AngryTechnician

I have a gander at ours every so often. According to the Zen portal we have averaged about 145GB per month since moving to 40/10Mbps VDSL. Download use has increased about 50% since the change, but upload has increased about 500%.

You mean you don't power all your servers using dynamos driven by lightly irradiated gerbils?

There are actually a collection of different laws that relate to this, not just DP and FOI (and enjay is right that FOI does not generally apply to independent schools). The Records Management Society has a 'Toolkit for schools' with a LOT of information on this here: Toolkit for Schools - May 2008 | Information and Records Management Society It may be slightly out of date now as it was last revised in 2008, but the Retention Guidelines document in particular is very thorough and makes an excellent starting point.

I have to say I gave Xibo a try a couple of weeks, and after the numerous recommendations on here I found it very disappointing. I scoured the documentation (which I found to be a bit lacking), and still don't know what I could have been doing wrong, but I couldn't even get it to display a PowerPoint without the client crashing. I found the layout editor very clunky, and the client seemed very slow to pick up layout changes, even after adjusting the settings. In the end we decided to just use ShowPoint for now and do everything in PowerPoint slides with embedded web content via LiveWeb.

Yes. The user needs Full Control rights on their roaming profile directory. You will need to add these rights back if you seize ownership. Under Vista/7 you will probably also find that without that GPO setting in place, the owner information and ACL is reset back to the default next time the user profile is updated. I seem to recall this wasn't the case in XP, but it has been nearly 5 years since I looked after an XP network so I can't quite remember!

I should have emphasised that by 'single sign-on', I meant automatic single sign on, i.e. when you open up OWA on a school machine you don't have to sign in again. I don't think Google Apps can do that without a third-party solution, but if it can I would dearly love to know how. Same for Public Folders; I haven't found a way to set up a shared folder I can access from within Gmail. It doesn't. Tasks are a weak point in Gmail, I think they were a late addition and even Android doesn't sync them. P.S. Sorry this has gone a bit off topic!

Off the top of my head: Single sign on Public Folders Tasks that sync with Outlook

Another option would be USB COM port adaptors.

Using either Roaming profiles or redirected AppData is horrible because parts of the profile are still stored locally, and each time you run Chrome on a machine you haven't got a cached profile on, it will launch the first-run experience, which includes dropping a shortcut on the desktop whether you want it or not. This poor user experience was the main factor in us removing Chrome from our network, but Google don't care because they just want you to use Chrome Sync.

We use Exchange and Google Apps, but we turn off Gmail for those users who have Exchange accounts. If you have Gmail set up as well as providing Exchange accounts, they will be separate mailboxes. Only one will receive mail (unless you auto-forward to the other), and email sent from one won't appear in the sent box of the other. Why do you want to have both?

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you do need permission from the copyright holder for that. You may find that publishers are quite accommodating for schools, however.

Sounds like something is up with the server in general than WSUS specifically. I would try running chkdsk followed by sfc /scannow to see if there's any system file corruption.

I'm less of the opinion that it's a whacky idea in principle, but I think it's definitely the wrong solution for the problem (if a genuine problem even exists). I'd also be delighted to have an interested Governor, but not a paranoid one, which on the face of it seems to be the case here.

I await correction from another member, but I have never encountered a single school that encrypts their onsite servers. There would certainly be a performance hit, and disk maintenance on servers is hard enough due to RAID complexities without throwing encryption in as well. Most encryption systems will require a password to be entered at the server on reboot, with the exception of BitLocker. If the governor is concerned about physical theft, the cage and normal building/server room security should be more than sufficient. If it isn't, you need to think about why the building security is so bad. Who do they think is going to go to that much trouble to steal the server? They are harder to fence than projectors, desktops, and laptops, most of which will be far easier to remove by the car-full before they even get near the server room. I suspect the governor may think that encrypting the server will prevent against remote intrusion, which of course it won't. To be blunt, a governor should not be able to make this sort of operational policy decision without (at the very least) strong evidence to back up the need for it.

Do you mean a policy for the teaching department or an acceptable use policy for use of IT? If the latter, try here: School Policies - Wiki

Question from a Smoothwall newcomer: is the solution back on page 1 still the same for G3 or is there a different/simpler method?

Might be worth its own thread tbh, similar things happening here.

We had very similar problems to this when some of our staff updated, and I solved it by adding http://mail.yimg.com/zz/combo to our RM Smartcache whitelist. The new Yahoo mail relies on some Javascript hosted on that domain, and it was being blocked by default. It sounds to me like the SWGfL filters may be doing the same/similar.

We have a couple of staff at my school with spouses who work there, so I hear quite a bit about them. They are a CC4 school and were afflicted by some of the performance problems it had for quite some time - hopefully they've got that straightened out now or it could make life interesting! They do seem to have quite a healthy IT budget though, which I am a little jealous of, so that's always a bonus. IT is certainly a priority there, and they've been in the news a couple of times over the last year as they are a study site for TI's 3D projectors: BBC News - 3D learning tools positive for pupils, says study (Disclosure: as I also work at an independent school in the same area, The Abbey are technically one of our competitors).

john, I checked personally this year and it is the photographers themselves doing the barcode scanning. We have 3 togs on the go at once, so I guess we'd have to supply 3 members of staff if we were doing it ourselves. Ours are always accompanied by their form or set tutor to keep the mucking about to a minimum, but I'm not sure I'd trust all of them to get it right either. Another option we've considered is having the form tutor hand each child an individual card on the way in with their barcode on so they can't scan the same one twice on the sheet, which I think is what happened a lot this year. It's not so much the misidentified ones that are a problem, but we have about 30 kids who have no photo at all because their code was associated with a duplicate of another child, rather than them being swapped.

Achandler is correct, Ergotron make quite a range of these. They are the towards the top end of the market though, in price but also in quality. I have a few of them and rate them very highly.

For years we've been using Tempest for our school photographs, but for the last two years we've been dissatisfied with the job they are doing, in particular the provision of JPEG photo thumbnails to load onto our MIS. This year's had more than 1 in 10 photos assigned to the wrong child as a result of poor record keeping by the photographers on the day, which is also making it difficult for us to provide reference numbers to parents who lost the order form they got on the day. Can anyone recommend a different school photography service covering the Thames Valley area that can not only provide MIS photos, but can also cope with the obviously highly taxing job of scanning the correct barcode on a class list?

I get third-party replacement remotes from Wallis UK - Specialist distributor of Remote Controls, Replacements and LCD/Plasma TV supports. I'm lucky in that we don't have many go walkies though.

Two quick questions: 1. What version of PASS are you on? 2. Have you run ProcMon as well as NetMon?

Let me clarify: I'm not saying they should bung Windows 8 Dev Preview on and ship it. That would be insane. I'm saying when they bring them to BETT I'd like to have a play with one that has Windows 8 on it. Also, the Dell product page that was returning 404 earlier has now been put up, including full specs: Latitude ST Tablet