1066girl

Thanks. I ended up asking the supplier for their certificate copies. All progressing now. Thanks again.

I am trying to check that a supplier is Iso certified as they claim to be. Anyone ever done this? I have checked with BSI but the supplier isn't listed with them. I thought there would be a central database of certified suppliers. The supplier concerned isn't on the DfE list sadly. Thanks in advance.

We use AdSelfService with mixed success. A lot of users set this up but forget it is there when they need it, despite us having a link from our website.

We are currently reviewing SIMS Independent and are looking at integrating our HR system (SelectHR) with SIMS so we can import new staff information into SIMS at the point we have a start date. We were given details of a school reference who, we were told were doing such integration, but actually all their integration is exporting out of SIMS, not importing into SIMS. We have had massive issues with our existing MIS due to their lack of an "import" API and don't want to make the same mistake with SIMS. I understand the issues with importing integration and creating records in this manner, but we are double entering information at the moment and it is always open to human data entry errors. Are there any schools out there that are looking at this? If so, anyone managed to make a success of this? Thanks in advance A

Yes agree with TechMonkey, only 6 months in now, but savings for us will be approaching 50%. System size: 192 phone handsets (including two conference consoles) and 367 extensions (all DDIs). 172 extensions either voicemail only or softphone. We also have around 200 softphone apps installed on school and staff mobiles. Our original annual costs for telephony were in excess of £80k and the system was a hybrid of an ancient BT BCM with Nortel and Avaya handsets and a very expensive proof of concept Mitel system. We also had around 34 BT "residential" lines for various reasons which were really expensive. I reduced these down to a minimal critical incident number (no mobile signal here in places) and moved them to a more competitively priced provider. My team struggled to support the old system. The ISDN costs alone were £7500 per quarter! This was for two geographically split schools. Now we are on the same telephone system and just about to start testing a SNOM PA system using 3CX too. The new system is so much easier to manage.

We went with 3cx in the end and love it. We extended our service, got rid of the BT ISDN and phone lines, replaced our ageing Avaya and Nortel phones and it looks like to reaping rewards and paying for itself very quickly. Thanks everyone for your recommendations.

Just gone through this exercise. We went VOIP using 3CX. We have a large system and so use a partner for support (I believe we might be one of the largest school installs in UK). We use Yealink phones, a mix of T42s and T46G deskphones and W52P DECT. We increased the number of extensions and purchased a load of DDIs. We give an extension to all staff, even teachers without physical handsets and they get their voicemails through outlook. I can't emphasize how good the system is and how easy it is to setup and support. Although not essential, we used PoE switches so this was a big cost, however, we are projecting a £30k revenue saving on our previous ISDN/BT solution year on year. If you want a provider recommendation, PM me. Thanks

Thanks, I will hope they see my post.

