teejay

Thanks BBC, I now have a blinding headache, please take whoever decided your new design sports pages must be YELLOW outside and shoot them.

The problem is now with the price increases, it's made the OU unaffordable unless you really have to do it for career progression. I feel this defeats the object and reason for the original existence of the OU, which was education open for all. If you are thinking of further study, have a look at part time degrees at your local Universities, these are now usually working out cheaper than the OU. My wife completed an MA part time at Liverpool last year and it was several thousand pounds cheaper than a similar MA through the OU.

Has anyone managed to get a definitive answer out of Adobe about if their licences can be transferred across when converting to an Academy? The only appropriate smily for this is

Elephant here, when they were slightly dearer than someone else on renewal, so I phoned them and they dropped the price cheaper than the other quote and threw in a load of extras. Maybe worth giving Privelege a call and seeing if they will give you a better deal.

Agreed with @Millgate, be very very careful to check that what they are quoting is correct and keep a paper trail as it's pretty easy for suppliers to quote the wrong part either accidentally or deliberately. Make sure the quote shows the Microsoft part codes and check those codes against the other quotes you receive, if codes vary then investigate. It's worth checking that the reseller is actually authorised to sell Educational Licences, a list can be found here - Microsoft UK Education - Software Licensing - Education Licence Resellers

Try putting an Invitation To Quote on Buying Solutions - The National Procurement Partner for UK Public Services and then negotiate downwards from there, you always find one sales person who is more desperate than others;-)

Got a new Skoda last year, absolutely love it. For those of us of an age where we remember the old Skodas, it does take a bit to get over the badge snobbery, but it's an impressive car. You can get some cracking bargains from the dealers, mine ended up cheaper buying it brand new than buying a 3yr old one, plus I got 3 yrs free servicing 3yrs European RAC cover etc.

Yes, you need the timetable in SIMS. I would be carefull using SLG for lesson registration, we ditched SLG because it was pretty bug ridden for entering data by staff, the data kept not saving. They did promise to fix this in the Autumn update but we'd lost all confidence in it by then. Personally I'd go with SIMS on their laptops, either a local install or set it up as a remote app via terminal services.

This might solve your problem -Download Windows XP Mode

Personally I diskike the phrase 'in the classroom' as I think this goes against the philosophy behind these. They need to be allocated as personal devices to the students who can then take them home and fiddle. The classroom should be about inspiring students with ideas and empowering them to go off and play and learn, bringing them back in to show off stuff they've done.

Fill in the contact form on their site and they will arrange a demo for you, it looks much nicer than SLG and is very simple to set up. Cost wise, it's a fraction of the price, I'll pm you as I'm not sure if the price is publicly available.

We ditched the hosted version after a year, poor feedback response from the trials as it's pretty buggy and ugly. Have moved to TASC Insight for parental access, we've had much better feedback, their support is far better and it's really easy to setup and maintain, plus a fraction of the price. I've heard good things about the Bromcom one as well. Staff access is now being rolled out via a remote access solution.

Hmmphh, not allowed chocolate pizza, in fact not allowed any pizza atm, goes and sulks in corner...

Thanks very much whoever neg repped me, I mentioned the legality problem as I don't want Millgate to get in trouble! I don't exactly take that as being a 'jobsworth', if you look here you'll see running an illegal lottery is up to £5k in fines and 51 weeks in jail, so you're saying I should just let that happen to a supplier!

Don't mean to put a downer on this and IANAL, but isn't it illegal to run a competition which requires a purchase as it's classed as a lottery and you need a lottery operators licence?

For something like that, I'd go with Dell as their telephone Pro Support is far better than HP's.

Will Edugeek be doing the same?

Got the Autumn update deployed finally. Waited 2 1/2 weeks for Capita to find out why it wasn't working, 2 days work for 2 techs and me to get it working on all the machines. Using Solus 2 took about an hour to do the server and then just deployed fine to the workstations with maybe a couple of visits to machines being silly. Not impressed. Now got Discover to do, which is completely refusing to install via Solus 3:mad:

Use a code repositry which tracks changes, first one to submit the code wins ;-)

The ESS route is much easier to manage and to keep your licencing legal, plus there are other benefits like Technet and finance much prefer it as there is a pretty set annual figure to budget against. We were on the Schools Agreement before ESS, they still do Schools Agreement as that and ESS tie in with the two licencing models thay offers businesses, so I very much doubt if they'll remove it anytime soon. Also, don't go for the 3 year option, go for the 1 year as you cannot remove items from the agreement for the term of the agreement, only add.

Put it this way, the cost in time and training and the disruption costs more than @CyberNerd was quoted for MS Office for students use at home, we've looked at this very seriously and in depth and backed off. Personally I'd have liked to have gone with it, but the impact to the school and training costs plus lack of productivity whilst learning the new system was considered a deal breaker.

IIRC SIMS has to have Excel and Word installed on the machines to be able to generate the reports, it uses some API's or something from within Excel and Word. I beleive you can get away with the Excel and Word viewers for this, not 100% certain.

Ah, yes, good point! We use live@edu which has a web based basic version of office, if they need more we point them to the student version which they can buy themselves.

Right, I presume you are on about the Microsoft Licencing for your VM's, not the VMWare licensing? First off, you don't need the MS OEM licences for server operating systems, you only need that for Desktop products. You would want to licence either 2008 R2 Enterprise which allows 4 instances of the OS per physical machine or Datacenter which allows unlimited instances per physical machine. See Microsoft Volume Licensing - Microsoft Licensing for Virtualization

Blimey, are you at a University or something as on EES you would need over 1500 staff to get to that figure, even with the Desktop Enterprise CAL. The only other way you could get to that is if you have laptops allocated to each individual student.