PiqueABoo

A very little class then? A reaction we, and certainly the press, know absolutely nothing about. I'd have expected typical 10 yr olds to think this was the most hilarious thing that had happened all year. They'll be out in the playground passing the story down for generations now surely? Naah.. they never do that.. all mothers are far too busy balancing the weight of the world on their shoulders to be bothered by this kind of trivia. Playground rumour [told you]? But you mean your child wasn't one of the viewers and thus so distraught that you immediately enquired why and discovered the rough story from them? Accidents happen and teacher was doubtless mortified. I'm a bit annoyed that anyone thought "disciplinary measures" had a place here. PS: The bit that subconsciously kept nagging me: Does anyone who sends their kids to CE VA schools actually possess any of those traditional Christian virtues any more? Forgiving of course being a well-known Christian duty, as opposed to say "fulminating" in the company of journalists.

That was one...I didn't say anything about the rest Consider it a compulsion: What we haven't been getting from some of those big shiny R&D depts., and at what expense, has been one of my buttons for quite a while now.

A small criticism on the "divide": I've never noticed the implied correlation between s/w company size and s/w quality. Some big companies have caused me lots of pain, some small companies have produced "gems" (largely I suspect because they're not bogged down with big company overheads and manglement/political infrastructure). It all seems pretty random, however the "it's your fault flaky product X isn't working" meme is very predictable.

Generally agree with that assuming it's secure updates, but the scavenging introduces a new problem, or at least it did (has been a while so perhaps this is smarter now?). It's with Laptops that flit from wired to wireless and thus end with say this DNS A RR: LAP01 -> ; AIUI because of the scavenging no-refresh interval the order those IPs are returned can get stuck for a while, so if you ping LAP01 you always get the Wireless IP back. This can be a right pain in practice for a variety of apps other than ping. Without scavenging the IP you get back is whatever was last registered or refreshed e.g. plug in a cable and it's now the Wired IP which is generally much, much better. You can still get issues here if you're creative enough, but I rarely hit them. What I did was knock up an app which runs overnight and basically clears from DNS anything in DHCP scope IP range that: a) Doesn't exist in DHCP, or b) Has the wrong (security) ownership, but in both case records are only zapped if the associated IP isn't responding right now. I reckon this is more complex than necessary, but I wanted to get my head around coding for the various technical corners - a simpler strategy might be to simply delete all DNS records referring to the DHCP scope IP range where the associated IP isn't responding.

That's what zero is in one of the date formats. IIRC that's what you get on all DNS records when you first turn on scavenging i.e. the exisiting records don't automatically have "created" timestamps in them on the off-chance you will use scavenging one day. As above you DO have to turn this on both at the server level and for each DNS zone, after which I'm pretty sure this does sort itself out (I'm a bit shaky on this because MS scavenging annoyed me so I rolled my own to factor in DHCP etc.).

I've still got a few rough edges to tinker with. I was trying the "everything goes to Live@Edu first and any without mailboxes there are relayed to school" scenario, where for this experiment the school-side was an old E2K3 box: Fiddling with the E2K3 accounts via recipient policy to add/change the addresses wasn't too bad, but I'm aware of a couple of schools where they have manually created staff mail addresses with random numbers on the front (these are different from staff logons and their theory is that the kids won't be able to guess & abuse staff e-mail addresses) - haven't thought it through, but suspect this part would be harder for them and might require ADModify or script or something. Creating the Live@Edu MailUsers is where I came in: Needs a little powershell script, but wouldn't be that difficult to do in bulk with a CSV. And of course in principle you can buy, configure and use ILM/Syncing for this. Setting up a new SMTP connector for the shared address on the E2K3 was temporarily "fun" - you're supposed to point that at the MX for the shared address (a Live@Edu FQDN) but that name begins with a number and the relevant bit of the E2K3 interface will not accept FQDNs that begin with a number! So I eventually made and used a number-free DNS CNAME that points to the number-tainted MX instead. I don't yet understand why you need this connector at all, but for a first pass I decided to do things the MS way... ...but having said that, the key departure is that I did all of this with *additional* Live@Edu accepted domains which bear no relation to the domain used to create the Live@Edu tenancy i.e. SAS does not appear to be restricted to just the tenancy domain. Summary: SAS now works for me, but took a fair bit of thought in places and I suspect some of it might go ::whoosh:: over some heads.

Visa has got red bits now.

Netcraft's graphs for mastercard.com with red bits. I haven't got the slightest clue, but perhaps their payment stuff relies on some of the same saturated pipes.

I could use a genuine school opinion or two right now so did appreciate that (was a close match to what I envisaged for most of the same reasons). Some comments: - I suspect at least some of the pain is the difference between E2K3, and E2K7/10, where it's difficult to avoid working in PowerShell for this and that unless you have fairly basic requirements. - I've now got my eyes set on what Live@Edu will become, presumably at some point next year: "Office 365 for Education". We don't know enough about that yet, but they've promised the same infrastructure and SLAs as for business customers (think I read somewhere it is 99.9%). There is an hour long TechEd presentation called Security and Compliance of the Office365 Platform which has lots of information about that, most of which I imagine (but don't know) will apply to the Edu version. - Speed will obviously be slower than local, but it has been perfectly usable for me. - Sync. Agree. Haven't touched that yet, but I've got that "bloated" feeling too. - SSO. Agree. Looking at the SDK is on my to-do list. - Support. I've asked the free MS support question and that worked OK. But I've found it quite difficult to track down what I think is some fundamentally useful information - the MS UK implementation guide very definitely helped, just not enough. - Search and zap Bad E-Mail[tm]. There's a search feature in the GUI - unproven but I imagine you could use that to take out targeted ones. Or whatever it is you do now in E2K7/10 where you can't use Exmerge. - Backups and Service outages. See the above "O365 for" comment, plus you can get deleted mailboxes back via PowerShell. In addition to the issues you've raised there are some e-safety angles, for instance a school might not want things like the video sharing link on the web client, although perhaps O356 will help there). My summary opinion: Live@Edu started off pitched at higher education with (technically) adult users and it's still a bit of a "squeeze" to make it fit in schools.

