jamesb

I'd hesitate to say its a basic document management system. Much more of a very powerful document management system which is highly expandable and has lots of other features. However if you're happy with your VLE and have no plans to implement anything which requires Sharepoint then no, you don't really need it.

Try going to Personalize this Page rather than Edit Page. Personalize this page will be under your personal actions menu. Edit Page edits the shared version.

So in fact they are, as I said, partners and not independent companies?

I think he meant you should try RM support. To be honest I'd be suprised if you manage to find any other company willing to support RM's product, unless they're a partner of some kind or have a contract.

Just had another thought, extending the VM thing and a little more ambitious. If you can set up a network in VM, even just a single DC and one client computer (on a decent workstation you'll be able to run both of these at a low-spec), then get them all to try and harden their own mini-domains. After that, they swap domains and try to break in. Challenge is to be the first one to manage to get escalated priviliges. Just if you're going to do that make sure you watch exactly what they're doing, and harden your own network against it.

As another thought then why not give them a playground? See if someone'll approve VMWare or VirtualPC or something similar, put a linux install in it and set them some challenges. Either that or see if you have some older PCs around due for the scrapheap, put Linux on them, or Windows if you have the licenses, and give them a mini-network to play with. But I would say you want them to know the possible consequences should they try to use their 'skills' outside the playground, that's why it'd be worth getting the police and so on in as well.

Backtrack 3 is one of the best penetration testing tools out there. Free download as well. Unfortunately anything you might do to try and channel this interest would also probably be giving them skills they'd misuse. Might be worth creating a very heavily locked down GPO for their particular accounts and dropping known troublemakers into it. Work on least-privilege. Take away abilities to do everything except what they actually need. Allow specific programs to be run, and set all others to be denied by default and so on. The other thing that might be worth doing would be getting in touch with your local police and seeing if they have anyone who could come in and give the kids a lecture about electronic crime. Or even see if there's a penetration tester who might be willing to come in. Disallowing .bat files and RDP might be a start as well.

For basic stuff such as word processing, blogging or general internet access and so on they're perfect. 3D rendering and hosting complex databases they might be a bit pushed, but saying that I do know someone who's got one of the earlier versions running as a streaming media server. They're also fairly robust and sturdy, and relatively light. Pretty much perfect for the type of thing she seems to be after.

For that sort of skillset I'd say you're looking at a more realistic salary of maybe 30k at least. Since you're planning to use a VLE I'd suspect you'll be bringing SLG into the equation at some point, and for that you'll be looking at someone with at least moderate experience in SharePoint as well as Moodle. If the support is good enough though, and not knowing the providers in questions I can't comment, you could be looking at a much more basic technical role in which case you'd probably be okay with a technician starting on a lower salary and gradually learning and training towards a more advanced position. Basically if you expect the person to hit the ground running you're probably looking at offering a higher salary. If on the other hand you think that the support structure you have in place could provide all of the software support, and the new position would be essentially just dealing with hardware to begin with you might well be looking at a lower salary to begin with, possibly with incentives in the way of training and qualification in the relevant technologies.

I remember the running costs as being a bit cheaper, and disposal of used toner is much, much easier (involves chucking a small bit of wax in the bin rather than sending off a load of toxic cartridges). You can actually laminate the printouts, if you don't mind everything having a green tint after it goes through the laminator, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Depending on how ambitious you want to be, you might want to look at a codeplex tool. SharePoint Branding Tool (Themes, Master pages, Site Logos...) - Home Handles a lot of the basic, but tedious coding parts of designing a theme for Sharepoint.

I've found in my own experience, which admittedly has a main focus on commercial software rather than open source, bugs I encounter in a for-profit solution tend to be fixed a lot faster than those in open-source. Generally the times when I've had to try and get bugs fixed in Linux after encountering them tend to involve having to recompile things, write code, or mess around for a while with configuration rather than just running automatic updates. As I said though, my experience is mainly with commercial software. Back to the good old days of mainframes. Gonna be fun for server admins.

Slightly off-topic I know, but have you considered going with something like Windows SteadyState instead? It'll protect the hard drive for you. Alternatively do you have to use ISOs, or could you perhaps have a small bootable Windows system on the USB key, using BartPE, and then load the image from an NTFS share or even a larger USB drive?

They're saying that it won't work on multiple computers from a network share since certain files will be locked as read-only by the first user. What exactly is the setup you're on, you've mentioned its not on a domain, is there a particular reason why? What's the web app that requires IE7/FF? What other restrictions are in place?

Now that would be a surprise. Why would bugs be fixed faster with a small, unpaid, non-professional open source community working in their spare time instead of a dedicated team? If they can't keep up with Microsoft's dev cycle, I'd be very surprised if there was any effective response on bugs. Its a shame because it would be a great tool to have for development and testing, as well as troubleshooting. I just can't see it happening in any useful amount of time.

Read 'not supported' as code for 'probably won't work', same way as Microsoft won't support Exchange and Outlook on the same box.

I'm aware of that, but my point was more that people regularly use multiple logins for different systems.

I remember experiments with trying to do this at one school I was at. If I remember correctly it ended up that a script had to be used. You might find this link useful: Mounting Windows network drives at login (OS X tip) MacBitz From what I remember though we never actually got it working. Hope you have better luck.

Its no more impractical than having a separate login for SIMS .net, or for webmail, or for a forum. From what I gather it is possible to consolidate accounts to different domains as well, not easy, but possible.

Adding a pin then asking for a random character isn't two-factor authentication though, its essentially no different to a password. Two-factor authentication would be based on two of the three security factors, the three being something you know (password), something you have (smartcard) and something you are (biometrics). Requiring biometrics to be installed on all PCs that teachers might use to log in could be a little difficult, so it'll probably end up being smartcard authentication. That's my guess anyway.

Active Directory Provisioning by SLG2 doesn't actually have any effect on existing network accounts. The accounts it provisions are used purely to log into the SLG site and gain access to appropriate data. These accounts can then be consolidated with existing network accounts so that users can use these to log in to the SLG site. It isn't necessary to migrate all school ADs over to the LA at all, if the LA is hosting SLG then they can hold a seperate AD structure for SLG with no impact on school's existing sites. There is the potential, with customised provisioning, to use SLG to create an entire network structure for logins, but this is a seperate, chargeable service. There is no takeover of AD, all that needs to happen is an OU to be created for the use of SLG in the existing AD structure.

Around March next year I'm planning to move up to the East Midlands (I'll've been in my current job for a year then, and won't feel guilty as I won't be leaving them floundering in the middle of a huge project). I was wondering if anyone knew of jobs that might be going up there around that time. I'm preferably looking for a network manager role, same as I've got here, but anything reasonably paid would do for me quite happily. Thanks in advance.

Thank you for the information, very useful stuff to know. Do you know if there are any places left for the event?

I realise that recommendations and similar for laptop schemes have already been discussed, but I have a subtly different problem. We're trying to justify a scheme to our bursar, who is currently under the impression that many schools are cancelling or ending their schemes as students already have their own laptops. Essentially I'd like to know who else is doing a laptop scheme, and how successful its been?

We're going to be keeping Ranger Remote control, which is a seperate product. I did consider going over to Lanview but since we already have the license for Remote Control and the staff are all familiar with it we decided to stick with the product. Package creation is going to be done using Symantec Ghost for original imaging of PCs, with re-imaging on a semi-regular basis or when I get bored. Application packages'll be done through msi and AD.