Ephelyon

As with a lot of these things I think it comes down to the balance. I must find myself agreeing with @SimpleSi that staff shouldn't be out of pocket on the tools they need to work unless it can be proven that (in this case) "a laptop" is just like "a pair of shoes" nowadays... and I don't think it can. Yes, there will be those teachers who have earned good money and are advanced in their careers... but there are also the NQTs who are recently out of Uni, still paying back debt, and not in a position to blow several hundred on a portable computing device out of a month's pay packet (yes, they could save, but there's so much else to save for at that stage of life!)... Having said that, I think either way the pitfall is around supplying laptops and then not replacing them in a timely manner. We have fallen into that trap here. Laptops were provided once, but some are so old that, to quote one member of staff, "I've lost the crank handle!" I think some Leadership Teams (and, dare I say it, perhaps some earlier incarnations of school IT departments as well!) have failed to perceive the true nature of this "single" capital purchase! It will come back again... and again... and again... for EVERY member of staff to whom you assign one... until the end of time. Or until "we decide" it's okay to say everyone's got one anyway so why bother?

I support PARS as a product as well. On balance, a lot of things many people will claim can "only be done in PARS" can in fact be done in SIMS... but it might be that you will end up paying more for them (i.e. adding modules like Lesson Monitor and InTouch to do what PARS will supply in a single product)... or it might be that you get the same functionality but it can be "clunkier" at times. On the money side, the PARS purchase a couple of years ago was a no-brainer for us. We'd never bought Lesson Monitor, so I quoted up on this and was given a certain figure. When I then went to TASC for a quote on PARS, the figure was more or less exactly the same. Our decision was between a specific module of SIMS that only does so much, versus the same price for a product that does so much more. We went for PARS and haven't looked back, though we did suffer a few mishaps with the Grading features due to opting not to pay for the extra training days. PARS training as (usually) provided by Ms Urey is exceptional. There is a day rate involved but if you scrimp on it, you'll find productivity and user experience both suffer in the long-term.

Wouldn't it be great if the actual weather had an API? this.call(sunShine);

Why are they getting a consultant in?

@jinnantonnixx, I'm having similar issues to @localzuk and I just ran the report code you gave. scheduler_id always has 0 runnable tasks (out of about 8 current), but if I run it several times over 30 seconds I will occasionally see scheduler 1 (with around 12 current tasks) having 1 runnable task. Is there cause for much concern there? This host has 8 cores, running 5 VMs (DC, file server, Exchange, print and SQL) and this SIMS VM is the only one with more than 1 vCPU (it has 2). 8GB RAM assigned, 16GB for Exchange, 2GB for each of the others.

+1, though at least Server 2012 has brought about improvements in managing the sudden unavailability of DCs.

You may have to just get sometime downtime agreed (maybe they can compensate you extra for working very late into unsociable hours to make it more manageable? ) for this as AD/GPO/DFSR issues can be a real b*gger to sort out. Having said that though, you can always just back up the affected GPOs as @3s-gtech says if that'll make life easier.

@Lftek55, I hope everything goes well. It sounds like Mr G40's having a whale of a time at least!

Our Veeam setup makes great use of dedupe for the backups. I forget the ratio now but it helps a lot, not just for storage but also (because this is source dedupe) in terms of how much data we have to transfer over the wire for our offsite backups to another school a few miles up the road.

Googling KPIs (or the expansion, Key Performance Indicators) might help.

Most of these are SMART - I think one is Promethean.

Afternoon all, just wondering if anyone knows of "generic" fault resolution procedures for whiteboard/projector combos that just will not align properly. We're going through a spate of resolving a lot of these (often previously unreported) issues and I've made headway with most, but there are still a few stubborn stragglers. I've tried changing the resolution to something the projector prefers (fixed quite a few), fiddling with other relevant projector settings and the like. Does anyone know what the next step should be in that scenario, or whether this is likely to be a hardware fault in the IWB? I must admit projectors and IWBs are largely outside my skillset.

Brilliant! I know there are people at the Local Authority here in Cheshire who are looking to other examples... I may see if I can refer them to Devon! One thing I will say in fairness to Michael Gove (and I really don't want a political debate)... he's saying schools should share and pool their resources wherever they can. This is a good way of doing so and can (I imagine) be used by Local Authorities or Academy Chains who may need to justify themselves in this manner.

