GeekyPete

Not all schools will bother with Outlook. Or maybe for just some users. Corero for example needs the full fat client. Then the SLT or teachers like to have the shared calendars etc. But a lot of schools will never to think to give it to the students. Many reasons are sited, consistency of user experience with web mail when at home, Complexities of archiving, etc. Few will admit to laziness though.

They publish the data to cut down on the amount of Freedom of Information requests.

The problem there is you used technology. To hide your tracks you need to do it old school. You can hack into similar information by going to an Information Broker. This "Mr Smith" can be found in Most towns. He uses the initials W.H. Look him up. Then get on your raincoat, dark glasses and a trilby, go to his establishment and the code you ask for is "Times Please mate, with the TES". Pretend to look at your watch as if checking the "Time" it all adds to the subterfuge. He'll hand you a dossier with all kind of information in that the school don't want you to know. Be careful not to leave it lying about though!

There's nothing to stop you. I wouldn't normally expect to see 7200rpm drives in a SAN. But the originals seagate ones were. I'd change all the drives so they were the same and also a few spares.

Prozac?

You can use it in a lesson though. I posted on this before. I'll see if I can dig out that thread. There are certain circumstances under which you will not need to obtain or pay for a music licence. These are: When there is an exemption in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 that means you do not need one, such as when you play music as part of the curriculum in schools. regarding youTube you are breaking YouTube's terms and conditions, that what makes that illegal not the PRS. EDIT: Actually Scrub what I just said, read this... http://www.prsformusic.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/PPS%20Leaflets/Schools%20leaflet.pdf

You could give it a stab with Google Sketchup. You can use Photos to render the walls, floors etc, and then add your own lighting. The 15 - 30 minutes video tutorials are excellent. Plus there's a massive library of furniture etc you can use to embelish your project. Not sure how good it would be at people though.

The Griffin is great especially if you want to use Android or other deivices. But still a little pricey for my taste. Last price I saw on the RM Qube, which will also sync, was under £200.

Check the Hilton website and look for weekend deals. We've had the Hilton weekend breaks cheaper than the permier inn. Hiltons are used a lot by buisness travellers and can be very quiet at the weekends, So unless there's an England match or something on, you might be able to get a bargain.

I remember the big push to improve ratios, then someone realised that a PC for every kid, in every lesson isn't always the best answer. IWB started to make big in roads about the same time, some schools tried to claim that they were the same as 15 PCs. But in the drive to meet arbitrary targets, PCs were bought when they were really inappropriate. Forget the Ratios, look at how technology is being used, IWB, Tablets, kindles, BeeBots, Raspberry Pi. It should be evident in every class room, but only where it adds value.

E2E situation if you read nothing else read the Lessons for Customers.

I do a lot of work in special schools and there are quite a few that would shine in mainstream if they could keep the same motivation. I don't think that the move toward mediocrity is teacher driven. When I was at school, teaching was what you made of it. There were some very bad teachers that hopefully wouldn't be allowed today but there were some inspirational teachers too who taught you values as well as subject matter. Teachers have too much on their plates these days and are generally working them selves into the ground just to keep up. What might have been interesting enrichment once over, would be a distraction in today's micro-managed class rooms. even with all that said, there are still ones who shine (JZ you know who you are!)

Interesting choice of IP address for the server. It will work but personally I would set any statics at the bottom of the range. This is probably over kill for a home network but I'd set aside 192.168.0.2 - 9 for infrastructure (only ever needed if you get layer 3 switches), 192.168.0.10-19 for servers (not just DCs, Nas box, media centre or anything else like that. 192.168.0.20-31 perpherals, Printers, ip Cams etc. Then 192.168.0.32 to 254 for the DHCP scope, Leave the SNM as it is. Then again you could set it up as one DHCP Scope 192.168.0.2-254 and reserve 192.168.0.92 for your server. It would be easier but I'm old school and I like structure.

Thank you for agreeing with the point I was making, The framework does SOME of the DD, it's a start no more than that. "No matter who you choose to go with you have to sit down and have a good think about what will happen if one day your supplier is no longer there. With your own server and SQL instance you always have the data to hand which gives you time to plan." No matter how big they are, locally installed or cloud, You need a plan. The point I was making is that this is the one area where Cloud is more of a risk than local. But local only buys you some time. If capita go under, your SIMS will still work. You may not be able to easily get the right data for the next census but you won't walk into work one day and find the whole lot gone. This isn't automatically the case with cloud either. it's not too much to ask for a schema script and a data backup so you can load your data into SQL. Event if you have to write your own reports you still have the data.

Phase it, Give a few key users GBit, maybe one ICT room. Then in 3 months time do a cost/benefit analysis. I guarantee most rooms you'll leave on 100Mbit. Most schools I deal with will never need Gbit, unless they release a gbit iPad!

