jayemm

*bump*

Is this any good? http://www.edugeek.net/forums/educational-jobs/196828-nexus-associates-technical-consultant.html

The LA of the schools where I used to work operated similar scare tactics to stop people from moving from the LA RBC. We were a large secondary and only used the service for an Internet feed, bottom line is we stopped paying circa £30k per year and moved to circa £12k per year. We got a better SLA, double the bandwidth and better service generally. There was no contract with the LA for the service and a number of schools tried to cease mid 'contract' but many did leave in the end. They pulled the 'it will be more expensive for the primary' card, among others. Abuse of power if you ask me and must be against the Financial standards where schools should test the market and promote best value?

@1066girl How many pupils do you have for 600 staff? Do you sit accross multiple sites? Are the 600 staff current staff or is it returning all staff current and leavers? Sorry, but it just appears quite a high number.

Such a shame. I thinkt he writing is on the wall for MicroLib since it was purchased by capita. Look happened to IEP writer!

Hi Are the MFDs on lease? Did you purchase paper cut through your MFD supplier? Have you tried getting support via the MFD supplier or PaperCut?

Service Manager: ICT

Ok, so Meru's USP is single cell architecture, personally I think its a USP because nobody else will touch it. Meru's solution appears to be flood your entire school with APs, put one in every room. If you need to connect more clients then stick 2 APs in every room. The solution is very costsly to get decent results. I investigated this when we were putting in our 1:1 deployment of iPads and we looked at Cisco, Ruckus, Meru, AeroHive and in the end went for Ruckus for a combination of reasons. I can say that we have used the system with very little configuration out of the box. we have a site that is 1/4 mile from one side of the building to the other, all single floor. We have 38 APs 3 of which are external, and we have 100% coverage on site. We can have almost 200 clients connected to an AP and have over 1000 devices connected to a WLAN at any one time. There are never any complaints about wireless speed or connectivity, it simply does what it says on the tin!

You can disable copy and past in IE. I dont think this helps if you use an alternative browser or stop screen capture.

We are a 1:1 'scale' deployment of iPads. I agree with various comments that have been made here. We find it easy to manage the devices using our MDM, we like pushing apps out to pupils and staff, but giving them the ability and freedom to install other things too. BUT, I have found the following niggles with the whole process: * useful features are released in US first before UK and often take time to get here, VPP took a while to get here, initially we had to send codes out, at least we can now use VPP and MDM to push them * Over the Air supervision and Apple ID for students programs are only available in US at present, they need to come to UK. * The fact that initially VPP only allowed bulk gifting of apps, and we bought a couple of apps for all 200 staff and 1050 pupils and now they have the licensed variety that you can recall and redistribute. * When you say to the MDM provider that you would like 'this' feature or 'that' feature their response is usually that 'Apple dont allow that' or 'it is coming in the next release' * we had to write a guide to explain how to create an apple ID that does not use a credit or debit card from the start, to avoid adding and removing one. * the fact that with MDMs and tracking location of iPads appears to only with with cellular iPads and not with WiFi only ones. and * the numerous issues we now get when an iPad is locked to an Apple ID, great security but a pain to remove if you have a damaged device or one handed back when a pupil leaves. Don't get me wrong, they are great and get used in many ways but there are niggles on the way!

Hi +1 for ruckus. installed over a year ago an not had any issues. We are a 'scale' deployment of iPads. Evey pupil has an iPad mini, every staff member has an iPad, every teacher has a MacBook. 38 APs giving full internal and external coverage. We get over 1000s clients connected at any one time, with up to 200 on a single AP. Not a fan of meru and Single Cell architecture. I saw it in use at a school and it was s l o w! Their solution of stick another AP up seems odd, but not so odd when you have to fork out another £600 for one. Clever model!

Jigsaw sell the Kanex connectors for abot £30

Hi. We have pcounter and print from macs no problem. Not sure what your issue is with file size? We use open office on macs but we do have postscript enabled mfds which we were told is essential for macs? Anyway we map our printers from the windows server too so it goes to the follow me queue used to have an issue where it asked for credentials but found something called ksmb print which was for OSx 10.4. In OSX 10.5 the functionality is built in to the print daemon. Apple have an article here

I don't often find myself saying this but here goes... Solus 3 is one of the few things that has come out of capita in recent years that does exactly what it says on the tin and just works. Over summer we have scrapped two old domains and started using a single completely different one. Decided at the same time to move SIMS to server 2012 and SQL 2012 at the same time. Migrating sims and FMS was an actual nightmare and nit and not as simple as it was in the past for numerous reasons. Really wasn't looking forward to installing configuring and using solus 3 but didn't want to install sims on each machine individually. Installed solus 3 in a a breeze with instructions that were very good including the details of what ports it uses. Our sims/FMS solus server and client machines all have windows firewall on and it works a treat. Makes it much easier for us as we install sims on all 700 desktops. I do know that not all places have the same experience we do, one school had a nightmare with it, another set I tup to download and apply updates automatically rather than schedule. I love the fact that I can just add a computer to the sims workstation group and leave it to it.

we have 80 on ours and dont have any issues.