christhetech

That was exactly what I thought at first, but made redundant without any pay-out suggests that they have some pretty serious financial issues. If they haven't already gone under, it would suggest they may be pretty close.

I got a call off our AV supplier yesterday telling me that he had received an email from one of the account managers telling him that the staff had been made redundant with immediate effect and were not being paid. That to me suggests they have ceased trading. However, Genee have since denied that they have gone bust and say that they are trading as normal, with the redundancies just part of a restructure and the news that they had ceased trading just down to their website being hacked. Doesn't sound good if they have made a load of staff redundant with no pay though.

Give Peter at Ware247 a call. He will be able to sort you out with a decent unit at a really good price. I've bought a few HP servers from him in the past & they have always been absolutely spot-on with price & service.

I had worked in both Local Authorities and the private sector before entering the Education sector, and received plenty of training. I hold ITIL Practitioner status, I am Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Accredited, did have Prince 2 Practitioner status, which has now expired and CCNA. ITIL & Prince 2 have come in quite handy for me over the years, as the courses themselves provide a really solid base for you to start from. It's quite good to be able to manage your projects in a recognised and completely structured manner and it looks really impressive when you start producing a series of Gant charts to take into meetings with you, the SLT here love Gant charts, even though they don't necessarily understand them. Prince 2 is not really something that you need in education, and I'm not sure exactly why MATs would be looking to send their IT staff down that route necessarily, but the basic principles of Prince 2 are really useful, so maybe they could focus on giving their staff a basic grounding in Prince 2 methodology, rather than going down the whole Practitioner status route, as that is just overkill really. Much of ITIL, Prince 2 and Lean Six Sigma are just general common sense really, so I would say that I am fully accredited in applying common sense to problems, with a Cisco certificate to prove that I have passed an exam in networks. I don't think that I have ever consciously used any of my Lean Six Sigma training, but the Prince 2 methodology gets used all of the time.

We do some of it in house, mainly the lighter stuff. For Interactive screen installs, we normally use All Office, who are the company that we tend to purchase most of our AV equipment from. There's no way I'm even attempting to fit 65" & 75" screens to a wall on my own, and if it was to be done in house, that's how it would end up. I let the reseller bring a couple of their guys in to do the banging and hanging. Their installations have always been carried out to a really high standard and they don't take the proverbial with their pricing either. They are installing screens around the country every day of the week, so they can get them up on the wall and working far quicker than I would. If I could rely on somebody to assist me with installing screens, I'd probably do it myself and save a little bit of cash, but as soon as there's heavy lifting involved, others always seem to find something else that they are far too busy with to assist.

FN-GM is absolutely spot on with his answer. The catering company don't need to know who will be eating the meals, just how many they need to prepare. If you are requesting 1,000 meals, with 10 of them Kosher, 50 Gluten Free, 30 Halal, and a further 30 for people with nut allergies, you have not given the catering company any personally identifiable data there, just the very basic information that they require in order to deliver the service for which they are being paid. They don't need to know any more than that. If you treat GDPR as information given on a NEED TO KNOW basis, you won't go too far wrong. Generally speaking, if somebody requires PII, they will have a specific reason for requiring the information. As long as you are not handing over more information than the requester actually NEEDS to perform their duty, then you are normally ok. I always challenge any request for PII and find out the reason for the request, what the requester is going to use the data for, how they will store it and for how long, how they intend to use it, and what they will do with the data when they are finished with it to ensure that I am not handing over any more than is absolutely required to complete the task for which it is intended and ensure that we have an absolute undertaking from the requester that any data provided will not be at risk of falling into the wrong hands.

I used to look after a couple of PRUs in a previous job. I can also vouch for Dalen (Top-Tec) as a suitable solution. Not the cheapest out there, but their enclosures are extremely robust and will withstand a massive amount of abuse. If you are looking to mount monitors behind a plastic or safety glass. You could also consider a kiosk type set-up. Just be aware that the inlaid stainless steel keyboards on kiosks tend not to fare so well when one of the little darlings decides to pour nail varnish or superglue into them.

