matt40k

Nope. That would mean FoI every academy.

Wishful thinking there Steve If you've got a solid server farm\virtual environment, yer, not very good idea as its just another server. If you haven't makes complete sense. So primary school or a cloud-based school where local servers are really not much more then DNS, DHCP and caching, hosting makes a lot of sense over spending £££ on a server, then another £££ getting offsite backups and then more £££ on support contracts. I suspect more schools will look at it when Microsoft opens the UK data centre, I know the prospect of hosting sensitive data outside of the UK, even still in the EU, is a bit daunting. Just keep in mind all these bolt-ons add up, this is especially true if the reason your with your MIS supplier (ie Capita SIMS) is because its cheap. Equally if you selected them because all the data is on prem! (Oh and for goodness sake don't say its because of your LA!! Every LA is on record as saying its the school choice of which MIS they use, its entirely on them and they will not block it - they will only recommend)

If you like windows phone, stick with a Nokia. Cant count the number of times i've dropped it on the floor and its caused more damage to the floor then to the phone. I did however manage to crack the screen (note it still worked) when i dropped it on a solid concrete floor in ammo room of a fort at Felixstowe. I've switched to an iphone really just for apple pay and a few apps. Really i could of got away with a case that holds a debt card but hey. Anyway, anything from the microsoft thats in your price range: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/mobile/phones/lumia/?order_by=Latest Just check it'll get win10

Just to be clear, your at a school, they are thinking about switching MIS system, you are happy with the process, business justification, measurable targets and so on. You're after specific answers about SIMS, ie the stuff you wont get from Capita Sales guys, but from actual SIMS users

If your on the latest version you shouldnt have to worry about guid, if its null the server will push it out - least thats what i've been told!

Its more a question of, is your script now out of date? Folks wont know unless they contact support. As a wise man once said todays fix is tomorrows bug.

That'll be interesting, SalamanderSoft (@rpwillis) is in the Microsoft Village @ BETT -

I think the key with children, with anything is limitation. Where its tech or not. I physically dont charge the iPad regularly so the battery dies when his time is up - limits the amount of drama i have to deal with when its time to move on to the next thing, prob the only benefit of having oddy placed electrical sockets and a short charger cable Not for me, its that the hack was aimed at info of children. No credit cards, etc. Pure parents email (and passwords) and kids info. Security wise its hard to pick, the disclosure of key information (ie sql statements in error messages), the lack of ssl, md5 passwords like you said - still not as bad as 000webhost with its plain text passwords - http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/10/breaches-traders-plain-text-passwords.html?m=1

Rubbish, sims client isnt very touch friendly

I would seriously advise folks to avoid in-house development and to buy professional solutions that is being security audited and fully managed. Otherwise you are putting children at risk. Look at the recent VTech hack, i'm sure no-one on here would be foolish enough to create something so insecure, but it is an attack on childrens data - there was no financial data - http://www.edugeek.net/showpost.php?p=1392507 I hope this isn't the start of a new wave of hacks. Its one thing to steal money, its a very below the belt thing to target childrens data.

So, who'd bought the kids anything VTech, lets hope you never upgraded/registered it otherwise your data is out in the public! Troy Hunt: When children are breached – inside the massive VTech hack

No, you used to get issue when it came to uninstalling the client, but they might have fixed that

It's important to note that RAID-0 isn't recommended for servers - you'll get good IO, but if one of the disc goes, you've lost your data, not half, all the data. So when you write a file, it'll write "half" to one disc and the other "half" to the other disc. You also don't normally have the OS on the same drive as your data. So very strange. If you have 3TB of data, and you want it on one "drive" you could "mount" the second drive in a folder within the first drive. I believe you could partition the each disc in two, then software raid-1 the os "drive" then have a simple drive on other partition, with one mounted to a folder within the other, so you have say C: OS raid-1 with 0.5TB, then d: with 1.5TB then d:\folder with another 1.5TB - that'll be safer then a raid-0 drive. Still buying 2 more hdd and raid-10 would be correct solution.

