mjk

If LA's can supply support for academies which are outside of the LA, so it follows that they must be able to supply support for schools outside the area ?? I found a support company that also suggests that there are "obstacles" for LA maintained schools SIMS Support | Keystone MIS Anyway. thanks again.

Thanks everyone for helping here. To help crystallise my understanding, would you mind going through this: 1) Capita Sell SIMS to anyone, but the LA usually owns the software except for academies. 2) Capita only provide patches to the people that they sold the initial license to - Can a license be transferred ???? 3) Anyone can provide support for SIMS, but few do due to the high cost of being certified. Being certified adds gravitas. 4) there is no actual need to be actually certified, but it helps Capita keep things cosy. 5) Any school has freedom of a competitive market to choose support/patch providers and lower costs, but you have to 'buy; the system yourself and not through the LA. 6) LA's don't have much incentive to sell support to schools outside their catchment areas; hence the perception that you just pay the bill without asking question. Please let me know where I've gone wrong. @Banjo Not sure about why you can't buy annual maintenance through any LA you choose if you already paid for the license ?

This is sounding logical !

Ok, thanks. I thought it would be prudent to ask the questions - £10k per year buys a LOT of learning resources!! If there are no other private companies that supply support/patches, what about other LA's - can I get quotes from them? Does anyone work at an LA that could provide quotations? It doesn't seem right that we just pay a bill without asking these questions!

Ok, how do Capita prevent non-certified support people from supporting/patching ? I know Microsoft do it by licensing, but as an untrained Microsoft tech I am still able to support other schools.

Thank's to everyone who replied. I have a much better understanding of how things work now. I'd like to rephrase the question slightly: Given that I'm not paying a license fee and just for support could: 1) My school provide support/patches to other schools. 2) My school buy support/patches from another school. 3) is there a precedent for this? 4) are their third party companies (not LA's) that do this?

Yes, most of the answers seem to be on the forums, or here. I don't think LEA contracts can be commercially sensitive because it is government spending I'm sure an FOI would be able to reveal inter-departmental spending. Anyone else have a price as to what their LA charges per pupil ?

@matt40k I was simply trying to find what other schools are paying for support and whether we can get a better deal from another local authority, a private supplier or from Capita. At first I was under the impression that we were paying an annual license fee, but localzuk corrected me here. So I discover that we are paying for support updates ( about 3 per year, not including the fixes for capitas mistakes ) and telephone support ( about 10 calls per year, most of which are already covered on forums) - this seems quite high when I am facing massive cuts I worked out we are paying about £7 per pupil per year, plus a another £1.80 for additional modules. can anyone tell me what they are paying please ?

Thank you, I understand why the updates are necessary. How much do you pay for the basic support package per pupil ?

Thank you. It would be useful to know what others are paying for support/updates? either direct from Capita or through a third party.

Thanks Pete. How much does a basic license cost per pupil? Does this include any support ? Can you buy perpetual licenses ?

Hello. Please can anyone explain how SIMS support and licensing works at your school? I have been tasked with making cuts in the department and this is one of the things that I need to look at. We currently pay the local authority a fixed price; We are currently paying around £10,000 per year for this service and we need to make vital investment for teaching and learning. I understand that gives us the right to download patches from them and this pays for any annual license. Can someone confirm whether this is the case - are we allowed to get patches from Capita? is there a better financial model ?

I wonder if there is something else running on you 10MHz and it just happens to be off when no-one is around and you can switch off the wifi. perhaps. You'd need a pretty broad spectrum analyser to work out what is happening for sure.

No they pick up time from radio waves which are much lower frequency than WiFi - in the Khz/Mhz region. They are not even in the same ball park as Wifi (GHz) so wouldn't cause any interference. Incidentally; higher frequencies also have less penetration (which is why they use radio frequency for long distance) and this also explains why 2.4Ghz has better wall penetration than 5Ghz.

Not if physics has anything to do with it.

I didn't know they could be bad. We've had a few not sync and the caretaker blamed our WiFi!! - which of course it wasn't. Ours seem to be generally reliable.

vlan and a firewall should sort any problems fairly easily.

here: https://www.kcswebshop.co.uk/store/product/24970255.aspx

You shouldn't need WiFi / NTP for this as many radio clocks will pick up time from the air and will be cheaper and use less power. (I guess these are DAB radio frequency but not sure how they work)

You could mount the remote server as a local share read only using smb/nfs.

It is a real problem if your school has it's own wifi because it will cause a huge amount of interference, esp if multiple kids use it to disrupt lessons. Some systems (Meru) can mitigate against rogue access points, but I rather gather it can cause as many problems as it solves. I would also be interested in hearing others solutions to this.

Yes happy to help. I wrote some more details on this thread: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/wireless-networks/152208-new-wireless-authentication-methods.html

It's in "accounting" in NPS, you need to turn on logging first: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663944%28v=ws.10%29.aspx Also find that Wireshark is good for this sort of thing.

Google Apps for Education ?

So I don't have the PEAP in the "connection request" section; That bit is blank and goes in the network policy. In the connection request I have put "forward accounting requests to a remote RADIUS group instead (the smoothwall server). Earlier I mistakenly said that the wireless controller does this, now I see that it is indeed the NPS. In the "Network Policies" section I then made a policy for EACH wireless network/vlan. for example: Student-1 has: conditions: called station ID (the SSID in this case) Auth: PEAP/EAP NAS port type: wireless 802.1x windows group - DOMIAN\GROUPNAME ( ie match year 8 and go in yr8 VLAN) NAS IPv4 address: Address of the wireless controller x.x.x.x. Constraints I have: PEAP then settings I put: 802.1x Tunnel-medium type = 802 (includes all 802 media plus ethernet) 802.1x Tunnel-private-group = the VLAN ID 802.1x tunnel-type= Virtual VLANS clearly your wireless controller needs to be aware of what to do with these VLAN's So the way it works is the NPS allows connections, sees something coming from the wireless controller, forwards the info to smoothwall, authenticates the user and matches them against an AD group then sends back the VLAN info to the controller which puts the user into the correct vlan.