PiqueABoo

Perhaps it's just querulous me, but devs are no better at agreeing with each other than anyone else. They're interesting but the stats alone don't justify anything, whereas RM enumerating the difficulties, the work in making an SP2, the overheads in continuing to supporting Vista might. It's a bit of a precedent though isn't it i.e. dropping support for an OS before MS kill it? I would want some kind of assurance on the RM lifecycle for Win7 now.

The response is predictable though e.g. customer with: XP: ::shrug:: Vista: "Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! It hurts...!!!" Win7: ::shrug:: Makes me wonder about a) how many of their customers use Vista on CC, b) current RM resources/budgets (I wouldn't have thought knocking out a Vista SP2 and the subsequent hotfixes would be that time-consuming).

Talk to a Head? They should have been told all about this by now. Are you connected to some kind of Grid/RBC? They are the most likely folk to have been doing the telling, so ask them or look for documents about it if there's some kind of intranet/portal.

The LA here do support for a nearby Independent. Your problem ought to be how to design/make a good vanilla architecture - if that's decent at the start then it ought to be easier to subsequently manage than CC4 (where folk have exerted quite a bit of effort patching the CC4 management s/w as opposed to juts getting on and managing their system with it).

It's about as PC-multi-culturally-ethnically-religiously-diverse as you can get, surely? -- Pity Sprogette isn't a couple of years younger, but she'll probably like it anyway. Refreshing, but not as funny as C & L though.

I went looking for the source but it's a trifling £1450 + VAT for the actual report (covers a variety of other pastimes too) Not at all impressed by the Parents Outloud comments.. children obviously can't be blamed for anything, it's the insurmountable obstacles preventing parental-child involvement like err.. umm.. err.. dangers lurking on every street corner and.. and.. and.. urmm.. postage stamp sized gardens! Of course it is.

In the Primary world I see, which may or may not be similar to anyone else's (but if it's different I'd love to know how?) looming budget pressures appear to have kicked a lot of non-core "cute" engaging ICT stuff into touch. However there now seems to be a increasing trend towards netbooks where they once would have bought laptops. Netbooks of course can be integrated into their system and take advantage of their existing s/w investment - and if the screen size isn't so good for [whatever] they'll put up with it for the cheaper price. The sums don't work out quite so well if they don't have existing wireless infrastructure though. Anyway my main concern in this area is longevity/sustainability, as in how often do netbooks or any other "mobile" devices have to be replaced?

MDT. SpecOps Deploy used to be s/w deployment only, but now wraps (presumably seriously simplifies) MDT.

No answers sorry, but I'd be interested to see some. Personally I'd be very reluctant to take on buck-stop support for a random 'vanilla'. For a CC you [can] know the architecture and ditto if it's a vanilla you designed, but someone else's bright ideas could be 'interesting' enough to land you in a world of trouble and I wouldn't want to touch it unless it was a "no guarantees, best endeavours paid by the hour" kind of deal.

"To protect privacy.." .. hmm.. the only thing I can't figure out is if a specific household in the next street were beating themselves up or whether one of their more immediate neighbours finally snapped.

I don't think there is an easy way round this. I've done something like this by targeting GPPs at the user/machine combination, but those GPPs do have to reverse/relax a lot of lesser precedence GPO (& GPP) settings that they'd get on any other machine.

Having watched the Office365 videos, my advice would be to stick with CSV rather than playing with ILM now - the equivalent is supposed to be and looks easier, it's just a case of whether you get it in the "for Education" version.

Dear Miss Guided, Thank you for your recent e-mail. Having read several paragraphs of sensitive information about someone I don't know I finally reached the paragraph at the end informing me the message was confidential and only to be read by the addressee. I must confess I was a little worried about how I might erase the information from my memory with little besides common kitchen implements to assist, but happily then realised that *I am the addressee* because it would not have been delivered to my mailbox otherwise. Nevertheless I'm not that interested in assertions about the psychological problems of a newly pregnant minor and and would have complied with your request to delete the mail, except it wasn't a request it was an order ("must") and I've never really been Army material. So instead I decided to contact the ICO and sent them a copy of your missive encrypted via a pre-arranged password - I understand they will be in touch with you shortly, or at least that's what my new journalist friend on the Daily Panic staff suggests usually happens in this type of case. Kind Regards, PiqueABoo --- Dear Miss Guided, Thank you for your recent e-mail. You apparently intended to send it to my ex-wife, unfortunately she is no longer in a position to respond.. --- Dear Miss Guided, Thank you for your recent e-mail concerning next years term dates. Could you please arrange authorisation for my husband to read it ASAP because he will have to book time off work to cover the inset days.. --- Dear Miss Guided, You asked me to cascade this mail to my team, but at the bottom there's a bunch of jargon in a barely legible small font saying I can't copy it it anywhere. Clarification please? --- Dear Miss Guided, Thank you for your recent e-mail, one where I am very obviously the recipient. Sadly, you only began your e-mail with "Hi," and lacking any form of telepathic ability I am unable to discern whether I am the intended recipient or not. --- Dear Miss Guided, Thank you for your recent e-mail apparently sent to me by mistake and forbidding me to divulge the contents. Although in this specific case I am willing to comply with that officious request and keep the text "Hi Bob, Here's the latest draft." confidential, Baillie Estates v Du Pont suggests that disclaimer may not apply to the interesting documents you attached to the e-mail so I have forwarded them to.. --- Dear Miss Guided, For the nth time: You accidentally sent it to a mail list with in excess of 30,000 subscribers! There is no [bleeping] way you will ever sweep that secret back under the carpet. It's public forever - deal with it! --- Dear Miss Guided, I deleted your mail as requested and categorically deny e-mailing your list of proposed redundancies to the subjects concerned via what is apparently an anonymous remailer located in the offshore tax-haven of... --- Dear Miss Guided, You have just sent me an e-mail explaining the school's policy in respect of [whatever], however your disclaimer explains that this may not represent the views of the school. Could you please clarify whether your explanation does in fact reflect the views of the school and might I suggest you use a pen and paper this time?