Looks like the correct answer is "no". Was just looking at the PowerShell Toolkit for Outlook Live which is essentially a C# wrapper for the powershell. That has a CreateMailUser() function that internally runs New-MailUser followed by a few Set-MailUser commands.

[This sub-forum has "Exchange" in the description, so I guess here will do] Has anyone seriously played with shared address space? I've just started testing what you can/can't do *without* putting the syncing s/w on your domain (which is all the MS configuration doc I found talks about.. briefly). So it's fiddling with powershell remoting and I've happily made it relay to the other side of the SAS "partnership" by making one of those mailbox-less "Mail Users". To do that I used: New-MailUser to make the mail user Set-MailUser - to subsequently give them the right (I think!) "proxy addresses" in the right place. It worked, but I can't help wondering if I'm going about it the long way and whether you can do it all with just the New- cmdlet. Can't see it myself, but does anyone know better?

Don't recall whether it was aged 4 or 5, but Sprogette went to one of those seriously competitive birthday parties on the right side of the tracks, where the entertainer was apparently a former Chinese State Circus performer (she certainly looked like one).. was very subtle, but all the more awesome (original, non-slang sense) for it.

::sob: Unless I'm missing something that's 1998 .. was kinda looking forward to the numbers in the days *before* they let the riff-raff in.

I know you shouldn't knock a free.. but IPSCA was a bit of a pain for OWA last time I went near one. You need to make sure you have reasonably current MS cert updates on Windows OS's which isn't very predictable for home PCs, you also need to install and serve up the intermediate certs on the Exchange server etc. May well be fixable because I spent very little time on it, but I gave up on trying to figure out how to make Firefox happy. All-in-all it wasn't obvious that this was easier than using your own CA, and then giving your users the CA cer file to install on any non-domain machines. OWA is not a general public web service after all, the user's are your own and can be told that if they want the warnings gone strongly enough then all they need to do is...

My half-hearted impression could be wrong, but I thought it was more autonomy from LA and currently indeterminate amount of control from central gov (but possibly more)? Whatever, I can be as fierce about hidden real costs (support, training and so on) as anyone but yet again I thoroughly agree with BECTA saying the total spend on just MIS annual maintenance + licence renewal is "unacceptable". And that a fundamentally-the-same school A has to pay for it all over again if their status changes isn't any more impressive regardless of the excuses - I would be very sorely tempted to take the retraining et al expense hit for another system, just to stick two fingers up at that.

Do you think the AD with Exchange in it is broken in some way? Keeping the domain + users + Exchange, whilst doing whatever you want re. unwanted group memberships, OU structure/policy, file system structure etc. has got to be easier surely?

Belatedly noticed this thread: Half the problem with it is that we're talking current Live@Edu as opposed to that around-the-corner Office365 for Education where, AFAICT what Edu will get for free is significantly different in lots of useful ways. It's about Business-lite replacing Hotmail-offshoot surely?

Because I said so! ;b Did you have some specific question in mind?

There is a phenomenal amount of money being wee-weed away out of public funds for school MIS. The BECTA swansong report predicts licensing/maintenance at ~£45 million per year, with support adding additional £65 million per year and AFAIK it's mostly for "old rope". The problem the s/w solves just isn't that big - ask anyone with a serious development clue what they could do with a lean/mean team of their choosing for a small fraction of that, say £1 million a year.. you'll get a bunch of variations on "near perfection".. and there's a very good chance it would be. Here's a very relevant BECTA line with my emphasis: In the light of the current financial pressures facing schools and the nation generally we consider that the base cost and its current rate of increase will both be considered unacceptable. It is unacceptable. C'est la vie... it's what the company I worked for wanted when playing standards eons ago, and for all the guff people talk about the lovely open-ess I've seen the same in RFC-land (first time was in the 90s with mail service vendors trying to get SMTP extended their way, not the other lots way).

Hmm.. I'm not doing Win7 yet, but I was vaguely planning to get one of those "go get all the MSUs" utils and throw them in MDT's Packages (it's raison d'etre isn't it)?

PM me then, I'm on a genuine quest for enlightenment.

But that's all vertical isn't it? Recall I said "Yet again for horizontal within a school.."

Playing with current version via IE8: - With the non-enhanced file browser, when I hit Upload I get an alert box displaying "https:\\server\Extranet\Upload\" - Should the List view mode display them in a vertical list, one folder/file per line? If so it's not doing that (they're all one one line and disappear off to the right)

So ignoring any clunkiness (or cost) involved in getting the data you want out of that system, what's the problem with polling? Is, at a time of your choosing, exchanging a few standard request/response messages with that theoretical "nice" system asking for those deltas since the last time, significantly worse than being sent the deltas one by one as they happen? -- Yet again for horizontal within a school, I can see lots of cases for some kind of SIF-like-client -> SIF-like-service-exposing-the-MIS but where is that burning requirement for SIF Agents everywhere and a traffic-cop to route and keep on top of the (not-evident to me) complexity? I keep asking this. Someone must be able to cite some real, practical examples, surely?

YMMV but I haven't had any problems at all with that. If you're putting print queues on 2K8R2 the the x64 and x86 driver thing can be a pain sometimes. If I had a spare old box I'd hang on to that until after I'd sorted the printers i.e. if you hit trouble you could make it 2K3 member print-server.