Posts by Bendy 11 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010
Schools seem to be doing this quite well - A small choice of Information Management Systems actually helps us as data can be transferred to other schools/LA's/Government (there is of course the issue of vendor lock in).
Most schools IT systems are then managed on a local authority or individual scale.
I don't see why hospitals can't take this sort of approach if they had the standards
The problem is it's insourcing, and the beancounter can't see past the wages.....
Do you think the Grannie who just bought an iPad knows anything of the HTML5 war?
No, the Grannie wonders why a Lego brick has replaced the content on lots of web pages, why here favourite website is missing half of it's content and what is this Adobe Flash thing?
Take it from me, I have both an iPad and a Grannie and have tried them together.
Whilst forcing Standards upon people is sometimes the only way to change luddites, If it's at the cost of a large percentage of the web's content not working it's not a good option and will only result in lots of returns of the product.
What is iPad? A way of removing £700 quid from people with waaaaaay too much money.
I want a Grannie Icon please.
More importantly this is how you upgrade Ubuntu.
* Click upgrade.
* Carry on working.
* At some point later you should notice it says upgrade finished.
* I would suggest a reboot (not necessarily needed).
Ever done that 400 times? There is a lot of difference in managing your own machine and a network. I can save at least 3 days of my time by installing windows and using WDS, that in itself will pay for 12 Windows licences.
Add the 6,000 new software installs, 18,000 Software Updates and god knows how many Updates and you may find that Windows does in some ways pay for itself with its management tools.
I'd love it if Open Office became a standard though!
Seriously though the FOSS crowd should stop pushing there wares until they have mature management tools to lock down desktops.
'We also now have School IT staff doing MORE paper work and research into computers, best prices and so on.'
Bo****ks, We have always had to do this (If your talking about dedicated IT Staff), because Becta and LA's didn't and don't. There were frameworks for purchasing, but these have been ignored by LA's and by the majority of Schools.
To the open source crowd: make your products manageable to the scale that we need in school and I'll use your products! How many corporations use Linux on the desktop? - You are getting there but not nearly fast enough - Smoothwall is a brilliant example of it done correctly.
To the Government: Make the prefered suppliers of MIS systems stop hard coding and assuming that MS Office is on every machine.
A greater and much easier Saving would be made if a few local Schools got together and purchased machines once a year.
I don't think Crowne's £220k wage was ever justifiable. And if you look at the payscales on the Becta website they are all pretty disgusting for the amount of work they actually do.
Becta did make some good frameworks, but as they were ignored they have made no difference, each supplier/school has there own standards, and that mess is due to continue for some time. If they had been enforced we wouldn't be where we are now.
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