PiqueABoo

I've used this recipe: Automatic creation of user folders for home, roaming profile and redirected folders which is "related content" on the KB you linked. I set an account's profile path to \\server\profileshare\ and their homepath to \\server\homeshare\ and although I couldn't use the variable in GPOs, I essentially redirect MyDocs to %homepath%\Documents and redirect (roaming) AppData next to that in %homepath%\AppData. The script I made to clean up after robocopying lots of user MyDocs from an ex-system to a new one is the one I mentioned in this thread. Check that Automatic Creation recipe link and have a think about all this e.g. if your redirection isn't relative to a user's AD home and profile paths my script won't help (it would need "re-tuning" for another system plus, ::horror::, a comment or two in the code regardless). Alternatively, you could probably just make one using something like a DOS for /d command to call setACL on a bunch of subfolders (if you can make owner work with an account name - I didn't try too hard) or one of the other utils for fiddling with perms etc.

I had to think about this a few years ago and found people claiming to get away with ~ 1000 and I recall finding yet another 80/20% rule for other/broadcast traffic somewhere. Given an IP network it's mostly ARP (with a relatively tiny dash of DHCP) and that's normally few_servers<->workstations+printers, not everything<->everything. But I would consider subnetting at 510, unless of course there was another reason e.g. I wanted ACLs between boxes, multicasting or something. It must depend on the "character" of you network surely? Whether everything gets turned on at the same time.. where the traffic flows.. what the percentages actually say.

Some thoughts: Tutor 3 replacement (if required)? Print Management (quotas etc.)? Review existing s/w packages e.g. are there any you want with restrictive RM small-print or config/functionality that won't play nicely with vanilla? Or are just broken on Win7? Do people have or will they want some kind of remote access from home to docs? Backup Exec: Not sure what's going where, but if you want the full "media server" install working on a 2008 R2 you need BE2010. And if you don't then you likely want an agent. Given SCCM I can't think of anything else especially significant. You obviously need to string the new domain together, in particular design and make that OU structure, GPOs, file system structure, and it might be worth trying to figure out the rough time and the cost required for that. I always pitch that at around 3 months which would significantly narrow the price gap you have above, but I'm a bit of perfectionist and it's my estimate for "nothing left to do besides get on and use it".

Just sanity-check-googled and found a 2002 NetGear - some basic blocking stuff plus if you paid a subscription it apparently talked to some SurfControl URL categorisation service. Pretty much the same fundamental deal as K9, the Fortigate client etc. Overheads of putting category checking into a domestic router are not obviously that different to the DNS service you normally get on them. Whether you'd get a categorisation service to let some vendor hook up a h/w device for free is another matter. Presumably not, otherwise this would be a common feature by now surely?

Prior art: I'm fuzzy, but it's something like 10 years since some vendors made content filtering domestic routers.

OK I can see the (repeated) pain school-side, but how hard is that supplier-side then? How much does it actually cost them and why? I'm nothing like an expert on what's required, but quickly glancing at the 2011 guidance the changes just don't look that big. If you wanted to pay me ooh.. £50K a year to do nothing but worry about those for any given product, update some specialist census reporting/validation code, fret about "nice" deployment mechanisms of these updates and so on... I reckon I might be able to spend six months a year sunning myself on a beach. Now amortise that cost across the customers and recall how much you already pay for maintenance. But again I'm not an expert, so perhaps someone more enlightened can credibly explain why this is naive?

Mmm.. in a bit of a virtual-RL collision I watched Inception on Sunday and on spotting him went "Oh.. it's Pete thingy.. this [film] will probably be OK then". This is sad.. not usually sentimental about people I don't know, but he definitely was a "distinguished character actor" who made it very easy to suspend disbelief.

The last notable SIMS update was a necessary special case re. the end of MS life-cycle for SQL2005, surely? Which is of course one of the 1st April (variable strength) joke series, but sticking with it.. when folk have the antithesis of Cheap they tend to expect Good & Fast... and thus don't normally expect to have to work around things. -- It's just MIS, they're all Much-Of-A-Muchness[tm] and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for future paradigm shifts in what it does in user-land, less so any that makes much of a difference to educational outcomes. It might run out there instead of here, or have new ways of noting, counting, arranging and displaying beans on gadgets de jour, and one day it might even learn to speak a standard language, but I think all that is relatively yawnsome and quite teensy next to the BECTA point: It apparently costs the country, the tax-payer - most of whom are getting poorer (and poorer state services) by the day, a lot more money than one would reasonably expect.

