CyberNerd

A cat hater would tell you to feed them starfish. Cats love starfish. It also poisons them.

I do mostly treat Windows as middleware for servers.

Worked fine on Linux. Problem seems to be that MS don't write any working drivers.

I've been running various linuxes on my main work PC for the last 8 or so years. I recently decided I'd start learning how to use windows 7 and installed that after having some problems with printers that I really couldn't be bothered to fix. Now I get a BSOD everytime I try and use the USB to serial connection over putty and spend ages looking for software to do trivial things that I expect my operating system to be able to do. I think Windows 7 is ok, it's just not very stable and lacks any useful tools that sysadmins need. I'll give it another month or so and switch back to something more productive.

Ask me in a couple of years - at the beginning of the contract. MFD's only. No regular printers. In corridors, offices etc. Colour A3. Another local school was also looking at Kyocera and they look particularly competitive.

Only in that their quote was much more expensive than Sharp and Ricoh. We went with Sharp, but it was very tight between them an Ricoh. I know lots here use Ricoh direct.

An interesting insight as to why the specs need to be so high for MS Products here: "I Contribute to the Windows Kernel. We Are Slower Than Other Operating Systems. Here Is Why." - Zorinaq

Says it's done via Google+ groups. Last time I looked users had to be aged 13+ essentially meaning KS4,KS5 only.

OK. Now can I have a few more start menus so they read left to right. On the top of course because I tend to read left to right going downwards. A proper level of transparency would be good along with a customisable right click so I can run useful scripts on my files. When I close windows I'd like to see them disappearing in a ball of flame but when I minimise them I want white smoke. Oh and can I at least have ssh sftp built into explorer. On weekends I want the desktop to behave like osx but it can revert back on Monday.

Kids bring them in. We don't own any. Besides chrome books are locked down browsers and are only desktop environments in name.

Never used it. Windows desktop environment isn't customisable at all compared to the others I listed. Just simple things like adding more desktops seems to be an absolute no go on any ms windows versions I've tried.

Out of all of the Desktop Environments that I've used I can confidently say that MSWindows is inherently the least customisable of the lot. The Good thing about the Microsoft approach is that it has a common look and feel across all Windows operating systems, bar win8. Hence it's easy to pick up and use without having to re-gig everything for different default installs like you have to do with Gnome,KDE,Enlightenment,ICEWM,XFCE etc etc

Data hosted in school already gets transported to third parties, LA's and Govt. Hosting in a cloud isn't any different from a data protection perspective. It could be argued that its more secure if (an entire LA's data) is hosted in one place (the cloud) rather than spread over seperate sites with varing levels of technical support and security.

Totally forgot about FreeMIS!

The best Free MIS was scholarpack. They open sourced it in summer 2010 and quickly got bought by a larger company who promptly removed all traced of the source code and sell it as a commercial venture: ScholarPack - The Cloud Based Management Information System for Schools TS School seems to have stopped development: TS SCHOOL School Tool are still going: SchoolTool: the Global Student Information System

@edutech4schools As a "data controller" you have to register with them in any case: Register of Data Controllers - Information Commissioner's Office - ICO So you are probably already registered. If you change systems and purpose of why you hold data (eg start using biometrics) then you have to inform them about that;informing them about holding data outside of the EU is the same process. We did it and they didn't bat an eyelid.

Actually in a similar situation. School asset manager is ridiculously expensive. The problem seems to be that most Free/Open Source asset tracking systems are specifically designed for IT systems. Whilst they can be customised; it will take an awful lot of work and getting integration with (telephone) barcode scanners and being web based is difficult. I've not seen anything so far that will easily do what School Asset Manager does. Anyone know what Hospitals use? THey must have huge amount of expensive equipment to keep track of too.

Yes. As long as you tell ICO. ICO are happy with the fact that the data is held outside of the UK on a secure system under the terms of SafeHarbour. Safeharbbour was set up so that US companies could comply with EU legislation: Export.gov - Main Safe Harbor Homepage

120K Google docs in our domain now... Included confidential stuff. We even set up a link directly to SIMS to export live data so that spreadsheets are always current.

I've used mailscanner with good effect: ::: Official Home Page for MailScanner - Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam Filter ::: Another thing I don't have to worry about with Google apps.

It looks like it's going up to 30GB per user for apps users: Official Google Enterprise Blog: Bringing it all together for Google Apps customers: 30GB shared between Drive and Gmail and we're no where near our 61TB limit !

Spot on.

yeah. I stream video over an ADSL line. There are plenty of reasons why you might need gigabit on the desktop, but streaming video isn't one.

Get the users to do it themselves. Many hands makes light work !

FWIW my understanding is that many systems will use 'any old' RFID code. I'm pretty sure that Papercut devices on MFD's can be configured to ask a user to authenticate to Active Directory when they detect a card not registered in the database.