We're quite similar here, no PO no order. However, if I am buying something of quite small value and I can find it on Amazon or similar cheaper than I can buy from one of regular suppliers, it's normally just a case of showing the price to the Business Manager and asking her to sign off my expense claim, so I can buy it on my own credit card and claim it back. I never use my own money without getting agreement to reclaim it back first though. Apart from the fact that I'd probably never get it back, it's also seen as deliberately circumventing the school's policy and is very much frowned upon. In order for me to order from a non-regular supplier, I have to demonstrate that there is a genuine cost saving to be made by not using one of our approved suppliers.

Patch Cables and sundries - Mills - Normally deal with Ro, who is a diamond Headphones - Normally use CPC - Their stuff does exactly what it says on the tin and normally competitively priced iPad Cases - either Amazon or GBM - If I'm after armoured cases, I'll normally stick with GBM and buy the Griffin cases PCs, Laptops - PCM or Future Visuals - depends what I'm buying and which one is offering the best deal at the time. Servers - Ware247 - Always found Peter really helpful and I've dealt with him for years. Software Licencing - Phoenix Software for most of it. Used Phoenix for as long as I can remember and they have always been super helpful. AV Equipment - Future Visuals - Tried other suppliers in the past, but have a really good relationship with these guys and they have always been straight up with me.

CPC do some Pulse Portable PA systems, that will do exactly what you are looking for. We got one a couple of years back, which we also use outside for Sports day. It was much cheaper than the Coomber equivalent and does exactly the same job.

They use less power than a conventional Board & projector set-up. They are more reliable. There is no changing of lamps. This is even more important when you have a few teachers who could never quite get the hang of shutting a projector down correctly and would cause the lamp to blow out prematurely. Nobody would ever admit to this, and they all seemed to fail to realise the cost of replacing lamps. It's not just the cost of purchasing the replacement lamp, but also the lost productivity when the board is out of action whilst awaiting somebody (me) to go across and replace it, and the time that it would take out of my day whilst I could have been attending to other IT issues around the school. The image qualty is far superior to a projector, and there is no fiddling around with focussing the image so that it is just right on the board. Inbuilt speakers on the screens tend to be reasonable enough in quality to reduce the requirement for external speakers. We still have soundbars, but I'm sure that we could have managed without them. The latest Promethean screens have a removable OPS unit, so if they are rolled out across the whole school (we don't do this BTW, as we are not 100% Promethean across the whole school), you could give each teacher an OPS, rather than a laptop which they can take from lesson to lesson and use with the screen to deliver lessons without the need for any other hardware. So overall, just a much neater and convenient solution all round, with very little effort to set up and maintain.

I'm not sure that I'm expecting to get 10 years use out of ours, although I'd certainly be expecting them to be easily outliving their 5 year warranty period. We've had no issues at all with the ones that we have and the teachers here wouldn't consider for one second going back to the old SmartBoard & projector set ups that we had previously. For me, just the saving in time, effort & money in no longer having to replace failed projector lamps makes the switch to screens worthwhile. If we get somewhere in the region of 7-8 years out of them, it will have been a worthwhile investment and they will have quite comfortably paid for themselves by that time. Any more than that will be a bonus.

Which just shows that the problems with Northern Rail are exactly the same issues that commuters are dealing with on a daily basis across the whole of the UK. When you consider the cost of rail travel, it's pretty sad to think that you are paying through the nose for a network that doesn't work.