Akshully.. I think it might have been the Power of Mumsnet[tm] wotdunnit, for instance one mum posted: "I have been going on it and writing positive messages and encouraging people to not write nasty gossipy things." If this isn't a permanent outage i.e. it comes back, then I would skip the clueless folk who made the site and go to their web-hosting company instead: That's apparently Midphase Hosting who say this violates their AUP: "Distributing hate speech, or any other content that is obscene, abusing, which could be considered libelous and defamatory."

A significant number of people, myself included, thought videoing and giggling at "damsel in distress" was a bit uhh... crass. So, dunno, but possibly pulled because of rude comments aimed at the publisher.

I skimmed that the other day and thought it was largely a fluffy Live@Edu piece, however this caught my eye: "Others point to specific steps forward – for example, with Microsoft® Office 365 for education, seeing SharePoint in the Cloud, and integration of Live@edu with virtual learning environments and with management information systems.". Plus I thought we already have some VLE integration, but I suppose that means *more* VLE integration. BTW last month RM announced that future Kaleidos will integrate with L@E. And I had an issue or two with this re. a different style of ICT Management: "“Not losing control but releasing control – trusting the students, moving away from the mentality that wants to lock everything down.” Won't affect my approach to local lockdown at all because local machines and apps still need to keep working... and I'm looking forward to the Live@Edu to OfE transition for the same basic reason as some other folk have cited, it promises you the ability to *manage* the online Office apps and (Sharepoint) document storage.

No so different from normal Exchange really, except there I generally only use powershell for some one-off config. Are you finding that you need to routinely resort to powershell for Live@Edu, and if so, to do what kind of things? It's basic Windows security architecture preventing that.. unless you once went well out of your way to change this they're stored via irreversible encryption... that password change notification API is one of the few places you can get to the plaintext versions of passwords that are needed here. I suppose in principle you could crack all the kids passwords and then set those with powershell + CSV, but I definitely wouldn't touch that without formal written permission from the Head/whatever, and some kids might have too-good passwords that don't fall out.

I'm hoovering up real info so thanks for posting that price. FWIW I thought about this and it will always take code: You have to make some kind of PasswordChangeNotify() agent DLL to run on each DC to capture passwords when they are changed and safely put them somewhere central for later use - presumably that's what ILM does for you. Then you've got to make the app to talk to AD, that changed password store and sync Live@Edu - which is presumably what OLSync does. A fair bit of work to make it seriously robust, and all in all a couple of hundred quid for MS to carry-the-can seems much easier. I'm still thinking about the viability of making some app to do syncing that doesn't involve (require) passwords for a shared address space scenario i.e. just needs to make [unmake] mailboxes and mail-users at one end or the other. -- Dear folk who have ILM in production, What are the general ILM overheads like i.e. if you had to squish it onto an existing server how much would that hurt? I'm assuming the SQL instance doesn't hold much data and isn't too big, is that the case? Or if you've made a dedicated VM for it, what kind of "size" is it (+rough number of AD accounts)?

I idly looked once for potential use, didn't find one but that could have changed. Someone else here was on this track for E2K7 last night attempting to get the feeble (probably by-design to help stop complete mail blockage) transport rule regexp functionality to do this... not ideal. I've never done this for real so I'm a bit fuzzy, but it might be possible to get the Exchange content filtering to do it i.e. give your banned words high scores and set the "treat as a bad message" threshold to match?

Aren't there signup deadlines? For instance The Google Apps for Education team is happy to announce that Message Security by Postini for Google Apps for Education is available free for a limited time .... from July 2009 - December 31, 2010 I haven't got a clue, but does that look like the entire Postini stuff you have in mind or just some extra feature? If it's the lot then you said "4 years", so was or wasn't the ability to make custom policy (everyone inc. MS and Google has long had defacto AS + AV) available before July 2009? -- Edit: Following your link, at the bottom of the Email security page I read "Discounts are available to schools and non-profits. 250 user minimum".