I run an IT department in a large boarding school on the south coast. At our Senior School, we have 800 students, around 300 are boarders and 200 staff. We have spent the last two years upgrading our network after years of no investment. New servers, PCs, additional cabling, fibre between buildings, upgraded HP switches, increased broadband connectivity, Meraki APs, 2 x Smoothwall Firewalls, etc. I understand this is a dream for some schools as I previously worked in a school with practically zero budget. However, with this comes other challenges! Many of our boarders have at least three wifi devices. All our staff and students wifi traffic has to be authenticated and we stop VPN traffic other than SSL. We use Office365, but all other educational services are on site at the moment. Most days over 1500 users are logged into wifi (staff and students). In one boarding house alone, I have over 500 wifi clients connected split over 5 APs! 75% of our traffic is MAC/iOS, 12% Windows and the rest is Android and other devices. We have one 1Gb school2school link between our senior and off site prep school, then we have a 1Gb connection from the Prep which is a DR line and are in the middle of replacing the existing 100Mb and 300Mb connections at the Senior School with 1Gb and 1Gb connections. I am just waiting for contracts to come up this year. This will mean less traffic will need to cross the school2school link. Currently our 100Mb connection is reserved for telephony traffic and the remaining traffic is split across the 1Gb and 300Mb connections. Looking at the Meraki geographic access point chart, only a handful of devices were showing over-use and so more have been placed in these areas (such as the 500+ users above). Our wifi traffic, which is predominantly our area of contention, is processing 7.5 Tb of data per day (average over 12 months). Because we still have around 30 old APs to replace for Meraki, we haven't yet been able to implement any of the management tools that might help us, although through the cloud console, we discovered one student had downloaded 250Gb of data in one evening! Others were downloading in excess of 50Gb in that same evening. We have therefore put 1Mb/sec limits on 4HD and gaming traffic to allow other students half a chance of even getting on the wifi! I am interested to hear from other schools to hear what they do around quotas, restricting devices and/or traffic types. I am also keen to know what other schools are doing to manage high levels of traffic. Is our traffic typical for boarding schools? I previously worked in commercial organizations and never saw this level of traffic day after day (peaks, yes but not constant). I appreciate there are probably much more experienced infrastructure guys on this forum, so I am putting a message out there to you guys.... I would appreciate other schools in a similar position to PM me to share some information in order that I might see if our situation is typical and check we aren't missing any major tricks to get a handle on this! Thanks in advance

I entered values for a3, 4 and 5.

I think I have worked out what I was doing wrong. I had set the charges for A3 and A4 but not the defaults. It looks like copying using the default costs as its value. Thanks everyone for coming back to me. Much appreciated.

Hi, We implemented Papercut a few months ago for Xerox MFDs and I have been entering estimated per copy costs in the charging rules in the Papercut portal. So far so good. However, when I run a report which breaks down printing, scanning and photocopying, the photocopying costs are not appearing. I thought if I entered the information in the charging rules, this would apply to printing and copying. I cannot see where I would enter the copy costs for each MFD for them to be calculated in the Department print/copy/scan/fax - breakdown report. Any ideas? We are still running v16.1. Thanks in advance

We have been asked by an IT Teacher to install some copies of 90 Second Website Builder installed in our IT Room. Unfortunately, it appears that this software is licensed by PC and all files are maintained locally but tied to the student login. We have contacted their support line and they insist this is the only way to license, they are simply not designed to work in an AD environment with files saved to the network and another batch of students using it next term(!). What the teacher is after is a program, similar to Dreamweaver (but much easier to use) that will allow the students to create a website using a WYSIWYG type front end but that will allow the export of the CSS stylesheet and the web pages in their entirety so it can be submitted to BTEC. They actually used to use Microsoft Publisher and/or Word but apparently this functionality is no longer available. Any suggestions on a cheap or free software product that does the job? Thanks very much

Thanks everyone for your assistance, having checked with the teachers, it sounds like printing is essential. I had no clue about this exemption option. I will try to see if we can go for that.

We have recently implemented Papercut in our school and purchased a number of user licences based on our student and staff domain accounts. However, we are wondering what to do about the Controlled Assessment accounts? These accounts potentially push the numbers up which makes Papercut very expensive for us. What do other schools do about this situation? Is printing prevented from CA accounts, do you ask the students to log into Papercut using their usual domain IDs and passwords, etc? Many thanks

Application expiry has been extended to 30th September! We are looking for an IT Systems Administrator to manage our virtualised environment and deliver a transformation programme, along with the other IT Team members. Job details can be found here: http://www.bedes.org/senior-school/about/jobs-at-bedes/it-systems-administrator.aspx

Thanks to all for responding. I think I will be asking Salamandersoft to change the student licences across to alumni for leavers. This will solve a big headache, we have had students complain about their emails being deleted 6 months after they leave the school!! All good, well at least until Microsoft decides to start charging for them I guess .

