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Charteris Microsoft technologies case study The Edinburgh Academy may be nearly 200 years old, but its use of technology is completely up-to-date. With support from Charteris, this prestigious independent school for boys and girls has implemented the latest Microsoft desktop and server operating systems...

Great for academic institutions that are ready to take advantage of the cloud. Office 365 offers free email, instant messaging, group video and voice chat, and online document viewing and editing. We’ve got a great video that shows how Office 365 for education has enabled the University of Massachusetts...

Contribution from freelance writer, Gerald Haigh.   Gerald writes regularly for the Microsoft UK Education blogs.   I graduated from the Open University , I’m proud to say, as a member of the very first intake – the “Class of ‘71”. Earlier this Summer we were royally treated to a celebration...

Office Communications Server (OCS) is finding new friends across the educational spectrum – aka Microsoft Lync. We’re hearing good things about it from the University of Plymouth , for example, where it’s used by academics to keep in touch with students away on work placements across the UK and beyond...

As we talk about cost saving we keep coming back to server virtualisation. I don’t feel the need to make any excuse for that, because as so many schools have discovered not only does it provide substantial cost savings – and we all know how important that is – but it can also provide a better and more...

The Microsoft IT team publish case studies of how we've used our own products within our own infrastructure - sharing their real-life experiences. This month there's a case study about the way that we've implemented the security features in Windows Server 2008 R2, along with Windows 7 on the desktop...

Last week I spoke to a group of schools about money saving strategies ( based on this info ), and I do plan to shortly record the whole presentation, so that I can share it. But when I got to the bit about making sure that you do something about desktop power savings, there were a few in the audience...

How much does your school spend on reprographics - paper, toner, printers, photocopiers, and the staff to run them and keep them running? I'm sure that the average secondary school is spending more on reprographics than they do on their whole ICT budget. Mike Herrity, at Twynham School, found out his...

Dimension Data are running an event here at Microsoft HQ on 3rd November, which will provide practical steps to saving money with ICT. So the budget cuts have arrived – and it appears that for the moment, the biggest cuts are in schools’ capital budgets. Firstly we saw the Harnessing Technology...

I’m meeting up with the South West Grid for Learning (SWGfL) later this week. It seems like being a Regional Broadband Consortia is a pretty tough gig these days, what with the DfE cutting the capital budgets in the Harnessing Technology Grant , and some people misunderstanding that all they do is provide...

We seem to be having a run of good luck with UK schools being held up as worldwide examples of good practice at the moment – with a number of case studies appearing on the global Microsoft website – at www.microsoft.com/casestudies . The latest is the case study of the use of Office 2010 by Philip Morant...

If you’re a regular blog reader, you’ll know that I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about cost saving – and the ways that your ICT could contribute to saving your school money. With the pressure on school budgets, and the big investment made in ICT over the last decade, then I think...

I’ve been writing quite a bit about examples of schools virtualising their servers, especially as it is one way to significantly reduce your school budgets ( Wootton Basset School , West Hatch School , Neville Lovett School and Lodge Park Technology College are all saving a minimum of £10,000 a year...

We have a team, called Microsoft Global Foundation Services , who have the job of building clouds. Or at least, building ‘the Cloud’ – they design, build, run and support our global data centres which are at the hub of all of our cloud services. In Europe, we have one in Ireland and...

At the end of 2009, I worked with a group of schools, and with Gerald Haigh (an ex-head teacher and educational writer) to create the Money Saving ICT Tips , which was used for a presentation at the BETT 2010 show, and also for a series of later case studies looking at the numbers in more detail. The...

Last year we worked with the DCSF and a group of schools to record their stories of parental engagement, and what they were doing to build a stronger relationship with parents in their school community. As well as the written case studies on three secondary schools ( Blatchington Mill School , Monkseaton...

I was at Capita’s SIMS Annual Conference in Nottingham in June, talking about the future of technology, and how it will impact the workplace over the next decade. I’ve been invited to give this presentation at a wide range of conferences this summer, partly because it is one way of thinking about the...

Well you can be sure that up and down the country, the question “ What do we do now? ” has been asked in lots of schools and local authorities since the DfE announced the end of the BSF programme. I’ve heard lots of different opinions on the future in the last two weeks ( and have even seen some people...

After Wednesday’s IT cost saving story, of Neville Lovett Community School in Hampshire saving £23,000 , it seemed timely to share one more example of education IT savings – from West Hatch High School in Essex. Alan Richards, the Information Systems Manager at the school, has been...

In the Top Money Saving Tips post series, I wrote about various education IT cost savings – things that could be done to reduce your school IT budget, or to use IT to save money in other areas of the school budget. In all I described 14 tips, and calculated a potential cost saving over three years...

If you are responsible for a large IT system, then one of the biggest challenges you face is the huge pressure from internal and external forces for constant change – and also to reduce your budgets. The Microsoft Chief Information Officer Tony Scott is no different. I recommend taking ten minutes to...

I’ve just finished reading a story in Computing about the Co-op saving money on IT , when they cut their Microsoft licensing bills by at least £1.5 million, by changing the way that they implemented technology. Having written so much about cost-saving recently (including the “ Stop buying so much software...

Virtualisation again. Just to remind you if you’re still not up with it, virtualisation is shorthand for replacing your bank of network servers with just a few, more powerful ones, each housing a number of virtual servers. And why has it suddenly become a talking point? Because although the principle...

The Microsoft worldwide case studies site always throws up some interesting things to read. But a couple of weeks ago I noticed that a new case study of a UK school had been published by our services team, in partnership with Dell. It’s from Lodge Park Technology College, in Northants, and tells the...

One of the easiest ways to see what is possible is to look at what other schools have done. We publish lots of 'case studies' on our worldwide website, and I had a quick look to see how many examples are there for UK Education institutions. The Microsoft Worldwide Case Studies database is where all of...