Happy New Beer!

Well, a belated one.  The season of revelry is long forgotten and now it's down to business, sadly!



The return to work has been unbelievably busy but now that we're a few weeks in I can report on the progress of our Dell XPS-12 rollout.

Firstly, I'm happy that I actually have something to report.  Last year I gave Dell something of a hard time for being hapless with their model lineup, delivery of demo machines and poorly communicated information.  I'm happy to say they've redeemed themselves with delivery of these machines.  The turnaround was roughly 6 weeks between ordering and delivery including imaging by our local reseller.  Not bad at all for 80 machines over the Christmas period, particularly when you consider these models are only a couple of months new themselves.

So, delivery was a bit of a win for us.  I also have to say that imaging was as well, once we knew what to expect.  In having all our machines rolled out with our own software image, we hit a few problems initially (while preparing the master image machine), but it seems the process of duplicating that image was almost identical to Windows 7 machines.

Probably the biggest issue we hit was with getting sysprep to run on the master machine prior to committing it to be duplicated.  A word of warning to anyone else needing to do this - whatever you do, don't update the system Metro apps (video, people, news etc.) before sysprepping.  We had to start again from scratch after doing this, as it completely breaks sysprep.

Other issues we found were to do with customisations (like customising the Start Screen for users), we found ways around all of them with a bit of Googling, and they translated well into deployment en masse.

So the machines are here and we've handed some of them to teachers.  Now we wait to see what the reaction to them, and Windows 8 will be!  In the meantime we have to get prepared for the coming year and our new BYOD'ers!

Pre-Christmas Update

Well, a little while has passed since my last update and a fair amount has happened.  So much so that it's hard to detail it all here.  For that reason I'm going to dot-point list the goings-on for the last month and a half.

- it turns out Dell salespeople wouldn't know an active stylus from an active volcano

• The big news is that we've chosen the Dell XPS-12 as our staff computer for 2013.  Samsung couldn't produce a decent machine in time (or at all) and all the other options were either problematic in some way or just plain awful.  It turns our however that there is no support for an active stylus with this machine, so we're going to have to go without or use a capacitive stylus (it turns out Dell salespeople wouldn't know an active stylus from an active volcano anyway).  A shame, but not the end of the world.  The upside is that the XPS-12 is a really nice piece of kit, it's very fast, light and small.  Our teachers seemed quite impressed with it when we demoed it to them.  So we're quietly confident that we've chosen the right device considering the options.  Now we just have to get them delivered on time and get the staff used to Windows 8!


• We'd already decided we weren't interested in the Dell XT3, but it's worth noting here that Dell shipped us a demo that was not only heavily used, but broken.  It was also an awful clunky looking machine.  It's probably best if they don't keep that line going.


• We've been in communication with our parents about the plans to run two new programs next year.  Year 11's and 12's will need to supply their own computer next year, and year 7's will have a hybrid Windows 8 tablet supplied to them.  Parents of 11 and 12 students have been told they can supply a range of devices, basically anything that's a computer or a 10" and above tablet.  We'll set them up with network access at the beginning of the year, as well as some other tips and information.


• Our iPad group will continue into 2013.  I mention this because it's relevant as I was recently accused of being anti-iPad by an influential individual associated with the school.  I find this interesting because we run an iPad program with one particular group of students, and it was my interest in the iPad that got it going in the first place (I have two iPads myself).  Rather than unsettling that group by making changes, they'll keep plugging away with their iPads into next year.  The program was a trial, and it hasn't exactly set the world on fire, but it's not terrible either.  I quite like the idea of a multi-platform approach, as long as it doesn't put to much strain on the teachers or the I.T. Department.


• Finally, after much in the way of shenanigans, we've decided on a new Learning Management System (LMS).  Originally the decision was made to delay this decision until sometime in the future, however after coming to their senses the College leadership went with the recommendation of their 1:1 Working Party (or sub-group thereof) to implement the Scholaris LMS.  This is a widely used platform run on Sharepoint which can integrate well with our existing student data systems, making it something of a logical choice.  The Working Party went to great lengths to assess varying LMS options, create a comparison matrix of features and justify their preferences.  I'm quite glad that the recommendation was taken onboard, I only wish it had been immediate, rather than second-guessing the skilled and experienced people who arrived at said recommendation.