It would be nice to just have a public transport network that actually works in this country. Then, and only then, I would actually start to believe that people would actually consider giving up their cars in favour of using alternative means of getting from A to B. The problems on the rail network alone are already well documented, with our local provider Northern Rail constantly cancelling services for all manner of ridiculous reasons to the point where somebody has created an app which publishes every single cancelled Northern Rail service (its called Northern Fail if anybody fancies a good laugh). The impact on businesses across the region is already apparent, even with a decent number of commuters voting with their feet and using their cars instead to get to work, so how would it work if they had no feasible alternative? It's years since I used a bus, and having spoken to a few colleagues who rely on buses to get them to work every day, I'm glad I don't have that torture every day. The local bus operators have quite a decent fleet of nice shiny new buses, all equipped with WiFi and USB ports to charge your phone etc, but they are still unreliable. Taxi to work? I'm not a lottery winner. I couldn't afford it! With the likes of Uber hiking up prices at peak times, you'd need pretty deep pockets to get to work and back every day. A car gives you an element of freedom that is just not replicated in the current public transport infrastructure. I think that we will probably see a steady increase in the use of Hybrid or electric powered vehicles, but there is still much that needs to be done to make them viable on a mass-market scale. There are electric charging points starting to pop up here and there, but certainly not enough to make owning an electric vehicle a viable option for everbody.

Do the teachers not use the interactive functions on the existing screens? If they do, they may be in for a bit of a surprise when it's not there any more.

We've still got a few really old HP laptops that are Windows 7. It was enough of a chore trying to get Windows 7 to actually work, so there's no way I'm chancing upgrading them to 10. I've stamped my feet about getting them replaced, but just get the usual "no money" answer. They will have to be replaced at some point, so the money is just going to have to be found from somewhere. Everything else is W10.

That's just it though. It's not problem solved, just creating a whole new bunch of issues. If the staff member has a school asset that they can take home to use, at least you have some control over the device and how it can be used. If they are using their own device at home, that's a whole different can of worms.

The current Promethean screens have a separate OPS unit, so you can choose to remove it if you do not want to use the onboard Android software. It also makes it a little easier to upgrade if required. If it became an issue in the future, I'm sure you would be able to just replace the OPS rather than the complete screen too.

We normally use the serial number of the device as the device name in SCCM. Makes life much easier when it comes to auditing etc.

I feel your pain! I had the unenviable task a number of years ago of sourcing a managed print service for a local authority. It all sounded simple enough and we kicked off the project with a fact finding exercise to ascertain just how many printers they actually had, since nobody knew for sure. It turned out that they had a lot ore than they realised, as the whole of Health and Social Care had their own individual desktop printers on every single desk in every office that they occupied and that accounted for just over 1,000 printers on it's own. Once I had a handle on the number of printers that we would be looking to remove, I had a better idea of how much printing the council were actually doing and we started a drive to reduce the amount of printing that each individual was producing, campaigns on the council intranet, posters in each office, cascading the message from Senior Council staff down the tree etc. The part that I wasn't made aware of initially, was the funding stream. I found out when I started to approach suppliers for pricing that the IT director had already successfully submitted a bid for Capital funding, without speaking to me and getting information about the different types of managed services available, costings etc. So... ...I'm now stuck with around £1.5m of Capital Budget to replace the council's entire printing fleet with nice shiny new MFDs on a managed print service, and a deadline. The amount that the council had put up was quite fair I thought, and £1.5m will get a pretty decent solution. WRONG! The problem that I had was that every vendor that I approached wanted to give me the devices on a five year lease, but because of the conditions of the Capital funding I had, the council HAD TO OWN THE DEVICES OUTRIGHT! So here I am, armed with my purchase order book and a list of requirements, with over a million pounds to hand over to some lucky sod, and nobody wanted to take it off me. In the end, the only vendor that was prepared to play ball with me was Xerox, and even then I had to beg them to take the council's money off me. We ended up with a sort of hybrid MPS, where the council were stumping up the MPS costs every quarter, but getting only half the benefits. Because they owned the devices outright, they only received a basic warranty with them. Had they leased the devices, as I had suggested, maintenance of the devices would have been the vendor's problem throughout the lease period, but because they owned them, as soon as the initial warranty period was up, they were liable for the cost of all repairs. I don't know what OKI are like, but I know that one of our existing suppliers has recently partnered with OKI to offer MPS, as our account manager asked me whether we would consider MPS in the future. If it's done correctly, there are some real benefits to be had from MPS, just don't ever try to purchase the devices outright, as it's an absolute nightmare! The LA that I worked with on the Xerox MPS let me do it my way second time around and once the original 5 year deal was up. The old IT director had retired and had been replaced with somebody with a modicum of common sense, who asked for the information first and they now have LEASED Xerox devices on a 5 year MPS, with lower "per-click" charges than they were paying previously and no maintenance issues. They are now very happy with MPS.

