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Hi All, I'm not sure how politically correct and acceptable it is for a member of the company to reply to their own job advertisement, but here it goes! I joined Nexus summer last year as an ICT Consultant and really enjoy it. I don't think the text in the advert does the job justice, which is a positive and not-unexpected thing. Every day I'm doing something different, talking to different people, operating at different levels. Some days I might be working on documentation or creating technical designs, some days I'm presenting to schools, building contractors or the EFA. Sometimes I could be talking to teachers and staff to audit their use of ICT, or I could be playing with some funky new software, whilst on others I'm walking round a building site influencing the design to fit ICT. And they are just some of things I've been involved in so far. After 8 years working in schools it was a difficult to decision to re-enter the private sector, but I can say now that I made the right decision. I've not burnt my bridges or lost the influence I had on improving the use of ICT to support learning and teaching, rather now I get to do this from a different angle. Why did I write the above? I want to ensure that the best people get interested in the role as I want the best colleagues! Perhaps my little bit of text will encourage this. Thanks for reading, David

PaperCut is without a doubt the way forward for enterprise print.

Full job and person specifications are on the school website View our vacancies | Ken Stimpson Community School, as well as the application form.

Thanks, I'll give them a call.

Sorry, I've been out of it for a few days: The current setup is poor. With both core switches on the network will fail, meaning I can only run it in a non-redundant state and at half the desired speed. This is a product issue, not a configuration issue. Also, without naming a brand name, the company is no longer around in its previous form and the upgrade and support paths are pretty weak. I never would have chosen this network and just want something reliable!

I'm soon going to replace my current wired network with a new solution. Every active piece of kit in the backbone will come out and be replaced. I've currently got: 2 x 24 fibre port core switches 32 x 48 10/100/1000 Mbps port + 4 fibre port edge switches in 13 stacks of 1, 2, 3 or 4 switches. I intend to keep the same topology. All switches are POE on every port, but I could reduce this down to 1 switch per stack. As you might expect, we make use of VLANs. I also want a system that gives good management information to a centralised console, so either one that has a decent piece of bespoke management software or provides good SNMP information for a standard piece of software. Your opinions are welcome please, particuarly if you have recently upgraded / replaced your network. Thanks

Already getting a few answers, so thanks for that. Just in response to a question I had, my school is a state funded secondary school. I'm based in Peterborough, but am happy to travel a few hours for this.

Hello All, To aid in our plans of where we want to go with IT at my school, we'd really like to see how other schools are using IT successfully in all areas of the curriculum, admin and community. Are there any kind souls out there who have some good practice to share and would be happy for myself and the Vice Principal to come in, have a chat with you and a look around? We would of course pay for your time. Thanks in advance, David

I'd be happy to show off our vSphere solution for our servers with an iSCSI SAN. We've also done a lot with Moodle/Drupal integration with AD and SIMS for our intranet and learning platform.

Hi All, We're looking to set up a forum for parents, which will supplement our existing real parents' forum. They'll access this through our Moodle learning platform, integrated with Drupal to manage the forums, so it'll be secure from the outside world. Does anyone else have an online forum for parents or are you considering it? If so, how are comments moderated - before they are published or afterwards? Really trying to get an idea of best practice before going live with it. Thanks

To get around the above you can create 2 almost identical rules: In the first rule use 'when the Subject field or the body of the messages contains text patterns' and in here avoid putting words like the one above. In the second rule use 'when the Subject field or the body of the message contains specific words' and put all those words that can be part of legitimate words. This way you can block as much as innapropriate content as possible.

Good point! The error I'm getting is in this image. Thanks

We've tested a few ways - installing manually, using the deployment kit and by putting it on an image and then re-imaging the PCs. We've always had local admin rights when doing this.

Hi All, We recently purchased a site licence of Adobe CS4 Master Collection. We can get everything working excluding Premiere Pro, which is the product that we really need at the moment for our media studies course. Does anyone have experience of making this work when logged on as a student, i.e. with fairly limited permissions and definitely not a local administrator? We get error 6, regarding licensing. Tried all the guides we could find, but not getting anywhere yet. Any help is really appreciated. Thanks

That's good advice. Thanks for that. I had to pull the photo from a website, as the ones I have are in sealed brown boxes, so not that easy on the eye.