Sounds like a physical thing to me. If it happens when you have disconnected the keyboard maybe its a ribbon cable to the keyboard connector, the 111111s are a bit of a give away. Is the beep similar to what you get if you hold keys down too long or rest something on your keyboard? It's worth disconnecting it properly, by that I mean powering it off, disconnecting the keyboard, plugging in the USB one then switching it back on (make sure that the USB keyboard is enabled in the bios and fast boot is not selected). If you disconnect the keyboad's ribbon cable while it's powered on it may not clear the faulting condition.

Have you still only tried it on the one station? Do you have a clean station to try it on? If you go to tasks in RMMC, find the install task, and open it up you should be able to drill down to the target device and there may be more detail on the error there. Can't remember the exact buttons to click on but I can let you know when I get into work tomorrow. There is also a log file on the computer itself, again I'll let you know where to look when I get into work. If you are building packages you should always have a clean station for testing. Clean is a relative term, but it should be a close to OS Only as you can get on an RM computer. Keep your AV, essential plug ins, and IE or browser of your choice. But nothing else, unless it is a dependency of the app you are working on. Make sure it is in the Build folder in locations as this blocks inheritance. Once you have this set up, take a restore image. You can now allocate what ever you like to it and use it as a normal computer if you want but if you restore it, you have a test platform in 20 minutes. You can trail whatever modifications you like knowing you can get it back to a clean state in the time it takes to have a coffee break.

Regarding the Government FrameWork for MIS systems, you don't even need to have a product to get your company listed on there. That's more about due dilligence and is by no means a whitelist of suppliers. If you choose to go with someone not on the list you need to be careful. If your school puts all their MIS data in the cloud with no other way to get at the data what happens if there is an E2E situation and the liquidators pull the plug on the server farm to save on the electricity bill? Some of your due dilligence is done by the Governement if you choose from the list, you can state it as something in your favour when the inquiry happens. You MUST have a DR plan in the event of your cloud MIS suppier going belly up. With that said I have one school who looks likely to go to Arbour in the next month or two. If no one else can give a first hand account of them, I should be able to soon enough. The SLT are wowed by the UI and the reports. I still need to check if we can export the data in a usable format to hold a copy on site. No matter who you choose to go with you have to sit down and have a good think about what will happen if one day your supplier is no longer there. With your own server and SQL instance you always have the data to hand which gives you time to plan. Because of the risk to the organisation if the MIS provider fails to deliver for whatever reason I would suggest that Due Diligence is appropriate. It's worth googling Due Dilligence checklist to get an idea of the kind of things you should be looking for.

Seems to me that if you asked for a socket in the out building and they put it in the main building, they didn't do what was asked. With that said, BT would have charged you the earth to dig a channel or use a high wire to get between the buildings (how far apart are they anyway?). So whoever said "Oh Yeah alright just stick it there then" was even more lazy and/or imcompetent than the BT engineer. Eitherway, it's now up to you to make it right. How does the fibre get to the second building? There is often a pipe with some rope coming out of it used to drag a cable through an underground pipe. Check the plant rooms. You could drag your own Cat5/6. Other than that, go to the head and tell him what a lazy sod went before you and get the job done properly.

These are probably the least reliable peice of solid state hardware I have ever come across. I think the industry know it too. And to my mind it's why GBICs are modular and hot swappable (although not strictly the same device). Media converters do run hot, which is maybe the root of the issue. But they do work until one day, maybe years later when you have forgotten it's even there, it doesn't. GBICs do a similar job in your switch, but they still can fail. On a reasonably large cisco network (3000+ active data points, fibre to over 20 CABs, Fibre channel SAN, and Fibre up links between the swiches) we kept spares, ordered them five at a time. We'd lose a few a year. I'm working on small scale HP infrastructure now, but more sites. I can only remember losing a couple in the last few years across all sites. Which is a much larger deployment when taken as a whole.

I've never tried it but I just might pop along as it's soooo close. Is it the sports and social club, just before the Norton Tavern?

Straight out of an Amime Mag, too heavy to get the kind of following Gangnam style or What does the fox say enjoy. Thank fully. Shouldn't see this being hummed round school.

In trolleys, in depts, They get fixed when they tell use and the dept is charged for breakages. With a dozen trolleys there is no other sensible way to do it. We'll check them over if we have major updates to do. Which really means that we'll fix any that that we can't update without fixing. But that is normally a school holiday job.

SmartCache is an alternative product to Smoothwall. It's an older product now and is no longer available to buy. I mentioned it as I'm not sure if smoothwall handles wildcards in the same way.

Surface Pro 2, I'd have to say go with the recommended rather than minimum specs. There are just too many other compromises in a tablet. This would give you the 64bit/8gb ram that would really make it practicle. Plenty of storage too for those monster file. I must say though, the idea of running CS6 on a tablet makes me cringe. Someone who uses development software like this sits at it for hours. It's not like reading a news site or checking facebook. I would stongly recommend that you get your Health and Safety rep to do a DSE evaluation and at the very least include a keyboard, mouse and a riser to get the tablet at the right height. Ideally a proper monitor. This isn't what tablets do best. I just don't feel that a tablet is an appropriate device for the job at hand.