I think that's it, now it's off for a nice and hopefully relaxing Christmas break.  I say hopefully relaxing, because with the usual workload plus a 1:1 program, BYOD program, staff tablet rollout and a new LMS 2013 is going to be a HUGE year.

Dell Roadshow II - Try Harder

And try harder they have, but still not hard enough.

I got to attend yet another Dell Roadshow where they're showing off their Windows 8 devices again.  This time they actually had the newly released XPS-12.  I was able to play with it and ask all the hard questions about the supposed support for pen input. They tell me it will support an active digitiser, like the one on the Latitude 10.  I'll believe it when I see it.  Other than that, aside from being a little expensive the XPS-12 is a neat device.  It's robust and manages to pack that swivel screen into a package much the same size as the slimmest Ultrabooks.  Dell tell us that the swivel mechanism had been tested for 20,000 continuous repetitions and kept on going past that, and looking at it, I can believe that.

Other than that, Dell showed how expertly they've misunderstood Windows 8.  They have a couple of "companion" tablet offerings, The Latitude 10, based on Windows 8 running an Intel Atom processor, and the Windows RT based XPS 10, on Arm.  They've chosen to offer the latter with a keyboard dock and the former without.  This makes no sense.  Of the two, if I want one to be a primarily touch based experience with an onscreen keyboard, it's the RT device, as I'm going to be using Metro apps and they're made with touch in mind.  My Atom based tablet however can run legacy Windows software, which will benefit greatly from more traditional input methods.  So as you can see, they've got it backwards.  Way to go Dell!

[caption id="attachment_151" align="aligncenter" width="604"] Dell's new Windows 8 tablets, shown side-by-side. XPS-12 on the left and Latitude 10 on the right.[/caption]

Finally, the saga of the XT3 demo unit continues.  Dell have apparently sourced one for me, but the nice man at the Dell Roadshow informs me that they don't support it running Windows 8 and don't plan to.  In fact, they seem to think it and any successors may not have a future as a device anyway, so we can just about can that line of inquiry right now.

Some doors close, some more open (but not enough)!

So the search for a Windows 8 based computer continues.  The OS launch has been and gone, and it’s now early November.  I’ve had some small wins, like making a contact at Samsung, who was quite positive about the likelihood of them being able to provide enterprise-grade local support for their upcoming products.

We’ve also been let down on a few occasions though.  The most recent being that I’ve received confirmation that the Lenovo X230T will not be supported running Windows 8.  So that’s off the table.  Also off the table are the offerings from Fujitsu and Toshiba, for reasons I’m about to cover.  The result of this though, is that the field is much more narrow than it was.  With Lenovo, Fujitsu and Toshiba out, that leaves Dell, Acer, HP and Samsung.  Acer don’t really have anything suitable and neither do HP, so it remains to be seen whether Dell or Samsung can produce something.  I’ll be meeting with Dell in a couple of days to find out about their two possible machines, and Samsung are showing some promise, although I have my reservations about their Ativ Pro running a ludicrous 1080p resolution on an 11” display.

That’s enough looking forward, lets look back at what went wrong with the Toshiba and Fujitsu machines.  I’ll start with the Toshiba, it’s problems are basically self-explanatory.

The tablet we received was the M930, which comes with a multi-touch display, a stylus, a core i5 and a range of connectivity options.  On paper this unit looks good, but as soon as you take it out of the box it begs the question “WTF?”

[gallery ids="37,38,39"]

then your lead balloon is going down like it was filled with Sulphur Hexafluoride.

Probably the most bizarre aspect of this device is the lack of a mouse.  Oh wait, there is a mouse, it's just that it's possibly the most pointless token effort imaginable.  In my experience, users aren't so keen on ye olde pointing stick, a technology that some manufacturers still persist with for various misguided reasons.  I could only assume that if users don't care for the pointing stick, then having it built into the right-hand bezel of the keyboard with sideways mouse buttons is going to go down like a lead balloon.  Then if you concede that those sideways mouse buttons are what most would consider upside-down (that is, most of our users initially, and wrongly assumed the top button is left-click and the bottom is right-click), then your lead balloon is going down like it was filled with Sulphur Hexafluoride.

