Jed

We use Lasertech, they give us money off our already cheap orders with them. Has worked really well for us!

Tell me about it.....if you've been to the Uniservity meetings, this has been a nightmare from start to present and I can't see it getting any easier. Accessing resources is always going to be an issue. The NGN stats are terrible, so even the smallest schools will struggle! One of the guys from here asked Sandra South about it this week, they didn't even know! If they have blown that much on it then i believe this could get worse before it gets better.... Regardless of cost (I'm sure Uniservity are paying something for Moodle), I'm just happy they have decided to offer it as an option...

I have just spoken to a reliable source that grilled the Uniservity team at BETT about this. Uniservity will be giving schools the option of using Uniservity or Moodle. The difference being that they will be hosting the hardware and administering the Moodle based platforms aswell. The reason they have done this is so that all the people complaining about Uniservity not being Moodle will stay with them. For those of you concerned about cost, Moodle is actually open source software. You pay for the Hardware, and administration cost of techs like you and me running it. You can pay the Moodle (.com) Company, setup by moodle (.org) for support, consultation, etc which in my opinion is a waste of time as the forums on Moodle.org are so good. Uniservity will still be Uniservity. They will just offer, in my opinion, a better option to run Moodle instead of the Uniservity rubbish.

What is the size of your largest Ghost Image? 12GB Where do you keep your Ghost Images? stored on a server running raid 5. These are backed up once a week to a backup server running raid in a seperate location. Do you periodically Update your images with all the Updates and Software available? as much as possible, normally if we have a PC in for a fix, we clean it up, run updates and take an image Do you have an image for each model PC or for Each Room/Department with the relevant software on the image?We have an image for each model of PC and special images for departments that are slightly different, for example our Finance department has a build with FMS installed. In general if we distribute a piece of deparment specific software we try and take an image asap. A note to be aware of is if you are going to sysprep images, don't do it more than three times otherwise the images get unstable. Where you can, create a new build. Hope this helps.

I think this important to remember, but from their point of view, if they were advertising this on the stand at bett for thousands to see and they didn;t follow through, it could see the end of them! I spoke to Ben Sills and a couple of sales guys, can't remember what they were called, they were showing a limited version off on a couple laptops on the edge of the stand with a couple of guys giving a brief description about it. When I mentioned it to Ben because of my disbelief, he confirmed that this is the way they are going. As I said before: Here's hoping!

Yes, as far as the guys I spoke to about it were aware it will be a fully functional moodle design. If that is true then you will be able to use all moodle modules and plugins. Here's hoping!

Yeah sure- They are replacing their limited design structure with the moodle design structure. This mostly relies on floating modules that theoretically can be created by anyone and moved with a Click and drag feature, which would be big improvement from their wysiwyg editors. As they were showing it off with a moodle header I am assuming they have just paid Moodle for the code. They are saying Summer for it's release, but I am not sure how realible that is and how smoothly it will run in after the MIS integration saga we had. Jed

Hi Guys, For those of you who were at BETT you probably already know this but I thought I'd let you know that if you are being pushed to use Uniservity and their poor excuse for a VLE at the moment, they will be moving over to Moodle design modules soonish, so be aware it will all change very soon. Thank god for that! This is exactly what we as an LA have been asking for and they've finally listened, now to the other 50 things..... Hope this helps, Jed