pauljmiddleton

We don't have that many staff working across schools, you are correct, the only issue with that is say the Head of English is in school 1 80% of the time and then the other 20% is in school 2 how would they access the student\staff shares in school 2 easily? You could map drives but as the trust grows how do you keep mapping different drives?

I agree with you there JROWLEY, the plan at present would be to allow staff to work using One Drive for Business client syncing locally to their HD so changes only, as for SCCM that's kind of why we need the local distribution points, I agree that the bandwidth would simply not be enough for direct cloud working, sad but true.

Yes, I have to admit, we're really enjoying starting from scratch, slightly worried about what Sept 2015 will bring but yes. Yeah, sites and services is something I've used before, I've come from industry and we had 5 large offices across the UK and about 30 branch offices so it's something we used heavily. I agree with cloud storage, I think that is certainly something we will be using, office 365 is already setup and fully used in one of the schools and in trial in the others (although those trials will be closed down and merged into one o365 tenant). That school is already using One Drive for Business for staff storage and office 365 for emails, it's kind of our test system really. We're also looking to move some services to Azure (although that may not start until after we've finished the merger), the plan is to use Azure for a DC and ADFS server, SCCM server with distribution points at each school, help desk server, SCOM Server, library systems etc. Paul

Hi All, I'm an IT Manager for a group of 4 secondary schools and we're about to embark on a project of migrating all the schools into a new Forest, the plan would be to have this completed by September next year and I just wanted to sound out some ideas as we have a completely blank canvas and want to start out the best way we can. Some questions: At present the plan is to create a single forest/single domain to keep things simple, but we have discussed single forest\multi domain but are concerned about keeping things simple with a view to office 365, ADFS, Azure and of course local services. Considering how we deal with data across these sites, for example a member of staff may be working in one school in the morning and another school in the afternoon, the schools are linked with a 100mb connection between but this also provides internet access so don't want to swamp it with too much replication traffic. So storage in each school? Don't really have the money to replace SANs in each school ATM. I think there is a huge list of questions so perhaps better to also just ask if anybody has done this recently and how they approached it? Suggestions, recommendations, gotchas? Thanks

I too am looking into this, it seems like a perfect solution to on site storage, in fact the cost savings in servers and cooling alone would probably pay for a bigger pipe, anyway, there is a powershell script I've been playing with which kind of works, sometimes, same problem as mentioned above though, it seems you need to be logged into the website before this script runs, which makes it fairly pointless. It may work with ADFS but I've not got that far yet. Have a play and let me know how you get on: Office 365 Drive Mapping for Enterprise Desktops - Home Paul