mjk

Yes we resolved this problem, it was caused by an ancient URL rewrite condition which we were using to force safesearch. When we updated the url rewrite the captcha disappeared overnight and has not returned.

In my opinion the Cisco and ITIL courses have longevity and the MS courses get outdated very quickly. The MS courses are not going to be quite so relevant in the cloud era as they have been historically. Both Cisco and ITIL are mostly vendor neutral, although there is some propriety technology in CCNA it is mostly basic networking. The Windows courses tend to apply to only windows and my experience of MS courses is that they teach you how windows works and not how the protocols / services work. This can leave you high and dry if you are confronted with a cloud service or Unix, Linux , OSX system (which make up quite a high proportion nowdays with application and server virtualisation) Although it all rather depends upon what area you want to work in. If you envisage working as windows server specialist them it would clearly be a good choice!

So the purpose of Docker is to be able to run an application (Xibo) on any infrastructure, regardless of the operating system (notwithstanding windows, but that doesn't get much use in the cloud). ie you can quickly provision a system of your choosing: google cloud, Azure or even a linux server or all it's different flavours. Provided docker is installed then the application will be guaranteed to work because docker will bring across all of the dependencies for that app. It's really very cool. I've no experience with xibo, but the general premis is that you: install docker download the docker image run the image. https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/run/#general-form

Because some schools are going to save tens of thousands of pounds by not having local windows desktops.

only £12k per year, I'll even throw in a 50% discount if you sign this week :-) Just send me your sims database files by email and we can get started !

It looks like you do use expensive pay-for stuff for IT-only things !! Surely you don't need to pay for expensive windows computers, CALs and resource hungry windows servers to run all of that when you could do it free with linux on cheaper hardware... /sorry to play devils advocate.

There would have to be some sort of SLA publicly available or they will get no customers ! Imagine offering a service but having so little faith in it actually working that you don't publish an SLA and then expect customers to lap it up ! They would have to publish expected uptimes and web response times and compensation terms. It would be like me selling you something with no guarantee that it would work !

All comes down to the SLA that I'm hoping Phil will give us a link to.

On a hosted system I can't imagine what sort of support LA's could offer that wasn't in the documentation.

We'll also need to know about the SLA's that Capita will provide. Are these published yet @PhilNeal ? What happens if the system grinds to a halt through no fault of the schools, how much does Capita compensate us ? Still, I'm quite positive about this and I suspect we'll be an early adopter.

Our school already costed the savings when moving to a web based MIS as to be a minimum of £15,000 per year for our school. They could put the price up by 50% and we'd still be quids in. *the cost saving was based upon using iSAMS vs Capita SIMS. We are on it already! but it's still vaporware as far as checklists are concerned.

Yes sorry for the interlude. At least some emerging cloud technology will give Capita something to aim for with SIMS 9 in 2030 !!

you should read the article first. " in contrast, traditional relational databases have been designed based on the concept of strong consistency, also called immediate consistency."

99% of Computing solutions are workarounds to other problems. Cloud/NoSQL is a workaround for the misgivings of SQL and large cloud based data firms chose that because it scales better. But yes I understand that Capita SIMS databases are pretty puny in terms of what Google/facebook etc are doing.

There are well tested workarounds for the inherent issues: https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/articles/balancing-strong-and-eventual-consistency-with-google-cloud-datastore/

I thought SQL in the cloud had been largely superseded by NoSQL schema-less databases as they are faster and scale better ? When building a new system surely it's better to start of with newest but stable tech and not revert backwards!

For us it worked, albeit 3 or 4 weeks late. For others it doesn't. The idea of this is so that you might or might not get a heads up, not that it is going to be definitively reliable.

Thanks @PhilNeal. I was only worried because I asked a couple of times whether *all* data was available through the api and it's only now you confirmed that it is! Naturally I get quite worried if there is a possibility that we can't migrate between systems.

so is it confirmed that ALL data is available through the API?

I'm more worried about the lock-in possibilities, and that Capita will do a data grab and make it difficult for schools to migrate away. It would be easy to do if they provide a limited API rather than a full one. At least with local SQL you can always get to the data to migrate to other products and I'm hoping that @PhilNeal will confirm a RESTful api will be available and have read and write access to everything.

Is the API documentation going to be published? I would be very concerned if *all* data isn't accessible to schools through the api, as this would represent a real issue with vendor lock in. Can you give us assurances @PhilNeal ?

Taking that argument to it's logical conclusion would be to say that the largest companies can only make the worst products. That Google, Amazon, Microsoft are the least innovative tech companies, or that they make nightmare products. You should consider the problem might just be Capitas development team.

I'd recommend Altberg: ​Alt-Berg | High Quality Hiking Boots & Walking Boots

SIMS has been holding back our school for years now. The amount we spend on keeping it running (cost of desktop upgrades, cost of licensing, CALS, servers) vs almost everything else which runs on the cloud is ludicrous. The senior team want us to move to a cloud solution ASAP so we can spend this money on Teaching and not in Admin. I fear the SIMS soultion will be too late as others have made up too much ground in the mean time.

The irony is that the data will probably be safer in EU post brexit, if the home secretaries mantra about leaving backdoors open for everything is followed through.