I've got a few new Promethean ACTIVSlates, which I'm going to sell on ebay. If you are interested, please take a look here. Thanks

I use Gfi MailSecurity on Exchange 2007. It allows me to do content filtering and attachment filtering, as well as a load of other stuff, such as AV. I bought it mainly for the first 2 features on internal email though. It's AD integrated, so I can target groups with different levels of filtering. It's not cheap....

Yay! Thanks for that. We hadn't come across it anywhere in the documentation, but that was the thing that was missing.

I'll check the LDAP string tomorrow, but I think that it should be right. Thanks for the information on the kraal. I've had a quick look and this might be useful for us. I'll pass it on tomorrow to the person who is actually putting her time in developing our SharePoint sites. Yes, we've got it in like that. I've tried it in several ways - with the domain, without, using fully qualified domain etc. Thanks though. I really hope I can get this resolved. It, like many really annoying things in IT, is probably (read hopefully) going to be ridiculously simple, but we'll see.

We're currently working with Microsoft Learning Gateway, trying to set up a site for our school (after experimentation with other VLEs that just don't meet our needs). The functionality seems great, but we're having some issues. When a parent logs in they are meant to see the children they have at the school, but we can't get this to work. We've put the student names into the otheripphone field in Active Directory and told Sharepoint to look at that field, but always get 'No children available in this school'. Has anyone else had this issue and managed to overcome it? Any help is greatly appreciated. Also, if anyone is succesfully using the Microsoft Learning Gateway, I'd be interested to hear from you. Thanks

We use WDS and find it extremely good for a free product. It does have some limitations, such as not having much flexibility to alter an image once it has been created, but considering it is free, I'm not complaining. Just imaged 120 new Optiplex 740s with XP and they are working fine. If you do use network imaging software you must update the BIOS to the latest one first, as the network card is otherwise liable to drop the machine off the network and not reconnect. Was starting to get pretty stressed until we figured this one out...

For your domain I would agree with the general consensus of 2 DCs, but I disagree that DCs must only be DCs - they don't actually do that much in terms of processing and bandwidth utilisation, so, if they are well spec'd, having shares and profiles stored on them can be fine. If you can spread the current roles in your domain across to other servers and leave the DCs free, then do it, but I certainly wouldn't spend any money to achieve this.

I have 3 main trolleys of 30 laptops and 2 further trolleys of 10. I'm running a managed wireless network from a Nortel wireless switch with 68 access points. So I've got some hardcore kit, but I've still got a load of problems. Wireless just isn't great for 30 students to try and log on at once. The first 15 to 20 may connect with no problems, but then it can all go wrong. In addition to this, you have to think about the real cost of laptops: Purchase price is signicantly higher for equivalent desktops. Lifespan is shorter than a desktop. Support can be more difficult. They are more easily damaged and less readily repaired. They are less availalbe than fixed PCs, i.e. the amount of teaching and learning time per lesson is reduced. I'm now looking at replacing my laptops with fixed PCs in rooms with dual purpose desks, where the monitors pop up at the back of them. I can't wait. Sorry to sound so negative, but I just want you and your leadership team to understand the real cost (financial and educational). I know that laptops in education can be great and I hope your laptops work out that way.

Hi Jon, I've attached the agreement I wrote for my school. This is in addition to our standard AUP. I hope this is of some help you you. LaptopIssueAgreementAndAcceptableUsagePolicy.doc

I've been using Exchange 2007 in production for over a year now and although I've never had any formal training on it, I can mention a couple of good resources I have used. The Microsoft Exchange Team Blog, also known as You Had Me At EHLO, is really useful, with lots of general information and code snippets. It's really important that you understand how the PowerShell works, as loads of the admin needs to be completed through this rather than the GUI. You can get documentation, including the Primer, which is really useful, here. You can get some good example scripts to tweak from here. There are things that you will want to check RM have done, for example changing the default message size on the connectors (10MB). Exchange 2007 is very different from 2000/2003, so you can't expect that people with knowledge of these systems will just be able to jump in and work with it. You are now unable to perform email based tasks from AD, but have to use the Exchange Management Console and/or the PowerShell instead. To start with I was really against the PowerShell, thinking that it was quite a backward move by MS, but if you can invest the time in learning it, it really is quite powerful. It's going to be quite a big jump from your current system. If you have any specific questions once it is in, feel free to come back to me. Good luck.