speckytecky

Personally I'm using Maxthon as a good alternative to IE and Google Chrome both the latter have been a pain in one way or the other. In particular Chrome has been right odd of late; completely refusing to open some sites. Across the school though IE is the default and of late IE11 has been rolling out on updates - that said there have been a few incidents of the proxy not getting picked up by it.

Plug for CPLTD deserved as far as I'm concerned. I've been plodding through the treacle of trying to Migrate SWGfL Easymail to O365 For over a year now and Jon and particularly Andy Ratcliffe at CPLTD have shone the light that's making the whole thing more understandable to me at least. A well deserved thanks guys.

No experience of anything other than SIMS but I've been looking after it in schools for 10 years now and it not only does everything it's called upon to do but it is also kept sharp by the opposition and has had many great improvements. One thing that puzzles me though is why would it's owner the mighty a Capita hive off the Emerge part of it to Groupcall - puzzles me that does?

Given Lenovo a very decent try but for me they come no where near the build and value of Fujitsu.

Yep - just rolling out the Adobe FTE offer but so far squat feedback from either staff or students. They just haven't noticed. The only time they seem to notice something is when a convenient short cut disappears from their desktop or their USB connected printer fails to come up as 'default' because I've deliberately set a cheaper per copy central printer as default!

Thanks @witch - a superbly useful answer as ever, can't say I'm looking forward to the next couple of weeks as everything leading up to it and what I have read leave me feeling at best 'anxious' gulp!

Thanks @snagrat Ouch - you are right it's going to be a SWGfL job, that's not good to read. When you say you have had to fix - what's that involved?

After much effort myself and failure, I have bitten the bullet and opted for a paid for migration from our Grid provided e-mail system to Office 365. After considerable delays it's about to happen. My SLT now want me to carry out training on what the changes will mean - gulp! Anyone have an useful pointers for me please. I currently have an A2 account set up but apart from the Admin side of things haven't made much use of it - in particular I haven't been able to import my folders and messages to Outlook so don't even know what difference that's going to make.

Good thought Dave - I'll explore what our LEA recommend. However, with massive cuts at our restructured LEA I Have a feeling I know the answer already!

Yep - big problem that I'm sure keeps many of us awake. I'm certainly trying to find a way forward for this for my school. Currently our curriculum server gathers 'too much' cra* data that no one other than IT staff make any attempt to weed. That backs up to a LTO the tape being hopefully safe remote. The MIS backs up to a removable HD again the current removable device stored remote. Trying to work something better out. Especially trying to identify data that actually needs saving and backing up! Hopefully this thread will run and run. I've been in contact with one of the Edugeek backup sponsors to try and work out a plan but wasn't particularly happy with clarity nor sales technique. Still a high priority to do for me.

From a quick look it's under a grand for a full site licence.

I've prefixed this SIMS as we are running a SIMS MIS here. With the fixation many staff now have on mobile devices we are moving ever faster toward handhelds - specifically iPads. When it comes to taking registers etc we have tried but didn't get on well with Bromcom's Teachers Web Folder but are now exploring the Reggie App from Call Parents. Anyone using it please and able to offer feedback - the demo definitely looks good and seems to be pretty good bang for bucks as well.

Which grid are you served by - surely the support team there should be able to help?

What do Capita Support advise? Tel: 08448938000. I haven't encountered a problem yet that they haven't been able to resolve.

Recently a number of regular web sites - including Google Mail and calendar fail to load in any browser coming up with a message unable to load page. No problem prior to recent MS updates. We are behind the SWGfL filter and I have added the various pages as allows but still no joy. Any ideas please folks?

I'm a fellow sufferer @Bananas - did a lot of research when it first hit me in the early 1990s. Found a consultation with a Kenesiologist extremely useful; all seemed a bit strange but in essence relates illnesses to diet. There is a heap of anecdotal and factual info on the net pointing toward various additives. In particular the much less widely used, nowadays, synthetic sweetener E951 (aka Aspartame) which was first, it seems questionably approved in the early 1980s. Dr Betty Martini in Atlanta is a world authority on the stuff and in the UK Prof Erick Millstone at Sussex Uni is the lead. Worth looking at your diet and cutting out anything synthetic if nothing else. My 37 year old son when a teenager used to go hyper on just ordinary cola and my now 19 year old daughter had a mystery rash when she was two and a half which vanished when we cut additive laden fruit squash out of her diet.

We aren't big. 70 students 35 FTE staff.

I know not why Ben but apparently that's the way it goes nowadays. Being a pretty costly project we are having to get at least 3 quotes and it's the LAN (not actual Internet) that they are all telling us is now standard practice to use.

Thanks @MatthewL Yes, that's the plan with the data from the CCTV being recorded in the server room.

Our current Fibre to the cabinet connection gives us 35mbps which seems ok for our existing network which has a total of some 200 mixed Windows and Apple clients but rarely sees over 50 devices active on the network at any time. We are a smallish KS3 Special school and have a Ruckus wireless network with 6 access points. Again this seems pretty adequate for present needs. Come September it's planned that our phone system will be on the LAN plus we will be adding 50 student iPads and here's the crunch 28 networked CCTV cameras pushing our bandwidth requirement to so etching like 300mbps. Our existing SWGfL provided IP Range would no doubt also need to be added to I suppose. Any thoughts on the way to go would be much appreciated.

Am, so - now!

Thanks for reposting the Link @DaveP revoted ok for me.

I'll third that. Interesting to see the general sentiment of the replies is Windows 7 no mention of the horrid Windows 8! I'm a one mandate band in my school with some 200 client devices - no budget for replacement kit so recently I've spent a heap of time upgrading memory and OS from XP to Windows 7. Delighted to say XP is now history in our school.

Big problem for us native Cornish is we have in many cases been priced out of our County of birth. I just wonder how many true Cornish people there are left? This latest European gesture seems a hugely futile waste of money to me. It's a bit like the stupid regulations saying that Cornish pasties can't be called Cornish pasties unless they are made in Cornwall. Last I checked a so called cellophane big brand Cornish pasty it's list of ingredients contained all manner of additives. Add to that at least one founder / owner of a very well marketed Pasty company roots are the Indian Continent unless my eyes were deceiving me! Worst thing that happened to Cornwall was that road being carved down it's backbone.

Any chance of a numpty guide please @3s-gtech We are Server 2008 Standard & R2 here with W7 clients. Noticed recent updates to W7 have been automatically deploying IE11, we had blocked IE10 as it was not picking up the proxy consistently. Sadly that also seems to be the case with IE11 which has now deployed to toon many of our clients to make a roll back to IE9 viable.