ANiceEnglishman

Here's a link to the specs for the various models of web appliances, showing the maximum recommended number of users and concurrent users. Which model do you have? http://www.sophos.com/medialibrary/PDFs/factsheets/sophoswebappliancesdsna.pdf

We had a similar-sounding problem. Does the appliance's admin interface respond very slowly at the same web browsing grinds to a halt for users? The appliance was overloaded and we fixed it by installing a second one for students leaving staff on the original one. As we have vmWare infrastructure and our Sophos licencing covers up to ten appliances it didn't cost a penny

It sounds like the decision has been made so concentrate on protecting your interests and look at the advantages. I went through this twice within a few years when working for a multinational company. If you're not in a trade union, join now so that they can advise and represent you. You will receive lots of information about TUPE (Transfer of Undertakings, Protection of Employment). The principle is that your terms and conditions should be protected at the time of outsourcing, but there are loopholes and exceptions. The outsourcing company will target these - that is how they manage to do the job more cheaply while covering their overheads and making a profit. Your trade union will realise this and negotiate to minimise your losses. At the first meeting, ask if your local officials have experience in TUPE and if they haven't suggest they get help and advice from colleagues who do. On the positive side, you will be working for a company who focus on IT not mending roads, looking after vulnerable people, emptying bins and all the myriad of things local authorities do. There may be better training, opportunities to gain experience in different technologies and industries, more chance of promotion and a senior management who actually understand what you do.

It might be sooner rather than later, in the pdf I linked to above it says and Of course the key word is 'enables' and it remains to be seen whether schools take the whole package. The whole concept certainly fits in with Leighton Andrews' apparent desire to do away with LEAs

More here It looks like they are 'nationalising' the procurement of teaching resources, email and Office apps and moving them to a cloud model. I guess this will leave most Edugeekers in Wales doing hardware maintainance, looking after a few specialist apps and praying their multi-Gb/s Internet feed doesn't go down?!

Thanks to all for some very interesting and useful replies. We are in a fairly modern building with structured cabling and well placed equipment rooms linked by a 1Gb/s backbone so it is cheap and easy to provide a wired network point wherever it's needed. Our philosophy has been to have roaming profiles and provide a computer wherever a user is likely to need one. Every room has at least four network points and a laptop connected to a projector for presentations and about 40% have up to 20 networked desktops. There are several rooms with 30 desktops for the largest classes. We have several laptop trolleys with cheap and cheerful routers which plug into the wired network wherever they're needed. They can be used alone for smaller classes or to 'top-up' a less well equipped room for a large class. We have a number of what I have christened 'reconfigurable classrooms' with wall mounted PCs. Desks can be arranged facing the PCs for a computer lesson or in the conventional way in the middle of the room. All this works very well for us and I can't see a reason for an extensive wireless network - 'never us a wave when you can use a wire'! We would probably want to provide BYOD access in a few locations - meeting rooms, senior management offices, perhaps the library and sixth form (and of course the ICT staff area!) I know this is a technical rather than a teaching forum but it's interesting that only one poster has really raved about how wireless has transformed lessons.

A change from the usual techy threads. You've explained to the SMT that half a dozen 30 quid routers from PC World won't do the job, chosen Meru, Ruckus or whatever, had a site survey, gasped at the cost but managed to get funding, spent the summer installing APs and controllers, updated the AUP, given a presentation to staff on the first day back and your shiny new wireless network is up and running. A month into the Autumn term, The coolness of being able to check your email or catch up with the news without having to walk half way round the school to find a decent 3G signal had worn off and the invoices for the kit and installation arrive in your pigeon-hole (Accounts haven't quite reached the digital age yet). How many teachers and students are using the new facility? Do they use their own devices? Or did you get funding for laptops or tablets too? And most inportantlly, have lessons improved? Are you glad you spent the money this way or, hand on heart, would it have been better to have replaced those 6 year old PCs that nobody uses because they're too slow and unreliable or kit out another two or three classrooms with boring but cheap and reliable desktops? OK it would be cool to have Wi-Fi and it's nice to keep up with the Jones's and offer free Wi-Fi like Starbucks. The geek in me relishes getting stuck into an interesting project, it will look good in the cv but there is still this nagging doubt that it will all be a white elephant. What do those who are a year or two down the line think? Are you glad you did it? Would you do it again? Would you do anything differently?

We had his happen for a long time until we upgraded our server from 4GB to 8GB RAM. The problem was worst when teachers were entering assessment data (reports to parents). I read somewhere that the version of Tomcat used has a memory leak. As others have posted the workaround is to schedule a restart of the ePortal services in the middle of the night.

I'd go further and say leave Pcs and laptops to the big boys - Lenovo, Dell etc. Forget CCx and offer an off-the-shelf design using Microsoft technologies which could be adapted to particular school's requirements. and,er, what's KLP? I do feel sorry for those who are going to lose their jobs, especially our former sales rep who went out to Australia to work for them and presumably faces an uncertain future. It's a shame they never listened to me when I told them many times over the years that IT professionals were replacing teachers in specifying and running school networks and they would not pay premium prices for hardware, software or services.

I have to look into a requirement / desire to print posters etc in large formats - up to A1. My gut feeling is that it would be cheaper to use a local print shop and that this would provide better quality than any printer we could afford but does anyone do this in house?

According to Serco, you can backup in 9.2 and restore straight into 10.1. They gave the following procedure: 1) Take bdb backups from the current server of admin. 2) Install SQL on new server 3) Create a new database in new version of SQL (there's document on support site about creating new SQL DB) 4) Install facility admin 10.1 on new server 5) Connect Admin to new database and then restore data 6) Install eportal 10.1 on new server

Thanks. That sounds good. I have asked the same questions of Serco support and will see what they advise.

Thanks all for the various tips. I think we will get the new server up and running as though it was a new install then transfer the data by backup / restore, switch off the old server and rename the new one to the same name as the old one. I think in this way we will get away without changing the client files. The new server will have v10.1 whereas the old one has 9.2. Will that cause any problems?

Has anyone done this? How did you get on? Any tips? Serco Learning support say there is no documentation available.

Thanks very much for the responses so far. To give a bit more detail: Initial requirement is for three screens but we may want to extend in the future. This means some runs will probably end up exceeding the 300m most are specified for but I see Databay do a transceiver which will extend the range. Source would be a PC in the server room which will play out TV progammes made by our media study students, Powerpoints or other computer-originated content. We'd also like to be able to show off-air TV (BBC News for example). One way to do this would be a TV card in the PC. We do have a UHF TV distribution system to most rooms (but not those where the first three screens are required!). So an alternative to VGA over CAT5 could be to modulate the VGA signal and inject it into the existing system, extended as necessary, and use TVs rather than monitors. Any more thoughts? Does anyone know any firms in the south Wales area who do this sort of work (on a budget - we only have £2000 to spend on this).