link and they have access (Read only) to the student area in Drive (technically It's probably a snapshot of it, but who's counting)

If I was personally in your situation (and believe me when I say I have absolutely no intention of doing so) I would be investing any spare time in automating the processes, or finding a system that did. If SLT want a report SLT should be able to get that report without intervention from you. If they can't the system isn't fit for purpose.

of course.

We've pretty much ditched home drives for Google drives now. If it's usable for Google then the MS integration should be simple.

its ok. There is a comparison of editors here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_text_editors

The obvious thing to do is go with the supplier who will sell you less licenses because it will be cheaper. If this turns out not to be the case and MS won't allow it then either you won't need to pay them because MS won't sell it to them or MS will make an exception.

Google didn't say they were dropping Chromeos. Google Chrome Blog: Chrome OS is here to stay

Chromebit or chromebox with one of these: https://www.google.co.uk/work/chrome/devices/for-signage/#cms

Yes but make sure it's configured as an edge port in STP

unless you are actually using the breakout boards (or cannot code for USB/Serial for whatever reason) it would be far cheaper to sell the PI's and use a virtual machine.