AngryTechnician

Well, I've just has a quote back for our EES renewal and we have seen an increase of the magnitude mentioned in the OP (around 25%). This is compared to the pricing we got on the exact same licences 1 year ago. Obviously I will be getting additional quotes but it's looking like this might have been an accurate warning.

Step 1 when diagnosing Group Policy problems should always be to run Resultant Set of Policy on the test computer & user. That should give you more detail on what's going on.

Easy, just become a member of service personnel and get some offers when you leave. The TA are always recruiting mate.

Pure speculation in this case, but my experience of these sorts of shenanigans is that there's something else going on that hasn't been made public and they're using this deal as an excuse to force him out since it looks dodgy (even if it isn't).

I still haven't had a full confirmation, despite ordering 5 weeks ago and following up a second time a few weeks later as per my earlier post. I never even got any response from that one. I've pretty much given up hope of our order ever arriving at this point.

Some updates on the bugs that were stopping us from deployiong: Microsoft have closed my Connect case on the spellcheck with redirected AppData bug: the problem is gone in the IE11 Developer Preview, so they consider it fixed. Of course, how long it will be before IE11 is released for Windows 7 is anyone's guess, but given the 6-month delay we had with IE10, I'm not holding my breath. At least the workaround works for us. The KB article on the "Open with Explorer" bug in SharePoint Online has mysteriously vanished, and has been replaced with a new KB article which includes a hotfix for Windows 7. It's worth noting that the hotfix is also required for IE11 as the problem is in Windows, not IE.

I'm also getting one via a US relative to have a tinker with. I can see lots of potential at that price if it gains more capabilities later.

This. SMT need to get on the case or this problem will never be solved. We have a written policy that our staff must check their school email at least once per day, and the DH takes people to task if they don't (which is rare these days) About the only thing you could do to make this any better that hasn't already been suggested is a little trick I use for our pupils. Their email is on Google Apps and we don't have SSO. We do have SSO for our Intranet however, and from there I use 2-legged OAuth to read the 'unread mail' RSS feed from the Gmail inbox and parse it using XSLT to show on the Intranet homepage. It's not perfect (only shows the 20 most recent unread) but it works fairly well.

I don't believe that for a second. For start, Microsoft surely must use Exchange internally, and Exchange addresses are not case sensitive. I don't think it's even possible to create a transport rule that is case sensitive. Secondly, I sent mine to [email protected] all in lowercase and got a response.

The Surface (RT) has a micro HDMI connector, and leads & adaptors are available to connect this to full-size HDMI, DVI, or VGA (at varying prices). For some reason the Surface Pro has a Mini DisplayPort connector instead, but again, the same range of adaptors are available.

I had an initial response on the 27th after ordering the day before which included this: I haven't had the aforementioned confirmation email yet.

Both of these options are in the User Configuration section of the Group Policy templates for Office 2010 and 2013; they may be there for 2007 too.

I did the same with Logitech B910 webcams and some LED desk lamps (tired normal lamps but filament and fluorescent flicker too much). The autofocus on the B910s is fantastic so they work really well even for closeup work, plus we get full HD for less than the cost of the TTS one.

Ours is .internal Pretty sure that is standard practice for RM-configured domains, which ours was originally.

I had assistance with the first-time setup on the controller to save time, but I'm pretty sure I could have done it without. I also put up all the APs myself, though we did all our own cabling and hardware installs in my last school so I've had plenty of experience doing it.

Never processed anything with that sort of volume in production. I think you'll need something that logs to a database rather than flatfile given your need to interrogate the data. I've been using Splunk recently (not OSS but free edition available). The free version is limited to 500MB of data per day though, and you might find you go over that!

Don't get your hopes up with Blockbuster - we used them for nearly a year and the wait times for discs were sometimes very poor. We waited more than 6 months for something that was at the top of our queue, and eventually cancelled without ever seeing it. They never gave us a proper explaination, citing only that 'some popular titles may entail a short wait'. I told them that if there was a 6+ month wait for Star Trek - Deep Space 9, Series 2 Disc 1 then perhaps they should consider buying more than 1 copy of it, especially as they had clearly lost that copy. Unsurprisingly they didn't really have a response for that.

It just comes from the MX box. Be warned that you are going to need a LOT of disk space for the log messages if you plan on retaining full usage logging for 700 workstations. The Meraki logs are quite verbose. You will also probably need to develop some sort of solution to analyse the logs if you want any meaningful data out of them...

Silent push has been mooted for a while now; I think it is finally coming in iOS 7 later this year. Unfortunately that doesn't help either of us right now, but you're not alone with this problem.

Typically the problem you want to solve is addressed using a MDM system such as the free Meraki Systems Manager instead of using Apple Configurator directly. Almost all the same options are available, with the exception of placing the iPad into supervised mode (you can still put them in supervised mode and then use the MDM for everything else).

So I assume we are going to see a corresponding reduction in our EES subs to compensate, hmm?

Typical of government to suggest proprietary software when there is FOSS such as 7-Zip that does exactly the same thing, and better.

Speaking of using Office 365 in the browser, I don't suppose you have any idea if this SharePoint Online/IE10 bug will be fixed come September, @jamesbmarshall? It's the last problem that is holding back our IE10 rollout.

In theory, yes, but in practice it's much more difficult. SkyDrive Pro will by default sync to C:\Users\username\SkyDrive @ School Name This can be changed, but only by the individual user on first run. It's not possible to pre-stage the preferred location in any way (that I'm aware of). There are no GPOs or registry settings you can alter programatically. Also I'm pretty sure the SkyDrive @ School Name bit can't be changed. In terms of sign-on, I'm pretty sure you have to sign in at least once and the credentials are remembered. We don't have ADFS here so I'm not able to test that for certain.

It seems to have stopped for me now.