The TechNet site has a growing series of Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides for all kinds of areas – virtualisation, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server, Online Services and the Optimised Desktop.

The one that jumped out as me was the IPD Guide for DirectAccess in Windows 7. This is especially useful in colleges, where you have staff who are as likely to need access to your network from home as they are in college (especially if you have a large number of part time staff).

With DirectAccess, your users can have access to your college network without having to use a VPN or Remote Access setup – whenever they have access to the internet from their college laptop, they have access to your network. To get this level of convenience  without compromising security means that you need to setup your network carefully, and the IPD guide is designed to help with that.

The Infrastructure Planning and Design series guide for DirectAccess provides actionable guidance for designing a DirectAccess infrastructure. The guide’s easy-to-follow, four-step process gives a straightforward explanation of the infrastructure required for clients to be connected from the Internet to resources on the corporate network, whether or not the organization has begun deploying IPv6.

You can download the Direct Access Guide here

On the same subject, you may find the IPD Guide for Network Access Protection useful too, as it talks you through the ways that you can allow students and staff to connect their own laptops to your network without compromising security. In an environment where students are increasingly arriving with their own laptop, it allows you to save money and improve capabilities.

Certainly the first in the UK and Europe, South East Essex College went for a complete roll-out of Windows 7 for the start of term in September, making it the biggest educational user of Windows 7 at the start of term.They moved everything together – all of their workstations moved from Windows XP and their servers moved from Windows Server 2003 – to give all of their 950 staff and 13,000 students a new technology experience as they came back in from the summer break.

You can read more about their upgrade in this case study, published by the Microsoft partner they worked with – Design & Management Systems (DMS) – who are a Microsoft Gold Certified partner.

I’m sure this list is out on the web somewhere, but just in case you’ve not seen it in this easy-to-read format before, below is my list of the features of each version of Windows 7. I think this will help you to work out which one is right for your school:

• Windows 7 Home Premium is the retail version. It doesn’t allow network login (called Domain Join), so it’s unsuitable for college-based computers, and unlikely to be useful for student laptops owned by the college, unless you don’t plan to manage them or connect them up to your network except via the web. It is also unable to run XP Mode, which might be useful for some of your older software.
  And it’s probably the one on laptops your staff/students buy themselves.
  
• Windows 7 Professional is the minimum version you’ll need in-college as it has network domain join and XP Mode.
  
• Windows 7 Enterprise is the right version if you believe that you should be encrypting any laptops used by staff (this is something I believe strongly!), because it comes with BitLocker and BitLocker To Go. And in addition it also adds AppLocker – which you may want on all of your devices too.
  
• Windows 7 Ultimate is in the table below for completeness, but you are only likely to get this version if you buy it in a retail store with it pre-installed (which is an expensive way to get the functionality in Enterprise or Professional edition)

See below the table for my “How to Buy Windows 7” guide

What features are in which version of Windows 7?

How to buy Windows 7 for your college

So now you’ve worked out which version you want, you may want to know the best way to buy the right version!

Existing computers

• For any existing computers running any version of Windows XP or Windows Vista, you are probably already covered for the upgrades to Windows 7 Enterprise on your Campus Agreement. If you don’t have a Campus Agreement, or you need to buy some extras for staff laptops, you can buy a Windows 7 upgrade on a Select licence. If it’s basic Select, the upgrade is to Windows 7 Professional, with the Software Assurance option, you’ll get Windows 7 Enterprise.

New computers

• For Professional edition, you can either buy a new PC with it pre-installed, or buy a PC with Windows 7 Home Premium, and then add an upgrade (again, if you have a Campus Agreement this upgrade will already be included in it for you).
• For Enterprise edition, the best way is to buy a new PC with Windows 7 Home Premium, and then upgrade via your Campus Agreement , or with the Select licence plus Software Assurance (which gives you the right to keep upgrading, and adds the Enterprise features)

Here’s some links to find out more about Campus Agreement, Select Licences and Software Assurance.

Your existing Microsoft partner will be able to give you a quote. I’ve just checked on the Pugh site*, and they quote £43 for a Select Windows 7 Professional upgrade.

* Pugh is one of our partners, but there are plenty of others. You can find them all on our website

When I wrote about the Brighstarr “How to build rich and interactive websites for education” event being held on 4th November, it was in advance of the new Saïd Business School website actually going live. Which meant he couldn’t point to what had been done.

Now however, you can visit the website, on the University of Oxford domain, at http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/Pages/default.aspx. I’m really impressed with the way that they have managed to squeeze so much content in, with very easy navigation.

It’s definitely worth a visit if you are thinking of pepping up your own website. And perhaps putting time aside to visit the event in London, to meet the minds behind it.

Trinity Expert Systems, one of our Gold Certified Partners, is running a free Windows 7 Preview Workshop next Thursday, 15th October. Some colleges have already started deploying Windows 7 widely, and I’m sure that many of you will be evaluating it even before it’s official launch on 22nd October.

There’ll be experts at the workshop from both Trinity and Microsoft, and it runs for the whole afternoon – starting at 12:30 and running through until 4:30.

The agenda is packed into the afternoon, so you can definitely be sure that you’ll leave with a brainfull of information.

