kesomir

If you don't know how to use Active Directory, then the ranger policies will help you. (but if you do, then they can get in the way) The User Quota tool is very useful at helping to keep people within quotas Drive, Path and application title security checks are nice Restrict multiple logons is also nice User creation tool automates things nicely infraction screenshot is useful for auditing user activity, plus notice on login. Can secure older OS unsupported by AD You can do most of what ranger does without ranger, but it brings a lot of tools together, especially if the school it's deployed in lacks expertise. Downside is that you end up learning to use ranger and not how to do it using other free or already available (with windows) tools. YMMV

why not keep 2000 and install open office as well in order to open those 2003 files?

My copy turned up this morning.

Networked BW laser in Lab1 Networked BW laser in Lab2 Networked BW laser in KS2 area Networked BW laser in KS3 area Networked BW laser in Teaching shared resource room Networked Colour laser in Teaching shared resource room Networked BW laser in Admin Networked BW laser in Bursar Networked BW laser in Head No printers in classrooms, 1 whiteboard computer and minimum of 2 thin clients in each. I use a vbs script on logon that clears all printers and assigns a set of printers based on location: Lab 1: assigned Lab1 BW and Staff Colour (students don't have print rights to the colour so the assignment silently fails and they just get BW laser). Lab 2: assigned Lab2 BW and Staff colour.

Aye, depends on budget. If you have the cash, then a dedicated machine running server 2008 or 2003 (after buying the 2008 license) + the CALS. Will cost approx £100 for the server os + about £5 per client for the CALs. Then you can set up a domain and use AD to force home folder redirection plus a bunch of other stuff. The other way is to use a linux based server for the filesharing but.. 1. You lose the active directory control which is really useful. 2. I personally find print sharing for a windows network works better on a windows box than on a linux one (ymmv) as I have had fewer issues with garbled prints / postscript errors on brother printers that way. 3. Obscure network appliance drivers for things like network scanners in photocopiers will be easier on the windows server. You can get away with anything as low as a pentium 4 era xeon server with a gig of ram for the number of machines you describe. I would recommend a server with raid (raid 5 maybe) on SAS drives. You can get something quite reasonably from either dell or hp - 3-5yr NBD / SBD warranty is important. To set yourself up for the future maybe a PE 1950 or 2950 with 3 drives, raid controller, 2-4gb ram or something similar? looking at about £1500 all in. You can get cheaper than that ofc depending how you spec and where you buy. I'm of the opinion that if you're buying hardware, the educational cost of windows server isn't all that much. If you have 0 budget and lots of time to learn, then play with a linux solution - the backup tools on linux are excellent. I would recommend a linux solution for web first though as I think it's an easier entrance path, depending on your current proficiency.

I know some people swear by vegas, but personally, I prefer premiere. For a year 6 class, elements should be fine.

Is that just the base or are you hoping to get a monitor for that price?

Whats the recommended free distribution method? I'm thinking it must be either the built in windows one (WDS)?? or something built on linux | partimage or dd to pull an image and deploy. Prob with that is that it wont resize based on available hard disc size and I question the size of the images. I have no budget for ghost et al.

After running all the diagnostics I could, I bit the bullet and used my dell xp pro oem media to perform a fresh install - guess what - no bsod. Going to slowly add drivers one by one until everything works. Then I need to learn how to create an image with sysprep that retains the oem no activation doo-dah.

Got a bunch of Optiplex 740 with the 5400B Procs (23). Every single one I've unwrapped so far BSODs on startup with a 7F stop. I'm running the ubuntu ram check on one - no issue yet, 2 passes (still running overnight). After blue screening on startup (from the windows loading screen), they reboot and start over, after several repeats of this (a different number of times) they eventually startup fine, reach the login page and all seems to work fine from there. All devices appear ok - this is straight on reboot from unbox, tick the windows OEM first run buttons to desktop. Other than booting seems to run no problems, so I'm wondering if it's driver related in the image dell have used.. ideas? I don't really want to have to rebuild all these stations (it's an XP Pro downgrade from Vista Business btw). I've unboxed and tried 15 so far and expect the rest to be exactly the same. My next move after speaking to retail is to try a fresh install of XP, and see how that goes and if no dice, then try a vista one.

Bulletin Board. Seriously. For that level of functionality, you don't need anything more, users are comfortable with it and you have a large selection of well developed and robust software to choose from, some of it free. Free: PHPbb SMF Small fee: vBulletin Invision Power Board

I second Zimbra.

Moodle

Only thin I don't like about it right now is the colour and the fact that I can't open one dropdown bookmark list and move between them, I have to click on each to open it. That said, it's far above the usability screwup that IE is, so thumbs up.

np. I run a combination of server 2k3, 2k8, ranger and abtutor. I have all the ranger policies turned off though and use group policy instead. The account manager, quota checker, title checker and a few other features are all good, I'm just not sure if it's worth the money - ABTutor definitely is though.

Server 2003 or 2008 network without any middleware security / management apps like ranger, cc3/4 etc. It's like Ice-Cream - Vanilla is plain.

Adobe captivate can do this I believe

A search on edugeek for panic btton reveals... http://www.panicbutton.org.uk/about/

zimbra, exchange (and horde I think) do this - alternatively there are a bunch of web apps that would also do what you want such as: eGroupWare: Home phpgroupware.org :: phpGroupWare google groupware.

try a cotton bud swipe over the cd lens first though.

Why can't you just output one such div? What are you using to create the multiple divs?

I believe that the conferences and BETT make up a large proportion of that cost - no?

rsync or rdiff-backup rock teh big one!. I believe robocopy is also highly regarded for win. $0.02

Screencast and video the training - it's more work initially, but is reuseable. Plus you can post it to your VLE.

Don't have a mac Glad you found a solution though.