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.

We use Mifare with pCounter our Mifare number is 10 digits long, but I think I remember having issues with the readers in the MFDs and the reader/writer in my card printer in that dependent on settings I got 2 different numbers. I will see if I can find the setting I had to change which may, or may not, help you.

Hence why I said "comes across" lol

There is no need (now) to have a physical anything. This is down to changes and advances in Virtualisation software/OSs and applications. Remember when it was advised that ISA server should be a physical server and that you should have a physical DC. As things change people or specifically IT techs are reluctant to change because of our 'KISS' and 'if its not broken dont fixt it' outlook on things. Hence if a physical SIMS and DC works... why change? I am replacing our SIMS server as we speak and that new one is going to be a physical server, but only because I want it to be, not because it has to be. Personal preference. Capita now accept that a Virtual SIMS server should have no issues, but they still have documents which say, and I agree, that a poorly configured virtual infrastructure can be worse than an older physical server. As mentioned I think it all depends on IT tech expertise, skills, confidence and the equipment you have and how it is configured. We have 10GB fibre and two ESX hosts each with 8 x 1GBNICs, maybe overkill, maybe just that we were upgrading every single switch in school installing a new managed wireless network and deploying over 1200 iPads and 100 macbooks ontop of our 800 desktops. We dont use anywhere near the bandwith we have available and we stream media, have over 1200 ipads, use VoIP and everything else you can expect in a school environment but as always we like to provide resilience or over-spec for future proofing or sometimes buying the best we can now to mitigate not getting funding in the future. I am sure we are all guilty of this. I am contemplating upgrading to a 20GB backbone to protect against a single point of failure. I feel it is now appropriate to say I work in the same LA as @Dave_O and know him very well. He is not always right and he will admit this, he is not always confrontational or arrogant as he may come across. I like to think of it as more critical friend like! JayEmm

We are having random performance issues here, they have happened since we changed the domain our SIMS server is on. We get random error 0, error 3 and general timeout messages. Looking at the server it is a physical server with 2 hex core processors and 12GB ram, it is sat doing nothing most of the time. There appears to be lots of queries going through when I look at SQL profiler. Our MDF is nearly 7GB (not sure if that is an issue)? LDF is about 26MB We use full SQL Any help or ideas appreciated. We have contacted Capita and gone through the 'usual' re-index patch, which appears to have made it worse! JayEmm

I didnt think there was any staff information in FMS either. Maybe they want the personnel information into FMS, it is used for salary projections and budgeting.

when the BACS run is run the emails are generated on the FMS workstation not the FMS server, this machine needs to be able to connect out of the firewall to send the emails.

I assume that Dave_O always wants to be right. I feel sorry for the school he works in and the staff, if this is his way dealing with things. I would like to think its just the way I read his posts and that he is not really a dictator! My understanding is that Capita suggest installing new SQL alongside old SQL is to provide an easy rollback method for anyone and everyone irrespective of the SIMS setup. This has been my recollection of the moved to sql2003 and sql2008. In the past I have also taken the opportunity to change my physical machines in the past, this time I will be going from physical to virtual SIMS servers. This also helps people who are moving to a new server at the same time as you install SQL2012 on your new server and leave your old server in place. Changing the instance name should not be problem assuming you use a redirected connect.ini if you do not then it could be a pain.

We are just going through this process too. Well actually we have made a decision and placed an order last week. We are deploying over 1000 iOS devices to pupils, along with the 200 iPads already given to all staff and macbook airs to teacher, so our solution had to fit in with these devices and our wired PCs. We looked at Smoothwall, Bloxx and lightspeed and finally settled with Bloxx.

We have Impact from cunninghams linked to parent pay. Both leave a little to be desired both functionality and support. Unless you speak to one particular person at cunninghams who is helpful and knows their stuff, its useless. Problem with cunninghams is support is expensive and they dont want to change kitchen pc even though ist died twice and is covered. Then when tills need changing its £1600 per till. Outrageous.

Not sure if it is specific to T-Mobile or Orange, but just had my Everything Everywhere public sector update which included this "Office Signal Box Signal Box’s big brother. 16 people can make calls simultaneously and up to 40 metres away, enough to keep a small to medium offi ce connected. Professionally Installed, and available in one-off or monthly payment options."