Tallwood_6

Back to the topic though parentpay still seem to be having issues a number of us have raised tickets recently using the website only to enquire as to the status via email a couple days later to find the ticket was never recieved by support.

Met by a member off staff as i walked in the door telling me they cannot get on parentpay, this is pretty shambolic stuff.

Yes I believe you nee to set remote registry to automatic and turn off UAC on the windows 7 machines to deploy via enterprise console.

I believe battery life is the Samsungs only real weakness "The biggest disappointment is battery life: in our continuous video test, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 managed just 7hr 18min of playback off a full charge – less than half the life of the iPad 2, and 80 minutes less than the Asus Eee Pad Transformer." could be an issue it you plan on doing alot of reading on the device.

That would great, can you give some further information yet as to what it will (and wont) automate?

Yea for you lucky SIMS people it actually talks to the SIMs database doesnt it? For us we have to extract the information manually for students and staff create a mapping in MIS Sync import into MIS sync sort out any errors then upload. The process is made or the more complex as the mappings dont always show, the required file types to upload the extracted data for both the students and staff seem to be different and individual records error after the upload if the cell with the data in it is to small for the information.

It would be nice in MIS sync worked at all to be honest, the manual process for CMIS i'm less than impressed with and is far to complex for someone outside our department to complete without issue.

Most of the downtime has just been recently but the lack of any real phone support seems to have been a feature for a while.

Thanks I will pass the recommendation on, trouble is we only rolled out the cashless and all the user creditals a couple of months ago so it doesn't reflect very well on the school changing so soon.

I managed to get through to someone on phone support it only took most of the morning! Dont trouble yourself after 7 or 8 emails involving 3 different support reps and a phone call all appears to be sorted now. I did attempt to get through to someone to compain this morning but alas the line i tried was busy as well, also tried to call a few minutes ago and the office is now shut at 4:15pm.

I'm still awaiting some suitable answers from Parentpay this morning. The replys i have from support have me fumming and they are refusing to tell me why we had a whole year group archived last week and why we were not notified.

True theres not alot to worry educational customers but I see today Microsoft announced details of it's next server version combined with the new hyper v and system centre and I can see slot of business jumping ship especially now the feature gap is closing. Vmware have scored a bit of an own goal from what I can tell instead of creating a buzz around what's new and improved in v5 there is nothing but articles and comments from people complaining about the new licensing!

The fact there is a 12 page white paper on the blog from vmware explaining the new licencing model says it all really. Do we know what vRAM entitlement is per CPU for each edition? I love the way if you want to licence more vRAM you have to purchase another CPU licence or change edition!

I'm going to look at some of the other options dicussed in this thread and possibly have a dicussion with our finance dept and NRS about switching unless i get some acceptable responses from someone at parentpay.

I am so fed up with parentpay, they support where a nightmare when it came to setting up NRS and it wasnt until one of the directors stepped in that non issue was resolved. Integration and documentation is geared up for SIM's only so it would seem and the manual MIS sync they have provided us has proved buggy and no one from support seems to be forthcoming with a solution so we are manually uploading still. Last week it seems ParentPay support achieved all our current year 13's during a preadmissions upload so none of these users can currently pay for anything and I’ve had no real response from support as to how this as happened, why we weren’t told or how it can be resolved. (apparently archived users can’t be made live again!) The parentpay website seems to suffer from outages and general slowdowns far too often. For the poor lady in finance much of this is too much for her and I’ve had to step in to perform functions which should be quite simple and has others have said there is no number to call to log complaints, speak to support etc.

PM Sent

Well i for one an looking forward to progresso the only things that are holding this back for us currently is the integration with other services and i think it would be in Serco's best interest to assist its partners as much as possible as many schools will likely have invested in products which need to talk to the MIS, and a bit of ? remains as if schools will be able to bring over more than ther current dataset. The cloud hosting i look at as a possitive and providing the hosting costs themselves are reasonable will mean we wont have to spent money in the future on replacing hardware, its one less server to have to backup and above all it means the upgrades are handled directly by serco freeing up some time for us. If you have a decent broadband connection with a good service level agreement then i dont think you have an issue with availablity. The questions about liability if data is lost, levels of support do need some answers?

I'm sure someone who is done VCP or similar will give a more detailed explaination. I have one VM which has 2 vcpu's myself but found i got decent enough performance out of a single VCPU on the others and i'm sure the performance scales differently adding a vcpu vs a phyical core or processor to a server.

I dont know the full reasoning but providing you dont over allocate the number of cores available in the host its not really an issue. I believe essentailly when you allocate a core to a host by default it is not fixed so when a host needs processing resources it has to basically queue for that resource to be made available, if you have 6 vcpus alloacted to a host then it has to wait untill all six cores are ready before it can execute.

You allocate vcpu's which are cores esentially cores rather than a whole CPU and if you allocate more than one it should simply add an addional core to the existing CPU which is showing under the host, or at least this is how it shows up for me. Its not really best practice to have multiple vcpu's added to a single host, why do you need that many vcpus added to a host?

John I accept that beta testers are required but ultimately a school expects a finished working product. It is up to serco to ensure that the product has received an acceptable level of testing covering all the available functionality before release.

This should have been picked up during testing! Issues like this is part of the reason why i now await at least a week before installing any of the new facility updates.

What's the point in powering the IWB through the iPad if you cant actually use any of the functionality!

Why do you need a USB connection for the IWB when there isn't a client for IOS? I'd have thought the biggest problem will be managing this many devices.

SYNACK hit the nail on the head, teachers are trained on MS products. The curriculum and some of the tests themselves require MS software and the majority of the educational titles used across the curriculum are developed for windows only. On top of that the majority of workplaces will be using MS.