magicpatch

They are pretty cheap to be honest, and the support is local, we get the same technician from the LEA etc. The decision was with the head, she obviously feels more 'secure' by the friendly faces, but at the end of the day is is just a Vanilla network, they do some GPO work on installation and they will also connect all our current machines onto the new network as part of the install (where-as RM would charge £40 a machine!) and we have 90 odd workstations & laptops. I've been using the LEA setup on another site for a year, yes it has its moments but a year in I've not had too many complaints from staff, well apart from slow logins but thats because they've dumped GB's of data on their desktop so its sitting on their profiles!

After a long time to think about it, we've taken the decision to leave RM behind and go for the standard setup from our LEA. Although its far from perfect, its a lot less resource hungry than RM and I'm still tweaking the other LEA setup a year after it was setup, so although it will take longer to get right we can eventually tweak it to our requirements via GPOs rather than being forced what RM think is right for us.

Interesting thread, we're in the same sitatuion our CC3 network is due for replacement, we are looking at CC4 and a plain setup from our LEA. I'm at two schools, one already has the LEA Plain network - for a year now - and as people have said it has some advantages over RM, and CC3 has advantages over the plain one. Just to say it again, the decision needs to be taken which is best for the school. The CC3network I'm barely on site for 15hours a week, so if we go to a vanilla setup I could be spending the best part of that keeping the network in check and have less time for everything else I need to do such as MLE training, supporting lessons as needed etc. It also means that if I am away for whatever reason, another member of staff can take hold of the network and do basic implementation of various tasks thanks to the management console. They wouldn't have a clue how to do it on a vanilla setup. I find at the end of the day the decision will need to be taken by the Head & ICT Co-Ordinator, I can give pros/cons of both systems, but they need to decide what is best for the school and the daily teaching and use of ICT rather than what is best for me. Even on the vanilla setup, a year in, we are still tweaking GPOs and settings to stop the kids finding loopholes in the system - admittedly the children are younger on the CC3 site - but we've had less security issues in the 4 years of CC3 than in a year on the vanilla setup. Although not saying thats a selling point for RM, part of it is down to the setup and configuration of the server initally! Also it might come down to support, our LEA has a bad reputation for support, they only have something like 8 support technicians and it can take hours, sometimes days for someone to come to the site. Ours are very good at the "oh you have a go, and if it doesn't work we'll send someone out" attitude. They also supply Dell computers, the other issue is that Dell's technical support - although improving - can be an issue too. Seems to depend who you get and what level of service support you have with Dell. I find the issue for switching also comes down to software, at the CC3 site they use a fair bit of RM software, if they want to continue using this and buy licences for the software it gets expensive and brings up the cost of the vanilla network. I've calculated that RM would cost around £12,000 for our site including support and licences. The vanilla setup on hardware is just £8000, but by the time you've added the LEA support (£1000) plus potential software licencing for some RM software (£2000 or so) we are pretty much near the same price point!

So really, I should hear them out, fire them questions about it being terribly resource heavy and buggy and then say thanks, nice(?) ideas, terrible implementation but we might go elsewhere

I agree, but as I'm only on site for just over 2 hours a day and our LEA support is terrible the school might decide its better for them to go to CC4, although as I've said before I have no issues with CC3 and RM have told me they can still supply XP machines for another year or so anyway and even then CC3 supports Vista anyway .... Just the school server is showing its age and its filling up fast so the server does need replacing, the alternative is just get another CC3 server, at least that cuts all the licencing costs! We are giving RM the chance as we have their network now, although they won't get away with a light chat - it starts in 50mins, I'll update if they say anything that I need additional advice for.t The vanilla LEA one is the other alternative, but they use Ghost and everything and I manage one of them in another school and its not all that despite their talk. Would be easier just to do a plain startup from scratch but as I don't spend much time on the site it would be months and months before it was even ready so that's not an option.

We've got our meeting with RM tomorrow, this is how I'm going to pitch it to them and the school, to run CC3 and CC4 side by side, if they want to go to CC4 and then aim towards the end of the school year to get CC4 up and running to be ready for September. At least that gives times to recreate packages and do test runs before rolling it out site wide and if the CC3 decides to stop working the CC4 server will at least be on site.

I agree, I don't have many problems with CC3, problem is our server is crashing on a daily basis and the Active Directory died a year or so ago after the Easter Holidays and its never been the same since! So we are being forced to play our hand a little eariler, I guess its not possible to just get a new CC3 server and run that for a few more years, as people said there isn't much wrong with a solid Win2k3/XP network, we are only an Infant school and don't really need something that is super powerful. Its a problem area thats for sure.

After reading a bunch of comments here about CC4, is this still best avoided? We have an RM CC3 network which is really starting to creek and grown now as the server is a little underpowered for the amount of machines we have on the network now! We have basically an alternative from our LEA, its just a plain vanilla Win2k3 server setup but they do all the work setting it up etc. No idea what they base their setups on, I assume other schools they do this for, but after they leave then I can get to work and change everything to suit the school better. We have our local RM person coming down in a few weeks to talk about CC4, we'll give him a chance but looking here and on the RM Forums it seems CC4 is best avoided, so I was just wondering if that is still the case and to defiantly move somewhere else when we have the chance. Thanks

I'm at Network Admin, like a lot here it seems shared between two schools, I currently work at 27.5 hours a week, plus inset days. Both schools are large, one has a student population close on 500 the other around 430 (and this is an Infant & Junior school), not secondary. Both schools are 4 form entry. One school just replaced their CC3 setup with a vanilla setup provided by the LEA, 1 server, 50 laptops and 60 odd desktops at present. There are projectors in each of the class rooms. The other is still CC3, contemplating to move either to CC4 (but the horror stories put me off) or do a similar vanilla/LEA provided solution. They have 30 laptops, 30 netbooks, 40 desktops plus there is an admin server and 5 admin workstations. Projectors and IWBs in every classroom. I have to support all that plus the other ICT equipment like digital cameras, digiblue camcorders, all audio/visual. I also do statistics and analysis for the SMT when necessary as well as basic support of SIMS.net. Plus anything else that the staff seem to think is ICT and can't be bothered to do theirselves! -- Just realised this account was created in March'06 but this is the first post! Shows how busy I've been!