jamin

woohoo! No more paper cups for me! Thank you Very PC, As this is the first thing I have won this decade I have brought a lottery ticket, but with all the time travel going on there are going to be 2499 winners at the mo so the Mug is the best prize (-:

We use Meetingplanner from http://www.emergingsoft.com Its OK but tbh you could do the same with a cleaver exchange setup (if your users are comfortable with proper outlook calender usage) As for the school diaries we are just about to go live with something these guys: http://www.schoolssports.com have developed called Pro Event / Pro Admin which looks really quite cool. Its still being trialled but worth making contact with them for a chat.

I really like the leap, but for games and geeky things. Once mastered it can be really intricate, fun and the apps coming out for it are very innovative. However I still think its a personal device, not a classroom tool. A teacher would be better off taking a gyromouse around the room than a leap and the students would have fun trying but be able to do little with it mounted. Please post back with how you found it.

Hey all, Just wondering what the Ave size of your users mailboxes are? Ours: Total size of all mail Databases: 900Gb Total number of mailboxes: 900 Ave Size - 1Gb Cheers, James.

Job Vacancies | Benenden School Full details in the link.

Head of IT IT Ops Manager Server tech Network tech Sharepoint tech DB / dev tech General full time tech General part time tech 70 Servers, 500 school owned devices, 2000 student owned devices, 50 printers etc etc Le edit: 550 Students, 350 staff

4 laptops 2 phones 1 ipad 1 raspPi 2 Consoles 1 Mac Mini 5.5 per person But this may be bias due to the laptop / multimedia setup in the shed (-:

There will be a few of us (Teachers and IT) from Kent, prob on the Friday, PM me closer to the time for an update

My account managers, who are quite good, know the two key things: I don't have time to speak for ages on the phone: keep it quick but professional No bidding contests: The first quote you submit is the final, It a fair playing field and any extras (discount or service) they add on after the call is not accepted. They know that I will always ask at least three of them to quote and pick the lowest. Also that if any poor customer service is experienced I will bring it up and if not sorted they will not be one of the three. I find this way everyone knows the way we work, we get the best price / service / goods for the school and all in all the account managers do their best and don't try and sell things we are not interested in however still get a chance o meet their quota.

Full details here: http://www.benenden.kent.sch.uk/userfiles/benenden/JobVacancies/IT%20Development%20and%20Integration%20Technician/Development%20and%20Integration%20technician%20Job%20Overview.pdf Job Vacancies | Benenden School

Hi all, Has anyone used Airgroup before and if so what for? We are looking to enable Airprint / Airplay over the network for staff and student VLANs and Airgroup seams to enable this but I am unsure about how it intergrates with things like FollowMe Printing and Bradford Campus manager Any comments about these or other products would be most welcome. Jamin.

HP servers from OCSL ave been very good for us, we have had problems OOTB (MS related) but OCSL have been great at sorting them and very proactive. I am also a big fan of Stones desktop services but not had much dealings with the servers

One for each here. SCSM, SCCM, SCORCH, SCOM, SCVMM, WebPortal, SQL X 2 and SQL-Datawarehouse. It sounds a bit over kill (and some rolls could probably be combined) But the data warehouse server is 4 core / 16Gb and still runs out of RAM while processing cubes.

Worth noting it is a requirement that lift emergency phones to be working (and copper not VOIP) or shut down the lift.

+1 to Stone onsite repairs, very good service.

We are independent and use iSAMS. It does 99% of what we need and the support is very reactive. They are also actively developing feature requests from customers. Onsite hosted and open database. I have not used many other school systems, so can't offer better than / worse than advice but when deciding on a major new piece of software I tend to look a lot at the company, and I don't hate iSAMS (-:

Perhaps something like the following would help (it did for us): Spend the first 6 months asking IT Staff what infrastructure they need / Teachers what they would like to try in the classroom / Pupils what they like to use. Offer teachers training on apps, ipads, IWB etc. Get a few demo devices in and let the most advanced teachers try them for a week (let them know in advance so they can plan lessons) Ask for feedback and invite the most vocal (positive and negative) into a group to talk through ideas and the set some pilots up. These need to be tracked and money spent but should not be over red taped. Next 6 months doing the pilots and IT infrastructure. As mentioned core network and storage should be key but thinking about where to outsource same functionality (Student Office 365 for email etc) should also come into play. Pilots should now be producing data, ask the students and staff how it has changed T&L, IT Staff how it has been to support. Ask what to invest in and build a service wrapper around the successful. Think about bringing the service into production, I.E. support and teacher training before go live, don't force it on the whole staff but let the futurists lead and filter down. Repeat yearly and it works well as a stratgy in our school. Just need to make sure SMT are on board with a small but effictive pilot budget which may result in dropped ideas. If you are in the south east feel free to PM me for a visit James.

Same here: AP-105s work well

Hi all, We used to have the following setup: Firewall = Cisco ASA Web filtering - Lightspeed rocket Email filtering - Lightspeed NAC - Bradford Campus Manager VPN - TMG We have brought a Palo Alto device to replace the end of life Cisco ASA and it is running as a direct replacement only. I am keen to consolidate as much as possible onto the Palo Alto and wondered if anyone has migrated the services from the above onto it? It looks like it can replace all of the devices above but wondered how pratical this is in the real world, any advice / war stories greatfully recieved. We have 900 mainly residential users with 450 school devices and 1000 odd personal devices with full access to services. Thanks James.

All our students are required to bring there own device, teachers rely on them having the devices in lessons. All devices connect to a Student VLAN with access policies handled by a mix of Bradford and lightspeed. We have scripts to setup printing (Followme) and private and shared filestore. Apps are available via TS. Most of these are currently Windows only however over the summer we are upgrading the filestore, printing and TS to support Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, *nix and ChromeOS as far as is possible. So by the new academic year (Almost) any device will have - Internet, email, filestore, printing and remote apps. The students device setup initial setup is automated and we do support the services and the students devices, even arranging warranty repairs.

Hi there, We are running Win 7 64bit with activstudio with a dual monitor PC (one 19" LCD and the IWB projector). Some teachers have this set to extended desktop and some mirrored (we should have never given them the choice!). When a teacher logs in and it switches from extended to mirrored or vise-versa the board needs recalibrating (presumably because the resolution has changed). Does anyone know of a way of allowing users to switch between desktop modes without having to recalibrate? Thanks

We have 100 ish in the Sixth form. There are a few workstations dotted around in small clusters mainly for group work but every student is required to bring a laptop to school and connect to the managed Wifi. The difference being we fully support the students devices (laptops, tablets, phones, ipods!) down to OS reinstall / arranging hardware repairs etc.

After a large ram upgrade I found myself bored with alot of 64Mb Dimms and a dummy: The roman armour was great look at the next fancy dress party but a pain as I could not sit down )-:

I got a Alcatel Onetouch 983, very impressed as it was only £40 and has android 2.3, plus all the normal hardware (3.2 camera, 1Ghz CPU, GPS etc). Is well built and feels good. Highly recommended for a cheep phone.

Hey all, We had a could of classrooms refitted over the summer with HDMI AV setups (PC HDMI out to HDMI switch to HDMI wall plate to HDMI projector) and we are seeing problems where the connectors will move a little cutting the display. It seems the slightest movement of the console or brush past the wall plate will affect the setup where as the DVI / VGA connectors screw in and stay put. I have thought about hot-gluing the connectors at the sides but don't know how effective this would be on the metal wall plate / back of a PC. Is anyone else finding this? Any other ideas on making the connectors teacher / student proof? Thanks James.