matt40k

Sounds like your using the PAYG also rather then having a schools agreement (or such) Rich

... and you don't leave server running overnight \ school holidays \ weekends...

Sorry I read Governor said Azure as Office 365. Going fully cloud requires a rethink. If you do like-for-like it doesn't make much sense in most cases. If you take your backups - if you're including user data - why aren't they using OneDrive\SharePoint - if your backing them up onto Azure, what value does backing up Azure onto Azure add? If you're backing up fat VMs (nasty), if you're backing up dbs - Azure DB gives you backups every 15 mins, so... Not saying you wouldn't need Azure storage for backups, just it should be alot smaller. Alot of assumptions, not a lot of info.

Assuming he's declare it and they don't blindly make those decisions - ie they actually look at Google Apps, and ultimately he doesn't call the shots - should be OK. It's always good to get a new point of view (assuming its just that).

... Well that escalated quickly.

@mavhc - Have you asked for a MSI installer for VS Code? As for the Atom one, have you tried the --machine switch?

I might agree with you when I started my working, but I've had Middle Schools close, new schools open. Schools have physically disappeared and others have grown at such a rate. As for "ISO/PCI compliance" - I won't wave the GDPR flag, just the fact you can't walk into a AWS \ Azure datacenter and walk out with the server without too much effort. Replacing hardware frequency - you have to admit technology is evolving faster and faster. I wouldn't want to make 10 year plans beyond stuff will change and we will replace what we've got. Folks are already talking about quantum computing.

It's worth a chat with some of the Ex-BT folks. Martlesham Heath the village they basically build for BT employees has "horrid" internet (I say horrid as folks have alot worse). A few of them live in the sticks which is why they setup that wireless internet solution. Depends, if you're not upgrading your server every year, if your not factoring in power, human costs, you don't have any problems with it, you don't need to scale up \ down because of loads of students left\joined, you don't need to replicate your data within the same country but geographical separate, have ISO \ PCI or whatever compliance, the fact they give each user 1TB of space for free...

@DJ-1701 I live near Adastral Park, there are plenty of more talent folks around here that could provide a far better solution then I ever could. @Norphy You're missing the point, schools aren't in the business of cattle. AWS \ Microsoft \ etc ARE in the business of cattle. As a consumer I care about the end product, the cattle is a means to an end - food. The food isn't my business, its a resource I require to do my business. Bottom line, I don't care about the cattle so long as it gives me the resources I require. If I can buy the bacon at the supermarket, why am I keeping pigs? The economics of scale means having your own cattle doesn't make sense. The internet is such a major innovation we shouldn't be doing workarounds, we should be fixing these issue - ideally whilst we can see get some of that EU money!!

Seriously?!? Has no local entrepreneur started laying their own fibre? Or some sort of wireless solution? Are they happy being in the dark ages where you are?

Quite an interesting topic - years ago you had only 1 option in terms of storage, spinning rust. Let's face it anything with moving parts in a server will go wrong long before the non-moving parts. HDD being really sensitive - to shock and - and it makes sense when you think they are spinning at 7,200 or even 15,000 RPM and the platters are separated by such a small space. So we got around this by having 2 (or more). So do we still need RAID for SSD? Well SSD (assuming we're talking server SSD that are designed for the load and not cheap SSD) are more reliable then 2 (or more) traditional hdds, in terms of SSD vs raid traditional HDD, SSD wins hands down. So yer, it's a valid question, specially when you think two SSD installed at the same time, writing the same data is prob going to die at the same time. The other interesting points are GDPR - eh? Backups of critical data that will land you in trouble will be need to be in two completely different media formats. Personally - paper and electronic - if it has to be electronic for both, one should be CSV. Remember those random posts we get here asking about can someone help get data out of that really old database, but they don't have a copy of the old client software and waste weeks and weeks trying to get the data. Doesn't matter that you have 12 copies of that file or disk\tape\cd\cloud\whatever, if you can't read it, it's not a backup. If you've got printed data collection sheet in case of power loss\IT failure\whatever, is this still an issue?? The final interesting one was - servers are cattle, not pets. Sounds like alot of folks still have pets. So Microsoft or Google gives you free email, makes complete sense, no one should have on prem exchange, doesn't make sense. They also give your users 1TB of space. So you don't need alot of space on prem, the only things you should be worried about are legacy things - most likely your MIS. So if the bulk of your stuff is now in the in other peoples server rooms, why don't you spin up vms in their server room? Yes AWS \ Azure looks expensive, but you don't use it, you don't pay. You separate out your storage from your compute, storage you can't escape, but it's pennies, compute you only pay for when you need it - both Azure and AWS has ways of start\shutdown VMs etc. So you looking at what 8am - 4pm, 5 days a week then take off all the school holidays - fine, you'll have some edge cases that need a few more hours. So I guess my question is, who cares? And why do you care about the cattle?

Have a word with David Grashoff @ Capita. He'll be the guy who'll know. If no-ones done it, SalamanderSoft might be able to do it.

I found Simba to be overpriced IMO, don't get me wrong, a good mattress is worth every penny its just we picked up a similar mattress for less then half the price. Worth popping in somewhere like Dreams trying out the mattress first just in case.

Code should be in version control, scripts you can use something like gists - https://gist.github.com. Also they embed really well in blogs etc.

I think using the SalamanderSoft tool would be better - it means you don't have to ask Capita to go digging out a old dbdiag script and you're not bypassing the SIMS permissions by running SQL directly...

If you've just installed the s3 agent manually (ie scripted, not from the ui), it won't know it needs SIMS, just a question of adding it as a SIMS machine in S3.

Surely the SIMS.vbs is redundant as SOLUS3 does that?

You'd have to have it previously defined as a sims workstation, ie you add desktop01 in S3 deploy SIMS, then reinstall it, add the S3 agent - you can't just created desktop02 and get it to assume you want sims on it. Other caveat would be if you've got duplicates in the database - Capita should be able to help clear it out - although if its really horrid it might be easier\quicker\better to just start again, but they'll be able to suggest whats best, after all its what you pay support for

Don't include the S3 agent in the image, have it install on startup. Pretty sure one of the Capita devs said if you don't set the GUID it'll get pushed from the server nowadays.

I think you're under estimating how big a thing this would be. You're talking about sinking £50k+ into Capita's pockets. So what? teachers can work across schools? Does this happen? Is it a real problem?

If you can't drill into analysis - it's worthless. For example, 56% of students are failing English. Pointless unless you can action it, ie who are the 56%. It's also not quite as easy as you think - you need a ID to define a person and you need to ensure you can't filter down to just 1 - otherwise people could find out who it was - thus those fields become "sensitive".

Free version is only public stuff - ie you publicly publish the data. The paid for version, yes, can connect to alot of data sources including SQL Server, but have you seen the prices?As Phil points out - like any third party tool that "links" into your MIS, make sure you get permission before you start playing and you all understand the risks. @PhilNeal would love to see Capita statement on how it's going to support GDPR, especially the 'the right to be forgotten’

Can't poke Tableau public at SQL - only Excel \ CSVs etc. And would you want too? Seems like a nice way to expose sensitive data I know North Yorks has done some amazing things as has Ark

@gchivers Have you spoken with your Account Manager at Capita about getting the maintenance cost for (at least) 2 of the schools refunded?

It's depressing how many schools upgraded because Capita stopped supporting Win95/XP :'(