Gibson335

True, but not every cloud solution portrays itself as Education's friend and sponsor.

Oh, I agree...it leaves the obvious suspicion that once they're lured us into Azure and Office 365, after a while costs will appear where no costs were previously, and existing costs will creep up steadily...

Thing is, the idea is not to do that, but instead to steer us towards the cloud - making internal server-based solutions more expensive is one way to do that. Their hope is that any cloud solution will be their own.

I keep re-reading the bloody document in the hope that I've either missed something or something triggers a different response. I think the most salient part of the whole thing is the second paragraph of the second item. I did a blitz on Friday, over the weekend and this morning of UK resellers...the responses so far indicate they are clearly as confused as I am by this. The real problem is that they are all taking a guess and that then emerges as their response...only one so far has suggested we wait until a fully planned pack of solutions/costs has been released to resellers by MS...hopefully by the summer.

I've now communicated with 3 different resellers and they appear to have differinf views on what this actually means. Two have said they believe EES will continue in some form, one has suggested some items, like network cals, exchange cals, etc, may not be included.

Confused now. Our supplier are saying that there will simply be a new style agreement, still a subscription, with the only difference it will be 20-25% more expensive.

Our 3 year agreement expires mid July 2018!! So, basically, if you want or need to stay MS, you purchase at the yet undisclosed discounted price, go completely into the cloud with them, or mix and match as required. It's being reported as 'free' going into the cloud, but how many people will now have to increase bandwidth and/or purchase better failover protection? How much training will be required for ICT support staff, and at what cost? I have no idea how much bandwidth will increase, but as we often peak at 80+ currently we're upping our 100Mb cap to 200 in our next agreement...but will that be enough? We were also going for a single FTTC failover, so that it provided external mail use and basic Internet services, but that won't be enough should the main link fail.

No need - even if the master fails you can use the command line on the other to seize control, and once you have the console you can reassign the VMs.

Don't really understand this. We have 2 physical servers, with around 15 VMs on each...but each physical has enough capacity so that in the event of physical server failure, the VMs can be shifted across to the other one and run quite comfortably.

For new software install requests we have staff complete a form. We then install and test on a single clean station. If successful we deploy to a small cluster, or a small group within a major room - depending on the staff member. Provided there are no reports of issues, we fully deploy after 10 days. For standard updates, windows/office clients are pushed out via WSUS on a Friday afternoon, we then have automated startup and shutdown over the weekend so's the updates have less impact on users. For other updates, such as Flash, etc, basically we download and test as necessary, and then deploy fully across the live network. Allowing time for issues to present themselves is, I think, critical, before pushing out across the site. Many moons ago we were undone when one of our techs deployed without testing and we had to re-image the entire site...fortunately not as extensive as it is now.

We use OKI, but then we're in a leasing agreement for ours. Decent printers, though, for the money.

We're going with the Eclipse system from MLS. Web-based, and can be hosted by them. They use Biostore, which links with SIMS.

Agree with getting them back to finish the job properly - i.e labels at both ends of termination. If you can squeeze it from the school budget, treat yourself to a Fluke meter - best bit of kit we've ever bought.

We virtualised several years back and we have everything on it. We spread the load across 2 physical servers, as this allows greater flexibility. Disk storage is via SAN. Our backup server is physical as well.

We removed Chrome when Impero was having problems with it, and have yet to replace it. GoogleApps posed some early issues with IE which appear to have been resolved. Seldom get asked about browsers these days unless something happens not to work properly with IE that we can prove does in Chrome. Firefox was removed from the system many years ago.

What do you do with staff who may have to use a specific item of software that only works under Windows? Do you provide them with a laptop or provide RDP to a terminal server or similar?

I don't think MS have got it quite right since moving from v7, but as others have said I think it'll be with us in education and in the corporate world for quite a while yet.

The best advice I can give you is avoid Capita like the plague. If you or other staff have the necessary skills, buying in a leased line or FTTC and then installing and managing your own firewall is the way to go I think. Take a look at Zen Internet as well.

We try to treat them as school devices...most users treat them as their own.

You do have to wonder how they managed before laptops came along...I'm not suggesting new technology shouldn't be used in order to improve, but staff laptops do eat up a decent bit of our annual budget, and it would be better if we gave them to those who really need them as opposed to every teacher/TA.

We still do, yes. Been trying for years to get desktops in classrooms instead (actually, for neutral cost would simply tie-down existing laptops in classrooms for staff until they are scheduled to be replaced, then replace them with desktops) but to no avail. BM would love to do so as well, but SLT not willing to do so. Costs would come down only by around 4 grand a year (assuming 4 year replacement cycle for laptops and 5 for stations) but the management and admin for them would reduce significantly. SLT say staff 'demand' them these days, whereas in speaking to staff the vast majority could actually care less.

Root cause is staff can't be bothered to use Repro properly.

It's the Admin-Curric divide here that's interesting. In November on Admin we did 15,679 jobs, which was 155,801 pages...on Curric those figures were 7,247 and 14,011 respectively. Plus we have a full repro department going full time!!

We're moving to Zen Internet next year I think. Glad to see them mentioned on here so positively.

- - - Updated - - - The settings are different for different manufacturers, but you ought to be able to specify which groups can log in from the filters & restrictions tab. Printing filters are different - under printers, not devices.