jayemm

We have recently gone through the process of changing our telephone system, we looked at Avaya, Toshiba and Panasonic. In the end we went for a Panasonic NS1000 which we are finding really good for the money.

Hi there are a number of schools up and down the country who already have large deployments of iPad/iPods to students. Essa Academy Bolton and Oakwood High School Rotherham being 2 in the North that I know of. I also know of a Bank that has just purchased over 8000 for deployment to their staff. What is key is that you know what you want them to do or not to do and plan around that. It is possible to deploy them in a range of ways from light touch to completely locked down. I must say that I am saddened that this thread appears to be generally against using newer technologies in schools? JayEmm

We want to give a small number of staff who use apples in deliver of lessons a macbook to use at work and off site. At work we have magic triangle working and they can authenticate to AD they see their home drive etc. My query is does anyone have a similar setup as I am wondering if there is a way to make the home drive available off network or do we use drop box? Also do they need a local account on the device to enable them to login off site and do we restrict the account etc? Any help appreciated. JayEmm

Hi Phil firstly thank you for replying, although you have not answered my question, I will address the points you have raised. The pressure is not just on an LA but a school too from the LA and their Financial Regulations. At our school and LA for example we are expected to tender for any goods or services where the expected costs over the lifetime not just in one year are over £30,000. For the case of SIMS this would be true when looking at a 5 year life time. To be fair it also makes sound financial sense to check that you are still getting a good deal? I am sure Capita do the same. The framework, DfE site and the GPS site all refer to schools using this agreement and not LAs too. Interestingly with more than 50% of secondary schools being academies and 85% of those (capita employee provided percentage) using SIMS I can see why Capita want the schools to relicence. Is there an answer to the original question? How does a school renew with capita stating framework terms and conditions?

Phil, could you please explain for the benefit of all SIMS schools how they renew specifying the new IMLS framework terms and conditions and if there are costs associated with this.

@localzuk specifically the fact that academies that convert are required to purchase licences again. This document appears to suggest companies on the IMLS framework should not do this. http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/academies%20and%20licence%20transfer%20costs.docx

I was relating specifically to the document on the DfE website entitled academies and Relicence costs

I have asked this question on another thread too, but is this issue now resolved as a result of the IMLS framework?

Sorry if this has been covered elsewhere, but does this not now mean that Capita cannot and does not charge for re licensing where a school converts to an academy?

No the prices have gone up it would appear. When I first bought impero it was £3000 and £1000 per year. When I asked for quote recently I was told £6000 plus £1800 per year and soon it will be £8000 plus £2400 per year!!!!!!!!

We are looking for information and pricing for a wireless network. We currently do not have one in place and are taking the opportunity to find out what the prospective costs would be. Our school is currently awaiting a decision to see if we are part of the first wave of PSBP schools hence the final proposed solution may have to be amended. My first question is to other school based technical staff: If you have a managed wireless system what is it? Ruckus, Meru, something else? I am specifically interested in Meru and Ruckus. If you have Meru, Ruckus what do you see as possitives and negatives of the system you have? If you could make the decision again would you change your mind. Finally and I am sorry if I cannot do this, (please tell me), but any one from Meru or Ruckus who is willing to help can you please PM me details so I can contact you to arrange for site visits to get this started, JayEmm

Head -> Me (ICT Manager) -> 3 techs I also line managed 2 LRC and 2 reprographics staff

Is anyone using Discover? We are but are having trouble when creating our 5A*-C Venn diagram to show that some courses are (currently) worth more than 1 GCSE. Has anyone managed to overcome or workaround this in Discover? JayEmm

I was appointed NM at a school last year, the day after it was announced that BSF would cease for schools not at Financial Close. Since then we have been allocated funds by the LA to refurbish, and now we have applied for funding under the Priority School Building Programme. This has ringfenced funding similar to the BSF one of £225 per pupil for 'ict infrastructure'. My question is to anyone who has gone through BSF, how was your ICT infrastructure money spent. Was it done for you, or could you spend it? Also what was it expected to cover cables switches servers etc? Finally were you consulted on where power and data was placed etc? Any help appreciated.

Tried with firewall off and on at server and client and doesnt change anything. It is strange because it appears to happen intermittently and can only be fixed by a reboot of server, it doesnt affect all clients just some of them.

We are having a strange problem with one of our Server 2008 R2 servers. It just so happens that this server is also our SIMS server. Intermittently some machines are unable to ping this server, they can map drives on the server but not ping. The only fix is to restart the server. Has anyone had this issue? Or have any suggestions. JayEmm

Mark Salamander does a lot more than just add the email groups. And are you sure you will only need it once a year? What happens if students change class mid year? Or when technology rotations happen? How do you add new users in bulk and ad hoc during year? As a user at 2 schools now of Salamander, I would recommend to anyone. It may appear expensive but it possibly does more than you were first looking for.

@meastaugh1 that sounds good. Where did you get that from or did you make it yourself? Care to share it.

I am just looking at this and there is a payroll system called Earnie, which integrates with FMS/SIMS

We use the Asset Management part of Sitehelpdesk, Help Desk Software, web browser based software solutions. This integrates with the fault logging, release management of this product too. I have seen other places use WASP, excel spreadsheets, access databases and I have seen that KeepKidsSafe the company behind a first day absence contact system have made one too.

Hey, just thought I would give you an update. I followed some instructions about dual home setup from microsoft, but it all appeared to be ok except a static route on the 'secondary' network which was actually the one that was working. Decided to reboot server the switch the server is plugged into and the core switch and so far all appears well!?

Hmm, ok. So we have found out what may be causing it. If I disable the curriculum NIC, admin works fine. If I disable the admin nic, curriculum works fine. When both NICs are enabled, the one that was enabled last has the timeout issues etc. We never had this issue with 2003 so ideas welcomed.

The two networks are physically sepperate. Different switches, fibre and copper. Two physically seperate domains. The SIMS server is a member of the admin domain. DC is a server 2003 machine, new sims is 2008 R2 with SQL2008 R2 SP1. The switches are not managed just factory defaults. We have tried changing where things are plugged in and still no changes. The admin machines map the drive and it uses domain groups to assign the share and security permissions. Curriculum map the drive as local account on the SIMS server. To eliminate this I tried mapping the drive on an admin machine in the same way but that made no difference. I wondered if there was an issue with the old server still being switched on, they have different instance and hostnames though, but this made no difference. aaaaaaarrrgggggggh

I had thought about that, but the staff computers on Curriculum, and the computers on Admin, both have the same AV program. I will try switching the AV off on a test machine to rule it out. Other suggestions still welcome, as I feel like I am running out of reasons!

Ok, so we were one of the schools affected by SQL running at 99% due to our extensive use of panels on the homepage. Capita's suggestion to fix this was to drastically reduce the number of panels used. My fix was to buy a dual hex core server and thankfully it has paid off and SIMS on curriculum runs faster than ever. But we appear to be having problems with SIMS on Admin network, which is the network that the SIMS server is part of. Timeouts especially appear in Exams. I have visited an affected machine and checked DNS resolutions, ping times, connection to server etc and cannot find anything wrong. I have checked and running the same things on curriculum or on the server itself work fine. I have also tried adding the connection timeout line to connect.ini but no change there either. Anyone had a similar issue before and fixed it? Or any suggestions on what else to check.