I looked quite hard and ended up at Bradley too (there's also a blog page). Apart from that the best place I've found for useful info so far is last month's Tech-Ed presentations, for instance Microsoft Live@edu: Moving Your School Communication and Collaboration to the Cloud which somewhere talks about Forefront for Exchange & policy which I'm assuming is the Feb 2011 "new capabilities for compliance, policy, SPAM and anti-virus management".. and finishes with 10 or so mins on OfE which has more data than I've found elsewhere e.g. the slide at ~ 51 mins in actually tells me a few things about the Sharepoint, Lync etc.

Sadly not in any detail. There's a copy of the service email on this site. Guess it depends on your definition of "significant" but some of that stuff in the first para. fits with mine.

Other people doing something automagically making it OK certainly is a "useless argument" e.g. other people commit serious crimes. YMMV but I think the security/compliance stuff is a serious factor and one that I would escalate to someone else (AKA cover my backside). Typical edugeeks aren't remotely qualified for it and should not be making random decisions about legal stuff based on what someone said on a forum, or which way the wind is blowing today etc.

Do you get that with ExMerged PSTs then? I've seen the powershell import have the kind of trouble you might expect with "personal folder" PST files kept on networks etc., but kind of assumed the PSTs ExMerge makes would be relatively perfect.

In what context? I use imgburn for all creation duties, have used daemon tools together with some compiled-to-exe script or other to mount, run, dismount.. but haven't had a much need for that in recent years.. that kind of stuff finally seems to be shuffling off to the nasty edu s/w graveyard.

FUD seems a teensy bit ironic here: Please explain in less casual terms how this is stealing our budgets.. No one pays anything besides time=money for Live@Edu and I don't see where you'll have to pay anything more for the OfE equivalents. If I wanted to pick on it I'd start talking about something like "light editing" of documents implying a need to keep paying for a "heavy" editor, or how easy it will or won't be to get your data out of an MS (or anyone else's) cloud etc.

Such as? There were enough docs and blurb released in Oct and beyond to give us a reasonable idea about what the free "core stuff" for OfE will be. We know what we have now. We know what MS have announced, albeit at a vague level, for the aforementioned Q1 updates to the existing service. I guess it depends on your definition of "core", but by my definition the "core stuff" is free[1] [1] Ignoring whatever anyone thinks about the cost of MS, or Google or anyone else assimilating the troposphere.

You have put your finger on a significant issue here. I'm 99.99% certain MS have said somewhere that Live@Edu e-mail is EU data centres only, but Sky-Drive currently isn't. And as posted on a related thread it all seems a bit fluid at present so even if correct now the latter info might change, but ultimately whether you or I are satisfied with what the information you can obtain from either of them isn't the point - it's whatever your nearest expert legal-bod thinks that matters... and at least some orgs who have those on tap appear to think it does matter. [Where are BECTA when you need them to rustle up an official position/recommendation eh?] Would be interesting to hear some serious takes on why either are OK from any UK edu orgs, preferably schools catering for "legal minors" as opposed to (superficially) "adults", that are using their choice based on a proper expert legal-bod's opinion. PS: Have just read the article you posted, which I should have done first sorry. I vaguely thought it might be easier for Unis than schools.. and although only one of three was quoted talking about DPA it was UCL - which makes it something I'm not prepared to dismiss. But why then haven't Google responded (and what does that imply)?

Thing is.. Live@Edu admin accounts got an e-mail in October about the move to "Office365 for Education" sometime(!) next year and more recently another e-mail giving advance notice about the phased roll-out of what look like some significant changes/enhancements (albeit *not* obviously the full OfE "business-lite" thing) to the service during Q1 next year. Plus, I know little about Google, but presume they won't be resting on their laurels either. Not saying don't do it, but short of MS back-tracking on what appear to be solid plans for Q1, parts of any comparison you make will have a limited shelf life.. suspect you'll have to go back at perhaps 1/2 term to make it valid all over again. Similarly when the OfE shift eventually happens (that seems very significant to me).

It claims, for their per user price (will it be free for Edu?), to handle calendar and contacts items so it has to be more be a MITM for inbound/outbound SMTP. In fact it has to do something locally to get hold of internal<->internal e-mail. Perhaps you can set it up as an external Journaling service, but I didn't think (might be wrong) that coped with calendar and contacts. I wouldn't be that interested, but I'm contemplating the other direction i.e. continuity when a cloud e-mail service is unavailable (bet that won't be for long though), journalling and archiving from there etc.