12:30 Arrival & Coffee
12:45 Desktop O/S Strategy and Vision
1:15 Lunch
1:45 New Features
2:15 Planning and Assessment Strategies
2:45 Coffee Break
3:00 Deployment Strategies
3:45 Windows 7 ‘Hands On’
4:15 Trinity Windows 7 Assessment Days
4:30 Close

You can find out more, and book your attendance on Trinity’s website

You know what it’s like – you have a brilliant plan, and then something gets in the way. And this term, we’d hatched a brilliant plan to launch our Ultimate Steal offer on the International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Which is why we went with a nice Piratey theme for the launch. Oh, how we were going to laugh – with plenty of piratey jokes, piratey blog posts and other such sea-shanty-silliness. (We’d done our homework on the UK Yarr site, international talklikeapirate.com and the facebook group)

But ‘twas all blown to smithereens when ITLAP day was a Saturday. “Shiver me timbers!” said the crew of the vessel HMS Office, “We can’t be launching a campaign on the high seas on a Saturday.” And no amount of treasure could change their course. And so it quietly slipped out of port on the 17th September instead, and sailed into the wide blue yonder.

But it did at least get going – and we launched the Ultimate Steal offer of Office Ultimate 2007 for £38.95 - only available to students and staff with a .ac.uk email address. And this year, it will stay available permanently, not as a short-term offer

But what was even better is that our friends on HMS Windows also set sail on a Windows 7 offer for staff and students, with a special price of £29.99 until the end of December.

You can get both offers on our website at www.ultimatesteal.co.uk

ps if you want to tell your staff and students about it, there’s a sample email here, and there are some less piratical graphics on this SkyDrive link.

The University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School recently asked BrightStarr, one of our education partners, to create a website that would help it promote its courses and research. The Business School wanted a rich and engaging website that would capture imagination and make it easier to communicate with stakeholders.

By building the site in Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007, not only does the Business School get a functionally rich internet site, the powerful collaboration and document management features in SharePoint support the complex information needs of administration and research workers.

BrightStarr are hosting a seminar in our offices in central London, in partnership with speakers from the Saïd Business School, Playgroup and from Microsoft (including my trusty colleague Dominic Watts, our Higher Education Business Manager) on 4 November 2009 to demonstrate how you can use SharePoint to build a great looking and functionally rich content managed website that will help you connect with students and staff, and support the work of research teams.

Judging by their funky website design, it should be an interesting and informative session, with real world examples of SharePoint as a content management system, and detail on what has been achieved at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School.

The event starts at 10:00 and finishes at lunchtime, so it leaves plenty of time to travel up/down/across to London on the 4th.

To find out more, and to book your place, pop over to BrightStarr’s website.

Mike Herrity, at Twynham School, is hosting a meeting for schools and colleges who have adopted Windows 7, to allow early adopters to share their experiences, and the lessons that have been learnt over the last 5 weeks since it was released for Volume Licence customers.

Instead of having to head down to the south coast, I’ve offered to provide a meeting room here in Reading, at the Microsoft Campus, on Wednesday 7th October.

There’s space for 20 people available, so if you’d like to attend, zip over to Mike’s excellent blog, or just drop Mike an email. He’s managing the attendee list, I’m just providing the room and the free lunch!

If you have started deploying Windows 7, this is going to be a valuable day, and I am pretty sure it will save you more than a day of your time in learning from other people’s experiences.

However, if you haven’t started deploying Windows 7 yet, then Mike will be aiming to write up lessons from the day to share with others, so keep an eye on this blog later for when it’s published.

I hope that you’ve already heard about the Live@edu service, which provides a free, hosted email service for your students, based on Exchange 2010. It allows you to provide each learner with a free 10GB inbox as well as an additional 25GB of online storage space. Over the last couple of years, 10% of UK colleges have implemented it, along with a large number of universities.

One of the challenges for colleges is to provide an effective communication method to all of their students without breaking the bank – as an example, Brockenhurst have 3,000 sixth form students, and 9,000 adult learners to provide a service for. The end result is that either the service is limited (eg very small mailboxes) or expensive to run – which means that in many cases students either don’t have, or don’t use, a college email account.

What Brockenhurst have seen is that student use of their email service has gone from almost none to over 70% of students using it with anytime, anywhere access. And the college and students benefit from the wider collaboration that has resulted from the service.

Robin Gadd, who’s the college Head of Information and Systems Development, put it bluntly:

Providing technology that reflects what students use socially increases their perception of the college as a modern educational institution.

You can read the full case study on our worldwide case studies website

You may also appreciate reading what the University of Aberdeen have done too

Earlier last week PC Pro ran an article stating that Windows 7 is “already used on 1% of PCs”. This was lifted from some Internet metrics measured by NetApplications. It’s easy to do – each time you visit a website, your browser tells the website what version it is, and what operating system it is running on.

Given the buzz this summer about Windows 7, I thought I’d have a quick look at the stats for this blog. And the answer surprised me. (Or at least it did once I’d learned from Wikipedia that Windows 7 reports itself as Windows NT 6.1)

What this table shows is the last 2,000 visitors to the blog – and 1 in 8 are running Windows 7!

Now I reckon that this is partly because the readers are more technical, and there’s been quite a buzz about Windows 7 – and lots of early deployments in education. Given that there have already been half a dozen schools who’ve told me they’ve already rolled out Windows 7 to all their desktops, and plenty of early adopters in colleges and universities, perhaps Windows 7 is going to overtake even Windows 95 in it’s speed of adoption.

I was genuinely surprised at what I saw. Are you?