limawhiskey

It must have been frustrating but it sounds like the consultant was reasonable and backed up your view. I think it's good to have the odd sanity check now and again. Did you get to see a copy of the report? I've been asked to do something similar but I'm relatively inexperienced yet the most technical here, so I'll be glad to have someone to work on our strategy with. If you get chance, could you PM me the consultant's details?

Are you also converting to C of E given the shady financial situation at the vatican?

We still use Frog throughout the school, but a few years back we created a post for someone to work on it extensively and he's been great at working with departments and developing the Parent Engagement Portal. Even our public facing site is built on Frog. We still find staff in departments doing their own thing, but that's down to (lack of) training IMO - e.g. a lot of new staff in the department and they just don't know how to use it so fall back to shared files and powerpoints, or someone has the bright idea of getting a departmental assistant to create a website, for example. Transition to Frog Learn has been tricky with all the legacy stuff in Frog3 but starting to get department sites moved over now. @FN-GM - why do you find it rubbish? We've just migrated to Gmail and it's great (ok, we were using Frog Mail before)!

I'm planning to install Spiceworks Network Monitor (free); we already use the helpdesk which works well. Setting up and running a trial of IMC is on my (lower priority) to-do list. We have a relatively large but un-monitored network and I'm hoping one of the above will do a similar job to the OP's requirements for me.

Thanks for posting the follow up. I was interested in this as well.

Yes, for example the catering manager uses a desktop to connect to her company's email, order supplies etc. Site team get jobs allocated through an online helpdesk.

Just to resurrect this, do you guys count staff that work and use computers in your institution but for another company, e.g. catering managers / cleaning managers?

Monday morning 😡

No worries Ah OK, sorry, I didn't notice that. Hopefully useful advice for anyone browsing.

I'd echo other people's experience of Cunninghams. When the system works it's decent; it reduces the stigma of free school meals, is more convenient for the parents that want to pay online, gives parents who want it an idea of children's meal choices and has driven up spending in the school canteen. However, to me Cunninghams feels as though it's a bit of a bodged solution; too many interacting bits of software that don't really error check or seem very robust. Their call centre guys sound like the most beleaguered support team I deal with - their building must be a ground floor block otherwise Foxconn would have some competition for stats. The engineers I've met from the company are nice enough and they get the job done. However the area rep and the management seem surprised that the standard of support is an issue and the company ethos seems to be along the lines of "never acknowledge there's a problem and if there is, blame the other guy". In terms of suppliers, my best tip would be to look out for a system that seamlessly allows the till operators to start selecting items for payment before and/or during the biometric scanning, for speed. With Cunninghams the canteen staff have to wait for the fingerprint to be processed before they begin, so queue speed hasn't really improved over cash. Other things to bear in mind: Make sure there's someone in the school who registers new enrollments - you may need a small team with a schedule for the initial registration so plan for that. Make sure parents know how biometrics works (you're not taking copies of their children's fingerprints!) and how to register for online payments. Get your opt in forms returned as early as possible and make the biometric forms and registration part of the new starter procedure. Figure out if you want to steer parents to use biometrics by deciding how you'll deal with those who don't opt in and if you want to steer towards online payment by the number of revals you have. It's not really cashless if the kids are carrying £20 into school every couple of weeks, and if there's always a queue for the reval at break the children will encourage parents to use the online payments. If you want to drive true cashless, consider saving money by not getting any revals at all - finance or the canteen admin can always make the occasional manual adjustment if necessary. Ensure you have considered communication - make sure it's clear who is dealing with the company, who's responsible for the different aspects of the system and for raising support requests from the start. Is it network support, the finance team or the canteen staff? Can you tell I've had some interesting challenges with our system?! If I think of any other tips I'll add them.

I'm about to board the OVS-ES train too, and I'm also finding it a bit of a minefield, so this thread has answered a lot of my questions, thanks. We're moving from perpetual licensing as I recently got a quote for 550 OS and office licenses and it was around £20,000! I'm planning on taking a similar approach - desktop license and CALs by OVS and servers on a license-by-license basis. I'm also planning to split server roles going forward too, so expect to end up with around 10 or 12 versus our previous 4. At the moment we run VMware but I have been considering a switch to Hyper-V as the datacentre licensing seems advantageous. Can I ask where you get that license pricing? I've been quoted £101 for academic Server Standard 2 processor licence so that seems like a bargain.

Been looking into some online technical training for our team (three techs, one VLE developer and one graphic designer). Classroom technical training is on the whole prohibitively expensive for the school's staff training budget. Does anyone use online companies they recommend? Any to avoid? I have seen offerings from; ITonlinelearning (agents and support are UK based, Live Labs option, pricing TBC) Infinte Skills (large pool of content, no labs?, $900 for a team of five) CBT Nuggets (slick content, virtual labs, but probably too expensive - almost $1k per user per year) Anyone recommend any others?

I didn't realise you could buy this kind of support in X day quantities. Would be useful for me as we are reducing the technical capacity of our team. Can anyone can suggest good experience of companies in Manchester or surrounding areas?

Thanks. I'll give that a try next time. Can you also provide arguments for the installer this way? Have only ever used that process to build a package with before / after scans.

Dropped into this thread looking for some info on deploying MSIs via CC4. I tried importing the MSI alone but got errors on assigning the package. Ended up finding lots of useful info in some RM seminar notes: RM Seminars Spring 2013 - CC4 Packages without packaging (PDF) - RM.com Basically, you need to create an INI file to go along with the MSI, in the form: [font=Consolas][Package][/font][font=Consolas]Description=A description of the package and its information [/font] [font=Consolas]Version=1.0.0.0 [/font] [font=Consolas]OS=5.WS,6.WS [/font] [font=Consolas]WIPackage=.msi[/font] Not mentioned in the PDF is the useful AddCommand entry, which you can use to supply arguments for the MSI (you can use Orca to discover the properties which allow arguments). I used this to create a package for SIMS Discover, so added this line to the INI: [font=Consolas]AddCommand=SQLSERVER="sqlserver\sqlinstance" DATABASENAME="discover" SIMSSQLSERVER="[/font][font=Consolas]sqlserver\sqlinstance[/font][font=Consolas]" SIMSDATABASENAME="sims"[/font]

I exported an list of admission numbers and UPNs and used a lookup to make the CSV for import. I agree, potentially messy solution, but it worked for me.

Oops. For future reference, don't forget to choose an option for Email Location. Works quite well once you do Great tool, thanks again Matt.

Thanks for the reply. It's just a small sample of six records to test the import. They all have email addresses.

Thanks for making and distributing the tool, it looks extremely useful. I am having a problem when running an import of student email addresses. The result comes back as "Import failed" on a test of six users. The CSV has fields Forename, Surname, Adno, UPN, username, email and I am choosing to match only the Admission No and email fields. The output looks similar to the screenshot in the manual; the value for gender is repeated in the fields for Gender, Admission Number, Date of birth, Year and Registration, with "Import Failed" as the result. The error repeated in the log is: Any thoughts on what might be wrong?