Dear all, Since academic roll forward, our school leavers' Office365 accounts need to be moved to an alumni status. I am keen to know what other schools do to manage this transition, now MS offer alumni accounts. Do you use a specific alumni domain address? If so, is there any way of automatically migrating email to the alumni accounts? How do you communicate these changes to students? I am hoping someone has gone through this process and can advise. Many thanks Angela

Thanks everyone for feedback. I think will do some more testing tomorrow. I think the office365 link might be valid (and wonder how extended Microsoft accounts such as hotmail might reveal flaws also). I will post back findings. Thanks again

We have recently integrated our MIS system to Office365. As part of this, we have updated student school photos into Office365 email profiles. Overall this has been accepted well as both students and teachers are finding it useful for new students and staff, etc. However, the Lead Safeguarding Officer has asked for student images to be removed from emails sent to non-school email addresses. Any idea if this is possible, or will be have to switch off the integration of images altogether? Thanks everyone Angela

Our school has been using educare for our Data Protection, Fire Safety in Education, Health & Safety in Education, The Prevent Duty, etc. The staffing manager is not happy with this system and wants me to find an alternative. He thinks the courses are too long (DP is 1.5 hours in total) and the content/examples aren't school relevant in many cases. I don't think he is that impressed in online courses in general, although I emphasised that I have no staff (or hope of getting any) with training skills who could start developing and delivering training. Are any schools out there really impressed with either e-learning they are using, or a company they invite in to deliver training to staff? I am interested to hear how other schools deliver such training. Any suggestions would be appreciated as always. Thanks very much Angela

We use Read and Write software from Texthelp. Our SEN team assessed it, you can buy a version which is MAC/Windows compatible and also have a licence that allows install on the student PCs as well as School PCs.

We have 9 boarding houses which are separated across approx a four square mile senior site. We have almost zero mobile coverage. I have been asked to put analog lines in all houses,main office building plus one in main building and one in boarding house in our Eastbourne site. Our sites are widespread and sprawling.

Hi all, I am interested in hearing experiences from any schools that may have switched to a hosted PBX model for their phone system. I have inherited an ageing Nortel system and a part-implemented Mitel based system which I seriously doubt the school can afford to complete and am keen to look at alternatives. On paper, the hosted PBX solution looks like a win win for us. It removes the need for us to have internal telecoms technical skills (which we barely have at the moment), it provides a portal for us to administer the phone extensions, we only pay for concurrent licences (so effectively can have an extension for all staff, but only pay for physical phone connections), it allows the porting of existing ddi's at a one off cost and there are no ongoing ddi leasing costs, it integrates with AD and voicemails can be sent to your email, you can have a selection of Polycom handsets, you can have soft phones, etc. We would need to maintain 12-15 BT analogue phone lines for critical incident/emergency phones (as we have regular power cuts onsite here) but otherwise it seems an easy process to transfer and manage such a system. I have yet to investigate costs, so it would be interesting to hear from any schools that have fairly up to date cost models that they are happy to share. Thanks in advance

Sorry to revive an old thread but we continue to have massive speed/performance issues with PASS and so I am keen to speak with other schools about their experiences. WCBS are keen to point the performance issues at our infrastructure, but over the last 12 months we have upgraded the server hardware, upgraded from Win Server 2008 to 2012 r2, replaced the finance switch, upgraded the backbone between Finance and the server room from copper to fibre, upgraded to SQL 2014, upgraded all the PASS modules, replaced all the client hardware, got rid of CC4 clients, etc yet it is as bad as ever. We have also adopted iSAMS for much of the MIS functionality (other than billing) and moved the SALTO printing off PASS. I am midway through moving the shop off the system, but none of this seems to make any difference to the performance. The Finance manager was working on PASS over a weekend, with nobody else on the system and it constantly froze and "blue disked" as she described it. The Finance Director won't hear of moving away from PASS despite it being practically unusable so I am keen to speak to other schools as she says every school she talks to uses PASS and they have no performance or speed issues. Running billing runs (we are a boarding school), payroll, end of quarter reconciliation reports, etc in PASS makes PASS unusable for the rest of Finance! The latest request is for us to basically re-implement PASS from scratch - new installation, reconfigure system, no old data migrated, etc. Anyone managed to find the magic formula?? Thanks