Ephelyon

This looks very good. Is there any indicative pricing available?

Perhaps that prompts the question of who was in charge of working with the company to establish the school's goals for use of the platform?

That's very strange - my source was the page it links to (both pages on the same site updated on the same date last month) plus a review from a couple of months ago I think. Must have different people writing the docs... Nothing in there about federating either. I'd still say that at the end of the day if you want 100% compatibility in real-time (i.e. Samba has to catch up whenever Microsoft releases a new feature) then get the client and server made by the same people; it's the most logical approach from a development point of view. If that's not a big concern or you're short of cash and the environment can handle it, then tech like Linux, Samba, LAMP all become perfectly viable options (though in Samba's case I wouldn't have said that a couple of years ago).

It works for you then... but it was a thorny one sometime last year if I recall. The main issue I'd have with it at our site is lack of support for multiple DCs (or cross-forest trusts, so if you use a learning platform like LP+ and want to federate your domain to support SSO, that won't work). Alpha releases are now showing the ability to join an existing Windows domain as an additional DC, but there's no mention of multiple DCs in a Samba-only domain yet. Naturally it will improve with time (as will the original technology), but I wouldn't say it's ready for a slot-in AD replace at the enterprise level yet.

Most of our user folders depend on it... it is possible to get it working.

Are you running it manually by double-clicking it, or are you giving it command-line parameters then as well?

Samba 4 is undoubtedly a marked improvement (in that it actually supports GPOs), but some are known to be dodgy (folder redirection for one).

That sounds like a problem with the setup programme itself, not the script.

Not to rain on any parades but pfSense is actually based on FreeBSD. It does look very interesting though; if I ever find myself without a wireless controller that can provide captive portals I'll definitely take a look. The same rule for a migration applies as much to Linux and FOSS in general as it does to anything else: don't do it for the sake of it. You need a reason to change things. Having said that, most of the responses so far have highlighted some very good reasons for doing so, but if you're going to switch the majority of your back-end system over to FOSS, make sure the school is aware they may need to recruit at a higher salary level next time in order to find someone with strong Unix management skills (another hidden cost of FOSS as these people tend to cost more - some notable exceptions though!)... Also be aware that if you rely heavily on Group Policy to manage user restrictions, software deployments and the like, then Samba is nowhere near as functional as a Windows DC (though other packages for managing software are available).

On a side note, I don't mean to completely debase Moodle... from what I can see (and I've used it as a learner myself on a Uni course delivered at a College), with its course-orientated structure it has a great potential for use in FE or HE institutions. I have less confidence in it for primary/secondary education, but many do seem to turn to it because it's free without perceiving all the different kinds of associated costs (and this is the proprietary/FOSS debate all over again).

True on the free side - but then, as you say, money will be involved eventually. Or if not money, then other costs in terms of time and training. The product Dashboard from Dataspire (a big presence in Northants I gather) has a feature that allows for designing lesson plans and then scheduling them against specific lessons on the SIMS timetable. I discovered in Kite that this feature is not unique. Kite's major advantage over Dashboard is that the latter doesn't really incorporate most of the "traditional" features of a learning platform. LP+ is another good contender, but I take major issue with its insistence on being cloud-hosted (as with RealSmart); Kite is also a cloud platform but provides a gateway server to facilitate seamless authentication passthrough from your AD, plus access to local network mapped drives and the like. Both LP+ and Dashboard offer Office 365 integration; Kite uses Google Apps for the same purpose. My vision for mobile learning is that we create collaborative and independent learners, while also extending that provision to accommodate the Virtual School and learners who are e.g. ill but not dying; in isolation; excluded; or on a time-out from the classroom. If enough lessons (it will never be all) are planned and scheduled on the timetable, then Mum can say, "You might have a throat infection but there's no reason why you can't log on and follow the lesson with everyone else!" That also means the running around and faffing to produce work/assignments for pupils who are suddenly excluded for the afternoon doesn't exist as the bulk of that job has (theoretically) already been done. Google Apps is good for the collaborative side, plus Web 2.0 technologies such as forums, wikis, blogs and the like; allowing learners to comment on e.g. a History forum on the causes of World War II on their phone in their bed at 11:30pm (hahahaha!) if they want. This is the "always-on education" paradigm. Dashboard's problem is that it includes practically none of that and so I wouldn't really class it as a VLE per se. LP+ is a strong contender for us but at the moment it lacks the timetable integration, plus the annoying aspect of separate logins, local file storage access and the like. Kite is currently our strongest contender but it doesn't do the Web 2.0 stuff as well as LP+ does. Then there's the ease of management from our point of view and everything else that goes with that. While at BETT I ended up having a conversation with the MD of Frog where I highlighted certain limitations of the legacy Frog platform (i.e. not FrogOS) and the difficulties of keeping e.g. user account home directories in sync with AD as they are not actually synchronised... the need to wait until a pupil/teacher exists in SIMS and then linking the timetables and so forth (our current platform is very old and is more akin to the old FrogTeacher experience)... and his response was along the lines of "It's about teaching and learning, mate, not making your life easier!"... clearly failing to understand that actually they are two sides of the same coin. So when we want a learning platform that is BOTH light-touch for us AND a benefit to the pupils, the best way for us to get involved in the selection process is to drive very hard on the benefits in the latter sense as that way you are likely to get SLT on your side far more easily... unless they've played it sly and kept you completely oblivious to the fact that there's even a selection process going on, of course.