Users dont have file permissions to the dms files, like the sql db (mdf), dms is basically a web service. So the documents are saved to dms and they can be accessed by anyone - permissions is done by sims. So it being a permissions is nonsense

You cant compare M&S to Aldi!!! Its like comparing Poundland to John Lewis!! Of course premium stores will have better working conditions, the ratio of staff to customers is waaay better in premium stores for starters Stores like Aldi vary store to store, my local Asda sounds like your Aldi, you get nearly/expired food, let you go for other store and its fine

Yer, damm them for paying the living wage!! Agree with the ad rant tho, no where as good as the star wars version

More likely no-one trusts Capita to get it right first time in regards to releases - @CAM said the ui jumpy thing is back. If you had distribution rings like microsoft, you'd have to offer danger money for those in the bleeding edge

LA and Capita get reports out of Schools Manager (solus2) and Solus3. Bit hard to manage schools if you dont know what version they are on, unmanaged school still get a naggy call, just cause its normally required for census, the bonus for the LA is you dont get any surprise calls on census day when they say the menu option hasn't "magically" appeared. Never known folks not to use SOLUS to upgrade, its lot of effort for no real benefit not to use it. Even if you do upgrade manually, running SOLUS2 manually will update the report with you having completed it. Not sure why you feel schools would need to opt-in @vikpaw, its been happening for years and years and years, plus at the end of the day, who cares? Does it matter? Nope, even if you didnt upgrade all that happens is - they tell you to upgrade - the horror! Wont someone think of the children!!

The way Azure AD Premium works - the fancy multi-factor version - it will ring your landline and you press # to approve your connection. If you've ever phoned the activation line, it can also spits out some random code. For landlines you can check phone directories to additional validation. Again, its a solved problem. Added bonus is you could get the grandparent to approve being added - for example I could add my mum, but I doubt she'd want me to - a 3 hr drive to pick my son from school wouldn't go down well when we've got friends a lot nearer. Like I said, its not a problem a school can solve. If someone like Microsoft or Google went and solved it, there is a lot of tech out there that could solve a lot of the problems, bring a lot of improvements and not require a lot of human involvement.

If schoolcomms did data collection forms, they would. Same/similar process You dont do that manually, when they enter it in the web form it would trigger the workflow

@SouthCoastSaint like @GREED said - this is exactly what groupcall etc do already - solved problem. @GREED my point was that the school cant code this, its a complex task that companies have built business upon. Same time, its not financially viable to reinvent the wheel. Just sticking bits of validation code together will cost more then buying a product - if you've ever done address validation you know you can select the wrong source and give yourself all sorts of problems. This is before you get into the whole is it secure stuff. For this the economy of scale always win, there are rumours that the central gov will do something that will filter down for school use - still its only a distance dream at the moment @Marshall_IT i would say they are getting better, but then i went to the docs a while back and the doc changed the label desc, which pharmacy changed to something completely different, so what hope do we have when three medical professionals can't agree on the label basic instructions on an inhaler !!

Again, yes, can validate them all, its all been done. The only one that could be an issue would be the medical, if you did that, you wouldn't allow them edit it, it'll pull direct from NHS - but we're years from that actually happening

Surely thats a solved problem. I mean this isnt the first ever user form ever is it? You can have business logic to validate user import, to check the format, you have address validation/lookup services, you have a email verification process, ie a link they need to click to validate email address, same can be done with telephone numbers. Categories can be dropdowns rather then freetext boxes

Still waiting on schwarzenegger to get back to me on my ssl certificate

Thanks for the speedy reply - I think its an area for improvement, but like you said, its a lot of work. Its good that someone like yourselves are saying it - you've got the "hard" bit done, you've done the paperwork, got the security in place, the business model etc - all the boring bits devs tend to forget. So if you're saying, hey, its a lot of work, just in terms of development, let alone if you want to start from scratch.