arichards

This didn't come from me, but here is a link to the webcast. I think its safe to publish it given it was a while ago ICT for Cost Saving

This was a great event to film and if you can I would try and watch it, some great ideas. I am going to shamefully plug a free event I am running on the 10th Feb at my School. I have put the agenda below and if anyone is interested in grabbing the last few slots then just contact me Agenda 9:30 – 9:50 – Arrival 9:50 – 10:00 – Welcome 10:00 – 10:30 – Mark Reynolds, Microsoft UK – Costs Savings In Education 10:30 – 11:00 –Dave Coleman, Twynham School – Virtualising using Microsoft Hyper-V 11:00 – 11:10 – Coffee 11:10 – 11:40 – James Marshall, Microsoft UK – Office 365 11:40 – 12:10 – Alex Pearce, SharePoint MVP – Using SharePoint 2010 as a Learning Platform 12:10 – 13:00 – Buffet Lunch 13:00 – 13:30 – Alan Richards, West Hatch High School – The Paperless School 13:30 onwards – Networking , leaving etc

Hyper-V is just a role within Windows Server 2008 R2 and so has no extra cost associated with it. The licensing of the virtual servers is fairly straightforward as well. If you install the following flavours of Windows on the host you get the following 'free' virtual servers Standard - 1 free virtual server Enterprise - 4 free virtual servers Datacenter - Unlimited free virtual servers Datacenter however is licensed per platter of CPU so as an example I have 5 Hyper-V hosts each with 2 x quad core processors, so I license 10 windows datacenter servers Don't forget as well that the new Microsoft licensing scheme starts in March 2011 which will drastically cut your licensing costs as well.

We use HyperV at my School and have had no problems at all with it. We run it in a full failover cluster with another virtualised SQL cluster in that !! With SP1 for 2008R2 you will get dynamic memory, which is similar to VMWare memory over commit, in that you can specify a starting memory allocation and then a maximum. For backing up I use Veritas backup exchange 2010 R2 which backs up all the virtual machines. If you want you can have a look at the videos that I produced when I set our system up on my blog: Education Technology Now

If you have SharePoint designer 2010 you can create a workflow that does exactly this job using a simple GUI.

When making changes to group membership etc in AD this won't appear in SharePoint until the user profile service has run. This normally happens as a timer job, but you can run it manually from central admin to force the change to replicate from AD to SharePoint. So you may need to make your changes again and then run the user profile service manually.

I can see the point that people are making about IT not being isolated in Schools and with any luck discussion on how IT can save the School money have been ongoing. Unfortunatley though we are all about to have our 'belts tightened' significantly and IT is an obvious place to save money by simply cutting the budget, which helps no one. I think what this letter does is give you the opportunity to put something in front of your head which explains that IT can save money for the School without simply cutting the budget. As well as virtualisation which from experience will save you money its also about showing the head that 'smarter' use of IT can reduce paper usage, photocopying, printing, postage and ultimatley the Schools carbon footprint. Whether you use the letter as a conversation starter or as an actual letter (altered to suit your School) I think its an excellent starting point. I am one of the lucky ones where the School invested heavily over the last 3 years and now we are starting to see the benefits in long term cost savings both using virtualisation and our latest paperless School project. Like Dave I don't want to sound like I'm advertising Microsoft products but if anyone wants to discuss further or see what we are doing then just let me know. Alan

Hi I know its already been mentioned but you can download a quick help guide from my blog if you want. Its a 'how we did it' type of thing. You can get it from here: Windows 7 Deployment Event | Education Technology Now If you have any questions then don't hesitate to drop me a line. Alan

you could wrap it in an msi file but to be honest we run it from our apps server and it works OK. Much easier than installing locally

There is a registry hack that allows the use of network files, but it is user based so you would need to find a way of doing this for each user. Your other choice (and the one we took) was to use the Vista movie maker. All you need to do is find a Vista machine copy the folder, place it on a network drive and then create the shortcut My blog has our experiences.

Hi All, I hope all who attending got something from the day. I really enjoyed meeting some really interesting people. Disappointed though that I didn't get chance to grab and EduGeek T-Shirt. I plan on doing a blog series early September about our experience deploying Windows 7. If you want to know when it starts I will post the link here and on twitter: @arichards_Saruk One correction to the post though is that my blog has moved: An IT Managers Blog - West Hatch High School - Community Collaboration

I have signed up to go to this. Its rare you find a conference aimed at Education and run by educationalists. I look forward t seeing some of you there.

You could start messing about with hiding from the address book but that gets very messy. You can create different address lists seperate from your Global Address List (GAL) which is what is created when you install Exchange. This link will give you some background and pointers on GAL's and address lists. Alan Richards Information Systems Manager West hatch High School Blog