The offsite solution you have in place there sounds very encouraging - we're hoping to do the same with our own kind of setup. In this way, local schools would establish a manner of "data protection grid" that ensures we're only screwed if a nuclear missile takes out most of the area.

It's about a terabyte and a half as we're quite a small secondary, from about 11 VMs. The storage volume is around three and a half terabytes, which adequately accommodates 60 reverse-incremental snapshots of varying sizes as well (20 working days per month * 3). Please feel free to PM me and maybe we can schedule a phone call so I can explain the supporting infrastructure in more detail. Veeam also has the capacity to do snapshots up to every five minutes but we're not using this to save space and bandwidth (although we do have a separate BAN - Backup Area Network)... as most of the data that could be "lost" consists of files, I rely on Shadow Copies to handle this side of things.

+1 to the UniFi point!

Just my tuppence worth, but here's the finished presentation I put together for the interview (see this thread) that coincidentally I've just come back from today! It's on how the school might move forward with ICT as part of a strategic vision for learning (with bullet points in the Notes section as well). I've probably got the costings for the products I'm thinking of (but not mentioning). I tend to find Senior Leaders will give you mega-kudos if you can take "a pot of money" and transform it into something that fits well with their overall priorities (I haven't heard back from the school yet so we'll see!). Just in case it helps.

Just applied it here, everything seems fine for now...

I hope the ICO knows you're storing personal data outside the EU? It's a pretty painless process to notify them but failure to do so can lead to legal action even if nothing bad happens.

I can detail ours if it's any help. Quoting from our strategic overview for the past three years (here): "This involved the purchase of a new DR server (in addition to the existing backup server) along with the purchase of Veeam Backup & Recovery, designed specifically for use in a fully-virtualised server environment. Combined with the virtualisation of all core servers, this allowed for the entire system to be backed up to disk every evening, employing a reverse-incremental methodology, including quarterly archives to tape storage that would provide somewhere between 1 to 2 years’ worth of data retention depending on system growth. Working with the County Council and a local partner school, XXX XXX XXX, an arrangement was made whereby the bandwidth between the two sites (both being ‘core sites’ on the County broadband network) would be unthrottled at weekends to allow both sites to send their backups over the line to our colocated storage, thereby ensuring that a complete copy of the system was always available at another (geographically local) site. The five data recovery methodologies now available are as follows: • Using the 'Previous Versions' feature, which extends back approximately one month (this is also available for individual users to manage directly); • Using the disk-based system backups, extending back approximately three months; • Using the readily-available VM replicas, which are always the full system 'as it was yesterday' (or the previous Friday should a problem occur on a Monday); • Using the appropriate quarterly tape archive; • Using the off-site storage." This is using Veeam running against ESXi hosts. All servers are guest VMs and they are backed up to disk every Monday through Friday evening (on a three-month retention cycle). All server VMs are also replicated to the DR server after that job finishes to allow for a 'hot mirror' approach (only the last day is stored there). Every three months, the backup server and its contents are written to tape (on roughly an 18-month retention cycle). At weekends we use our offsite link (iSCSI over WAN - yes, I know the controversy but it's working well so far!) to back up to our offsite storage (one-week retention cycle, i.e. only the latest copy as with the hot replicas). Additionally, I've enabled Shadow Copies on the file server VM and given it 100GB or so of space, then opened Previous Versions up to the users (both staff and pupils); this means they are empowered to resolve most accidental deletions and other cock-ups by themselves in case we're not available at the time. On a side note, I'd agree completely with @VeryPC_Ed that DPM is an excellent option if you're running Hyper-V.

It's the old "all the eggs in one basket" story again... something I never do with any of our suppliers for similar reasons. Multiple cloud providers might not be so bad of course, but then you'd miss out on all the nice integration benefits.

@LausHHS, if I may ask... how do you find the accessibility of Kite from a mobile device, i.e. does all (or most) of it work from the Android Browser, Mobile Safari etc? I haven't really been able to test it on that score yet.

We tried too with the SSSNB, which I think if it had continued would eventually have produced far more flexible pay brackets (and job specs that don't date from 2005 and still mention Windows 2000) much in the manner of the new STPCD framework. *Sigh*...

Excellent point I think, @sted. The words "blended learning" and "flipped classroom" spring to mind...