CyberNerd

Think of it this way - there is nothing in MS land that is more difficult than reading a manual. One book and you know exchange, one book you know AD etc. Finding the anwsers is easy if you can use google. it isn't hard to do and a lot of people do it, therefore the pay isn't so good. Compare that to a teacher where you (currently) NEED a degree and a PGCE (ok, there are exceptions with this) or a Doctor where you need a medical degree and a Ph.D - there is more demand for these jobs and less people able to do it, hence the pay is more. logic.

No not at all. I wasn't trying to imply that term time only is 2nd rate, or in any way trying to say that windows skills are not valuable - just that there are a LOT of people who can use windows, it's NOT a highly skilled area in schools or in industry.

No, because people happily go for the jobs. If there was a skills shortage the price would go up. There are plenty of people who would happily work term time only and click next next finish all day long. Windows admin isn't highly paid because it is very easy - thats part of MS selling point. If you want more money as an administrator get some unix skills.

When HP initially released the re branded HP kit the old 3com transceivers didn't work but HP fixed that with a patch on the switches. We applied the patch and everything is fine. I think you should get a reseller who knows what he's talking about.

With our Meru system we have the following: 3 VLANS: Staff, Student, school owned equipment. But also have other SSID's on the same VLAN networks. We use RADIUS to automatically authenticate school owned equipment onto the network. You also need a firewall to keep the networks separate, VLAN doesn't do that. The separate staff and student network is for staff BYOD and student BYOD - keeps the kids off the staff devices and allows us to give more access to staff than students.

Sorry, I don't understand (I don't have EES as we don't use MSOffice) we just buy a win7 license and a VDI license. Without VDI we still buy a win7 license.

But thats the same for running desktops, the extra is the VDA license upgrade. It depends on the speed of the client. Full screen high quality video works here, but our clients are quite powerful - on something like the zero with VMWare I'm not surprised it doesn't work . With Spice the server offloads the work onto the client so theres an advantage in having more powerful clients. The real benefits is in how quickly it is to deploy. 1000 clients takes about 30secs.

The costs you are quoting are quite outrageous though. We are 'only' paying £400 per year for 50 desktop licenses and £300 per server per socket. To answer some of your other points, The project was driven by what the IT dept wanted - windows computers with students having administrative permissions. It's on a rolling program so we pay every year and not every 8. The thin clients are ITX boxes and cost £130 each - we'd need these for terminal services anyway so it still works out cheaper to do VDI than desktops do.

Picasa, Drive sync, Plus (in trial), video, groups, gantter, sliderocket, sites, blogger, appengine are a few. You wouldn't be able to use plus in a primary.

More Google applications - Google Apps Help http://support.google.com/a/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=20012&parent=&ctx=topic https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/?pli=1

Linux on a Dead Badger is a book - hence the suggestion http://www.amazon.co.uk/Installing-Linux-Dead-Badger-Snyder/dp/1894953479

In a nutshell, Theres nothing Office 365 does that GAPPS doesn't do - but theres plenty that GAPPS does that you don't get in Office365.

Schools are definitely a good place to cut your teeth, but not if you want any substantial career progression. I got stuck here.

Our 6th form drive is 2TB we just pay for the broadband.

Time to move out of your MS happy zone

I also have a razrI ( XT890 ) and concur that it's a really good phone

Make that four. We are using RHEV. Basically we setup a machine to our liking then replicate it into a 'pool' of virtual machines. Give the students access and they log in as administrators. Reboot the machine and it goes back to its original config. The SPICE protocol offloads some of the work onto the local machine, so server load isn't too bad (about 40 VM's per server) and it costs around £600 per server per year plus about £200 per year for 25 licenses. No IoS or Android connector though. No MS Office saves us a fortune!

1750 on roll. budget £150k +- £30k depending upon renewals and projects,

About £85 per student

try Cygwin Cygwin

you could try an airplay integration: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pv.twonkybeam&feature=search_result

Google apps works perfectly across all of the devices on our domain without the need for addons like quickoffice and pages.

I made a similar ballsup a few years ago with Google apps - locked out the domain admin account. Massive screwup. I called them and they put me straight through to an engineer who sorted it then and there. I'd give MS a call, I'm sure they'll be able to sort it at their end.

It depends how you use it, if your using with MSOffice it stores the documents in MSOffice format so they are identical. Our argument was that 90% of student machines don't have office (and can't ever have office on ipad,android,linux etc - this was backed up by evidence from our VLE) and the cost of using 365 to get the same features means everyone needs office (through RDP) and that ran into 0ver 40k per year - guess who 'won' ?

I'm not sure I can do css inside moodle. Anyway project is almost finished. Teacher records TV program from Mythweb and it automagically gets added to moodle, with search function too. I'll get the code uploaded somewhere if anyone want to add anything specific for IE.