Tallwood_6

HP 10gig fibre modules are still quite expensive as well!

I'd recommend the 2530 switches the gigabit 48port POE switches are pretty good value for money, we have a good number of them as edge switches powering ruckus AP's. The 2920 would be a worthy investment if you have the extra money and where looking to upgrade to 10gig in the future though.

This is a pretty poor policy from AL, that said I think this kind of situation is going to get worse as people move to hosted based MIS solutions as both the data and interface will be offsite.

System lost good seeded backups and resulting in several instances where we had to reseed overnight and start from scratch. The client support for exchange 2010 was buggy at best and support was slow to respond to issues.

http://www.misco.co.uk/Product/Q195744/PROMETHEAN-ActivBoard-300PRO-series-wireless-upgrade Is the proper official kit for the board I think.

http://www.misco.co.uk/Product/Q196869/Promethean-Activhub-2-4GHz-for-Learning-Response-System That is what you need, I know it works has I've had the same model board connected wirelessly at work although I do remember having to firmware upgrade it first.

We did due redstore to backup our exchange server a couple of years ago and that cost around £650 per annum for 250gb i think. Seemed like a nice idea but we had a couple of issues with it and i lost faith in the integrity of the backups it was taking in the end so brought it back onsite.

2012 or 2012r2 arnt supported as media servers on backup exec 2012 at all at the moment. I'd possibly look elsewhere for backup given a choice backup exec isnt what it once was!

You can buy a promethean wireless usb dongle which will get that board working wirelessly but i dont think it uses bluetooth.

Seemed to have this issue this morning and couldn't work out what was going on and the service status didn't flag any issues. Seems largely to have been resolved now though.

We have a number of QNAP rackmount units used for shared storage and replication and a synology for backup, both makes are pretty good but I was a little peeved that the synology would not do iscsi multipathing though.

I have done in the past but both where running the same firmware version so I'm not sure if that presents an issue.

Switch to transparent mode and authentication browser and apply the filtering policies to AD users or groups.

If it's anything like the sophos web appliance you shouldn't need to use a client you should have a captive portal / transparent filtering option.

Useful info thanks Michael, I understand AL reservations about giving sites access to a fully functional demo however its the only way for all the staff involved in using an MIS day to day, to get hands on and see what they think. Its easy for AL to demo the product working well in a carefully choreographed session to a load of heads or system managers but I believe the decision to switch MIS should be made by all the staff that have to use it day to day. When some of the other MIS providers will give you a hands on demo you can use once they have gone and access to a range to schools to speak to about there experiences and AL just close the door it doesn't exactly express confidence in the product. You have to appreciate that not many people will want to move with the assumption that everything will be where it needs to be in 6 months time either.

We are waiting on both proper feedback from schools happily using progresso and access to a fully functional demo version of progresso so we can properly evaluate it for ourselves. Neither of which AL seem to be forthcoming with at the moment which speaks for itself really. Aspen and iSams sounds like they are worth looking at.

Don't key me wrong everytime I've spoken with Ozan he has been very helpful however getting hold of him seems to be an issue.

Ozan this is utter rubbish, I have tried both at home and with various different web browsers and every time I try and download the release I just get redirected to the login screen. We have had this issue since we purchased the helpdesk and I've lost count of the number of PM's I've sent you trying to get you to resolve it or to email me over a copy of the latest release, I've phoned and spoken to your colleague on sales on a number of occasions in the past expecting a call back with no avail. I've stuck on v2.4.25 at the moment which we have had all sorts of issues with!

Tried to get hold of him a couple of months ago without success, looking to replace the Smartdesk with something else when I have some time.

I'm going to look at smoothwall along with some other solutions again in the new year, I know everyone raves about smoothwall but the last time I looked at it much like yourself I was less than impressed with the interface.

I must admit my view on the appliance having had it a few years now isn't entirely positive, there are a number of things not working properly for us and support aren't great although I've not had any issues getting through.

We currently have an exchange 2010 hybrid setup and it seems a little silly that if you use dirsync a mailbox is created automatically on 365 as in some instances I obviously want to create an onsite mailbox! Yes I still have to licence the user manually but the mailbox does seem to be automatically created from what I can tell.

Thanks I didn't think of filtering the OU's in directory sync, was hoping for a simple delete button though

Couple of questions I'm hoping someone here will be able to help me out with: 1.) When dirsync runs office 365 seems to automatically create a mailbox for a user is their anyway to prevent the autocreation? 2.) Can you delete a mailbox created for a user via dirsync without having to delete the user from AD (option is greyed out in web interface)

I pitty those poor mugs that have just brought into FrogOS (without frog) because unless your a primary school I'd say there is at least a year or twos worth of development before its got most of the useful features built it. Looks pretty though so will probably sell well to school leadership!