truebluesteve

I have several Scottish friends and all of them want to remain in the Union, and so do I for that matter. However if the majority decided that they want to leave and live under President Salmond (and let's face it, that's what he's in it for) then so be it. If the Scots do want to leave then it has to be the whole hog with no support from the taxpayers of the rest of the UK. I think the oil debate will rumble on and on and only time will tell if it and the gas reserves will provide enough to support the economy, but I think it will be a lot tougher than the SNP would have the people of Scotland believe! Ps...It seems that they are going to boot the Trident submarine fleet out of Faslane if they get independence - now I'm not sure of the figures but I'm sure it brings a significant amount of money into the local economy which I would have thought was quite important. However I'm sure the Cities of Plymouth or Portsmouth or even the town of Barrow would love to have the business that the nuclear fleet brings!

Interesting that Stephen Fry was tweeting yesterday how poor his 4G in central LA was! I'd be quite thankful for a decent 3G connection where I live!

We use Wasp for our asset management along with the labels mentioned earlier. It has worked really well for the last 4 years and enabled us to keep track of lots of our equipment.

Cunninghams were very good throughout the whole process and they had a couple of guys on site while we did the biometric enrolment. It took a couple of days or so to do the entire school and was pretty painless. As for the costs of the systems, they were also the cheapest. The back end software does seem to be a little home brew for most of these companies but ours seems to work and hasn't crashed or burned yet!

That will teach me to skim read too quickly :-) Then external grade cat5 outside the house. If its run nicely and clipped properly then it will look fine

There is almost always a way of solving every problem for a price. I'm sure Lightspeeds offering works very well but it's yet another cost and very soon you'd be better off just buying a goddam Windows laptop! There is definitely a view amongst some that iPads are some sort of panacea for both staff use and teaching and learning. I think they can be useful tools but certainly aren't the answer to eveything

Yep every time! I'm a ex sparky and ripping the skirting boards off can be a right pita! The thing that will determine how much mess and making good you do is what the skirting boards are fixed to and with what. Big nails into a brick wall can be very messy whereas gripfill onto plasterboard not so! Anyway I use power line adapters here and they are great and will do up to 200 meg.

If you do a quick search you'll find quite a lot of recent stuff on here about MDM including Meraki's offering, which we use and is very good.

We use Treesize Professional and it does a very good job of removing them. It will search for duplicate files, files that haven't been accessed for x amount of time and so on. There is a free version but it will only work on the machine it's installed on rather than the pro version which will work across your network. Steve

We have had Cunninghams in our school (I made the decision to go with them after speaking to a number of companies) for about 2 years now and I have to say the system has been extremely reliable and the support has been very good too. Our system is Biometric (Biostore) and the most complicated bit was enrolling 2300 kids and staff! I would agree with all the above comments especially the September rush, but overall it has been a good experience for us.

We have been using IP Monitor from Solar Winds for a number of years now and we are very pleased with it. It's easy to set up and simple to maintain. The cost is based on the number of monitors you have which include ping, windows services, Exchange, SQL and so on. Hope this helps Steve

We use Meraki for our iPads and Nexus 7s and it works very well especially on the iPads, which have more management options than Android devices. The ability to important activation codes for Apple apps, which are then used up as they are installed by each device is extremely useful.

Just using net-ctrl at the moment for some Ruckus evaluation kit, and they've been very helpful.

Exchange 2007 Crawley Planning to migrate to 2013 this year

Blimey that's really grim. We give better stuff than that away :-/ Does anyone actually use the equipment?

Thanks guys

Hi folks Our Finance Director has asked me to look for some (preferably free) CRM software to manage the schools community contacts and others. Anyone on here use anything they can recommend or have any suggestions? Thanks in advance Steve

I think you're right, however the licensing rules are really complicated as it depends on who owns the devices and whether its is shared amongst lots of people or whether one person uses all of the time. It also depends on who makes the App.

I quite like Windows 8 but we only upgraded to 7 and Office 2010 18 months ago and I don't to traumatise staff all over again :-) however I am going to equip a small room with around 5 PCs for 6th form study use to I may well trial it and Office 2013 in there and see how it goes. I have seen a few iterations of Windows and when something changes radically, everyone throws their arms up in the air and complains that its all terrible. However after a few months it all settles down and we get used to it!

The Galaxy Nexus is a great phone - I have one, but it has no SD card support so you are stuck with 16Gb. I'm looking to the S4 or HTC One X next :-)

I'd be interested in what these "rules" are. I certainly don't believe it's a legal issue as data protection is the schools responsibility, so if you choose to use Office 365 then it's down to you to manage that. I suggest you ask them to detail exactly what the problem is and take it from there.

Ours is about £110 per pupil based on around 2000 on roll, although this has dropped from around £130 about 3 years ago. The school population is set to grow again over the next 5 years due to a new estate being built nearby so hopefully we will see an increase.

Welcome to the forums! I think firstly you need to have a passion for IT and want to learn. It sounds obvious, but I have interviewed lots of people for IT jobs and while qualifications are useful, having that desire to improve yourself is something I always look for. I have employed staff that haven't had MSCEs or experience, but did have that passion and they have always turned out to be great assets to the IT teams. Having said the above, getting some basic qualifications in IT will help get you in the door for interviews - compTIA a+ or Net + for example. You didn't mention if you already had any qualifications in IT so apologies if I'm teaching you to suck eggs! Apply for as many jobs as you can - they are likely to be junior positions of course and not very well paid, but once you're in a position you can get the experience you will need for the better paid more demanding roles that are out there. Hope this helps a bit, and good luck with your career change! Steve

This sort of control freakery is exactly the reason we left our LEA's IT SLA a couple of years ago. They should spend more time improving their services rather than trying to bully their customers!

I think this all goes to prove that despite what Apple says, it really isn't geared for education - not yet anyway. Unfortunately our leaders don't appreciate all of this when they suddenly decide iPads et al are a wonderful idea and we should have them immediately!