Welcome to our Autumn ICT Newsletter

Hello and welcome back to another year. Hopefully you are all fully rested and ready for the new challenges that the new term will bring. We have been working hard over the summer to improve the support we can offer to you. As always if you have any questions please feel free to get in touch with us.
New school contract options are now available!
Just before the end of last term, we emailed all our existing schools with an option to switch to our new school remote support contract. We have been looking for ways to improve our service to schools and improve the time from a fault being logged in the logbook to the resolution.

We are now offering a new contract where schools can call our help desk and log a fault directly with our help team. Any member of staff can do this by either email or calling and we will log a ticket and work on the fault remotely. If it is deemed that a visit is required to resolve the issue, then we will send out an engineer. If this is something that would benefit your school, get in contact with us to switch.

What are offline files? Why are they important?
They are a copy of your data that resides on your laptop/PC and will periodically sync with the server.

Offline files make it possible for you to take your laptops home and still access your My Documents and Desktop. When you return to school any changed data will sync with the server so that your data is backed up or accessible from another laptop/PC.

Sometimes however, the offline files can run into problems and needs to have some manual intervention for the Sync Client to know what to do with the data. You may notice a change in the offline files sync client icon on your task bar, usually it will look like the image to the right.
If for any reason the icon has an exclamation, then there is an issue with your offline files and you will need to act, as potentially the data has stopped syncing and is no longer being backed up on the server.

We are currently looking into an automatic alert should the offline files fail, but this is a work in progress and not yet accomplished. If you have any concerns, please log a ticket either in your logbook or if you are on our new school contract email or call us.

Backup, backup, backup!
The backup on the server is monitored by our remote monitoring software. This is a part of the school's engineer checks every visit. Alternatively, if on our remote contract, this is scheduled into your remote maintenance schedule. But what would happen if the backup drive failed whilst performing a full server restore? How long ago was it since you changed the backup drives?

We recommend that you rotate the backup drives daily so that if one drive fails then the next usable set of data would be from the previous backup drive.
New! NCI EdTech Exchange
We are planning to setup after school drop in sessions with any IT leads/ Coordinators from our schools. These sessions will be informal events that can be used as an open forum to discuss any matter relating to IT within your school or even some basic training. As these sessions progress we would like to introduce some brief product demos so if there is anything that you would like to see please let us know.

We cover a large area and require easy to get to venues, perhaps a school would like to volunteer a room for us to use, we will provide the tea and coffee! Please get in touch if you would like to find out more information.