The Primary offering from LP+ is quite good, as is Kite. The company Webanywhere looks like they can take your Moodle and turn it into a well-designed and well-featured platform.

To prevent the problem from reoccurring and to apply the fix to all Remote Access users, perhaps a logon script could be useful to check whether this is a Citrix session and, if so, manually delete the spurious file from the Home Drive? @query user | find /i "%username%" | find /i "ica" && del h:\windows\sims.ini I think the Citrix session type is listed as "ica-tcp" but I could be wrong. I know a normal Terminal Services session is listed as "rdp-tcp", so you'd replace "ica" with "rdp" in that case. If you've disabled Command Prompt access via Group Policy, you'd need to make sure scripts can still run (in the same setting).

It might be that your connect.ini has a redirect instead of pointing to the server-instance-db structure.

Many Dutch universities specialise in English-taught courses.

Simon, I'd say checking out the Job Centre can't hurt. @crt404, I'd agree on apprenticeships but would also add that you may have to take quite a lot of carp and monkey work sometimes along the way, depending on where you end up!

I like this Kieran fellow... he seems to have some magical power to make 1 Thanks count for 2! =]

This might be local to you if the location given on your profile is accurate: Foundation Degree in Computing Solutions (Networks) Colchester at Colchester Institute: all Colchester Undergrad courses 54311512 If you get a part-time job in an IT department and do that course part-time at Colchester, it's four years with fees much lower than you might find elsewhere as it's an FD course. Covers Cisco CCNA material too.

Another useful resource: Welcome to BigAmbition - BigAmbition - Your Digital Career Starts Here

Many of us start off self-taught - myself for one - so that's fine. You might also consider something like the BTEC National for IT Practitioners (or whatever it's being called these days) instead of A-Levels. If you chose to continue academically after that, Foundation Degrees in Computer Science or Enterprise Computing are available instead of a full-blown Bachelors which take one year less and are often perfectly sufficient. I started working at my current school five years ago through the "work experience" (though I was a "mature student"... hahaha!) sandwich placement on an FdSc course.

True, it's difficult when we see expectations of that nature being laid upon us. Until/unless we manage to change the fact that Leadership Teams are going to be composed primarily of people with a background in a single profession, we're going to have to accept the fact that they will mainly view individual professionals' results in terms of educational outcomes (that's what Performance Management means in their own profession, after all). The key is to find ways of drawing our activities back to exactly that, which sometimes means going round the houses to do so.

I see, my apologies. I've been dealing with a little bit of that today as it happens, so I think I over-reacted. All in the same boat and whatnot.

Assuming SLT gave him the resources to do so. Often this is not the case and the inevitable problems will arise. It's the old myth that "a poor workman blames his tools", which considering the way our profession is typically managed - in all sectors - is a nonsense. A practical analogy would be that there are some screws you're only going to remove if you've got (read: been given) the correct screwdriver. Otherwise it's not happening, all other factors aside. Don't judge that workman.

On the back of that, one area to familiarise yourself with ASAP is the school's Safeguarding procedures. Mainly that's in relation to what you do and whom you tell if you discover inappropriate material, but it also applies in a general sense because all adults in a school, both teaching and support, can be said to have a responsibility for the safety of young people, which has no particular parallel in business that I'm aware of.

The first rule to bear in mind is that IT roles do not necessarily equate between sectors. You are moving from business to education (no?), which necessitates a shift in your ethos. IT roles between business and education do not equate directly; in education there is far more aggregation of what business would call specialisms into a single role. That can be frustrating at times but it's also an exciting challenge, as long as the school supports its IT department well (support works both ways in the help-us-to-help-you sense). A school's primary mission is to keep the education of children "always forward". You do need to pay attention to back-end infrastructure and administrative services as well though; in some instances T&L will grind to a near halt if they're not in place.