Is the decision not to go for another ActivPanel purely based on cost, or is there another reason for not sticking to Promethean, especially as you intend to use ActivInspire. We had a similar sort of situation here last year, when it was decided that we would be replacing the last batch of old Smartboards and projectors with Interactive Screens. We had already covered a large chunk of the school with Promethean ActivPanels, so I initially assumed that we would just get another bunch of those and have them throughout. Unfortunately, the SLT had other ideas and decided that they wanted to see what else was available first, so I insisted that if they were going to buy something different, that some of the more demanding teaching staff should sit in on a few demos, and surprisingly they agreed. I asked our regular AV supplier to arrange some demos and he duly obliged, bringing in a number of different vendors, including Promethean, to demonstrate their current offerings. I asked the teachers involved to critique each offering, so that I could present a report back to SLT and we could come to a decision, fully expecting the Promethean panels to come out on top. In the end, the teachers decided that they liked the 4K Genee screens the best, and this along with the fact that they were a couple of hundred pounds each cheaper than the equivalent ActivPanel, led to us ordering and installing these over the summer holiday and the teachers absolutely love them. I do kinda wish that I had stamped my feet a little harder and demanded that we got Promethean though, as it would have made my life a little easier. We were getting rid of the Smartboards, and binning off Smart notebook at the same time, as I don't particularly care for Smart's current licensing model. Since we had no intention of even considering Smart Panels, the cost of licensing alone would have been horrific. The Genee screens come with Spark II and ProjectFlow pre-installed, and any content created using Smart Notebook works absolutely fine with Spark II. ProjectFlow is similar to Promethean's ClassFlow software, although I don't think it's quite as good, but that's just my opinion. Had we been replacing just one screen though, I would have definitely insisted on sticking with Promethean.

Oops - double post!

I've used PCM a couple of times and they were quite keen with pricing and I had no complaints at all with the service. Our old Misco account manager, Richard Jones, was snapped up by PCM when Misco went under, so I already had a really good working relationship with him and he already knew what kit we had been purchasing from Misco, so it was a really simple transition. I've also used our AV supplier, http://www.futurevisuals.co.uk, a few times too. They tend to be reasonably priced and also offer the option of "buy-back" on old equipment. On the occasions where we have used Future Visuals, we have taken the HDDs out of a few really old, crusty PCs and got a little bit of cash back towards the purchase of new kit. I normally wipe the HDDs, remove them and put them into the pile for disposal, which we use Recycle IT for. Recycle IT will give you cash back on old equipment too, so I will normally check first with them to see if they will offer a better price for our old kit than Future Visuals have offered. FV will also provide your quotation with their "buy-back" price included as a discount on your new equipment, so you just pay the balance between the buy-back price and the price of your new kit.

Still sounds quite steep to me. For 14 screens, you should be getting quite a healthy discount from the manufacturer, even if you are not replacing all 14 at once. Whether you are replacing all in one hit or in a couple of phases, they will still be selling the same amount of hardware, so should be willing to budge a little on price to secure the deal.

£2,800 each is very steep indeed for interactive screens, especially if you are looking to replace as many as 14! We got pricing from a range of manufacturers before getting our screens in and none of them were anywhere near that price.