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This year's BETT is generating plenty of new announcements from us, and here's yet another one. On Tuesday we announced the availability details for Windows MultiPoint Server 2011, which will be available from March this year. In a nutshell, Windows MultiPoint Server allows you to plug multiple screens...

So the budget cuts have arrived – and the pressure is on to save money in schools. And ICT leaders in schools around the country are going to need to hone their skills to justify the investments they are bidding for. Since late 2009 I’ve been working to look at how ICT can help save schools...

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...

Over the next few months, we are going to introduce some big changes to school licensing. It will make licensing simpler, and it will make it significantly cheaper for most schools in the UK. The big announcement of all of the detail will happen in January at BETT 2011 in London, but we're publishing...

The TechNet team create useful technical content for IT Managers, and their latest project is absolutely perfect for school network managers who are considering virtualisation projects ,or are wondering if they should be considering virtualisation projects. The reason that virtualisation is so important...

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...

Let me make it absolutely clear - I am not a virtualisation expert. But I have heard enough network managers in schools, colleges and universities talking about their virtualisation projects to know that it's very important to their ICT infrastructure - whether that's reducing cost, cutting carbon emissions...

I've just heard about another free event, on Friday 5th November, focused on cost saving with ICT. Although it isn't specifically education focused, I think that there will be a lot of readers that would appreciate a whole day full of network management tools ( oh, and a lot who could imagine nothing...

Over the last few months, I've been focusing on cost savings with ICT - you'll have seen many of the posts . But talking about saving money with ICT, and actually doing it, can be two different things. For example, knowing that you should be virtualising your servers to reduce cost is fine, but it would...

It's half-term. Although for most of the school it will come as a relief, as the corridors and classrooms empty rapidly, for many of you, it will be a busy week, as you finally get the chance to do some of those ICT projects that can't be done during term-time. And it is also a time to grab a chance...

After last week's post about saving money by printing less, I asked Gerald Haigh if he could have a chat with Ian Stuart at Islay High School, to get an update on their project, first reported in the Guardian a couple of years ago. They too were aiming to reduce their printing costs. Gerald picks up...

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...

Identifying ways that you can contribute to budget savings in your school is important to me. Which is why I've written 35 separate ICT Money Saving articles on this blog. The definitive article, Top ICT Money Saving Tips , identifies a series of strategies to save a secondary school up to £350...

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...

What happens when you want voting keypads for your students, but can’t afford the cost? Do you shop around to find suitable cheap voting keypads, or do you wait until you’ve saved enough money. Or do you look for alternative ways of achieving the same outcome? The reason that I ask those questions, is...

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...

Let’s start by getting the jokes out of the way. Yes, the ‘…for Dummies’ books are my kind of books. And, No, that’s not me on the front cover. Now, that’s over with… I’ve got my hands on 30 copies of the ‘Desktop Virtualisation for Dummies’ booklet to give away. And, let’s face it, desktop virtualisation...

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...

It’s not often that the TES reports on ICT – apart from a couple of pages tucked away towards the back of the magazine. But today they’ve splashed articles about ICT on the front page of the main newspaper and on the front page of the magazine. Unfortunately, in keeping with ‘good news is no news’, you...

One of the hidden costs of ICT in schools is the power usage of the equipment you’ve got around your school. I call it hidden because it is often not visible to the IT team, and the full energy costs of all of your servers and computers are simply part of the school’s overall electric bill. I’ve written...

A few weeks ago, on 18th June, the Government cut the Harnessing Technology Grant, in order to find capital funds to start Free Schools. I wrote a blog post at the time to summarise the information . Well, they’ve done it again – this time, when they announced the cancellation of the BSF...

A little earlier this month, I had the chance to have a long chat with Darren Madden, from Tameside local authority (or, as it should be properly known, Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council). Darren’s the leader of the Schools Technical Team ( you can find their website here ), which is a merry...

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...