Disagree.. the attacker is only forced to crack the entire password space when they **know** that password space is enforced e.g. some kind of complexity checking is turned on. Even then attacker would be an idiot not to try dictionary based cracks with something like the JtR rules to get the "MyPassword01!, MyPassword02!, ..." stuff. And if they don't know what password space is enforced, it's opportunistically try the same JtR-like approach and usually whatever capability rainbow tables they have or have the patience to use. Bottom line: "mypassword" falls out relatively quickly regardless of whether more complex passwords are possible.

Oh.. OK... do you think we can have their IPv4 addresses back if they're not using them? [We're apparently at that historic moment when IANA have no more left to hand out - few days or weeks subject to a bit of bureacracy]

Yes it was interesting, but my reaction is a quantum theory-like superposition of states: approve of some honesty, disapprove of some of the truth that delivered.. knowledge economy is tosh was fine.. tech is not a panacea (words I've used here before) was fine... but then the bit that disturbed me.. they were only playing along with that to advance their real agenda. And I don't entirely grok that agenda, the collaborative spaces in which next generation will learn to survive the rest of the century. Perhaps the paper will be more enlightening, but suspect I'll just file it under abstract meta-blather and then get on with something that makes a real, immediate change for the better in some small corner of the edu-tech world.

I've done that - getting hold of the right names to type in is a pain e.g. they're not explicitly in the settings you get from the OWA help->about. -- A good place to start troubleshooting this kind of thing is the Microsoft Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer. If it works there, then it's very likely something to do with what happens to HTTPS & HTTP between the school workstation and the net.

I'm happy to accept ratios of 5:1 or higher because that's what I see. But there is a serious quantity vs. quality aspect.

Thing is, it was only last year that we had Current ICT and Computer Science in schools - damaging to UK’s future economic prospects (doubtless discussed here somewhere), bemoaning how profligate and usually adept use of IT, gadgets etc.. is not translating into kids studying computing, which is apparently necessary if you have ambitions to advance that IT centric world.

Not saying it's false but sez who? Based on what? And has it been formally verified by the Guinness World Records?

No. You can remove the links from the top of the OWA client page and I believe you can filter that on local firewalls, but you can not manage (turn on/off) any features of the 'package' besides those relating to the e-mail. Part of the Office365 thing is that you will have management control over the sharepoint, lync etc.. how much control we've yet to see.

I think it's best to start with all warnings and errors in all logs besides Security, then gradually exclude any you discover are harmless (but only if you're absolutely sure).

Indeed. Most common strategy I see is that they buy everything with select, but they can end up running on that for at least 5, possibly 6 or even 7 years. Like everyone else, including MS staff at times I'm not an expert on their licensing, but I think the amortised cost might be half the price of MSA "School Desktop" etc. Yes, they're then stuck with what they bought at the start for the duration, but they also save the cost of upgrading to this year's Windows/Office in significant time+expertise=money terms. So far so good, but I've now got a niggling concern that these schools may not be able, or feel they are able, to afford to jump onto the cloud bandwagon that I'm guessing will heat up quite a lot with Windows 8 and apparently will add something to existing subscriptions even if it isn't the full $10 or whatever. If Microsoft want to look a bit more convincingly Good[tm] then I'd like to see them throw some free Office365 A1 licences in for teachers, perhaps 10, which would make it usable for free in single-form entry Primary and other small educational organisations (I'm ignoring admin staff because I'm not sure I want their docs in the cloud). More generally I'm not sure they really get schools and probably have a self-selecting view of them i.e the ones with the shiny tech are probably the ones who are most likely to go talk to them. And certainly not Primary, but look around - neither do a lot of Secondary folk. More cynically I'm not sure they care too much: higher education use gets them "mindshare" amongst more imminent future movers/shaker/tech-influencers, but will they really get much back from having younger kids use their stuff?

Probably not associative. -- A cloud..

Decisions.. decisions... I haven't kept up with this, but I think quite a few folk expect to see the next Windows in 2012... so if you kept it for another year would you really want to go to Window 7 when 8 (or whatever they call it) is just around the corner? XP drivers for new kit is certainly an issue and (strictly anecdotally) they seem to be falling away in portability order i.e. netbooks appear to be the worst, then laptops, then PCs. But if I wasn't likely to need lots of brand new boxes in the next year, and especially if I'd bought select licences, then I don't think I could put up a serious business case for upgrading. What will Win7 it do for your organisation in the next year or maybe two that XP doesn't? Run IE9 maybe - and is that so compelling? I suppose MS may hit us with a few more bits that only work on Win 7+ though.. an equivalent of the W2K killing dotNet 2.0.