That's not the only problem either.  The device converts from tablet to pseudo-laptop using a hinged slider mechanism.  The mechanism is not only quite stiff and difficult to use, it also makes the most awful noise you've ever heard.  When I first used the hinge to convert the device everyone else in the office turned to look at what I was doing, with looks on their faces that said "what are you doing to that poor computer?"

Other than that, the machine was fine, it was quite speedy, the touchscreen was responsive and the keyboard was decent, but none of that mattered.  After seeing the two flaws mentioned above we spent some time laughing about this clownputer, put it back in the box and returned it.

Okay, so what was wrong with the Fujitsu then?  The Q702 (pictured below) also looked good on paper, and even had a proper touchpad.  It's core i5 was fast enough, and with the dockable keyboard containing a second battery it got great battery life.  It even looks as neat in person as it does in the promotional material.

The big issue with this machine was the touchscreen.  It's multi-point screen felt strange to begin with, not as smooth as the gorilla-glass coated tablets we're used to.  It felt like the resistive screen on an oldschool Tablet-PC.  None of that would matter normally, we don't think our users would be bothered by the feel of the screen (and if they were, we wouldn't be).  What they would be bothered by would be the lack of responsiveness the touchscreen exhibited.  Sure it worked well enough that normal touch and swipe operations worked perfectly, as did multi-touch gestures.  The problem was evident when swiping rapidly and repetitively to scroll through a long document, or sometimes even a heavily loaded Start Screen.  The screen would miss one in every few swipes.  This meant you couldn't flip neatly through your start screen and you couldn't get the fast scroll going down a page like you could with an iPad.  To anyone that was used to that on their phone or tablet, it felt like something was broken.  We therefore couldn't put this in front of our users and say "here, this is your wonderful new machine with Windows 8" knowing that the experience would be less than ideal because of the touchscreen problem.

So, after trying and failing to communicate the problem to Fujitsu and get a fix, we've struck the Q702 off our list as well.  I might add that the price-point for the Q702 was such that you'd expect it to be flawless.  It's not cheap, so we felt this made it even harder to justify the machine.

Now, on we go, the list is ever shorter, as it our timeframe.  With only a few weeks until I absolutely must order something new for our staff, we've not got a lot of options remaining.

Eek!

Special Dell-ivery

When I say “special” I mean a delivery so special it can’t be delivered at all!

Some time ago I started work trying to get hold of a Dell XT-3 Tablet.  It’s a current model and it meets some of our requirements.  I also know of another school using it in a tablet PC program, so it’s got some credibility.

That’s all great, however months have gone by since I originally enquired about getting a demo machine.  After signing the required paperwork to ensure them I won’t break it, sell it, or take it to Mordor and throw it into a volcano nothing has happened.
If it wasn’t for the fact I have to keep my options open here, I don’t think I’d bother with it at all.

UPDATE:

After several enquiries and one somewhat unhappy email making it to people high up in Dell’s Australian sales team, I’ve been told I can have an XT3.  Apparently it’s one they found somewhere else in the company (so not a made-to-order demo like we usually get).  But I’ll take it anyway.

Chasing Geese

So, we have our first test machine for our staff machine rollout next year.  The idea here is that the teachers get something ahead of the kids that sets the scene for our 1:1 program next year.

The machine sent to us was the Lenovo X230T (pictured).  Interesting because it’s a traditional Windows Tablet PC form-factor with multi-touch capabilities.  Available in an i5 version (which is where we’ll be aiming), it seems to tick a number of boxes, on paper at least.  Probably the only issue is how well it runs Windows 8, apparently some schools have looked at it previously, and had trouble getting some drivers to work.  I’ve been told by a reseller though, that they believe the drivers are due to be updated for Win 8 soon, so I guess we’ll see.



It’s been handed to one of our teachers for a look and the impression has been overall quite positive.  The demo model didn’t have an SSD though, which we’d require if we were to buy it.

Whether it turns out to be any good or not, it’s nice to at least have it.  It wasn’t easy to get hold of.  We were originally told by one reseller that we could have it as soon as another school was finished, only to have that reseller spend weeks trying to track it down as it went from school to school, avoiding us like we had the plague.  When push finally came to shove we were told that the particular demo unit had been arranged by another reseller and we couldn’t have it.  We contacted said other reseller and had it in our hands within a week.

Needless to say, we won’t be hurrying back to that first reseller anytime soon.

BYO, but not the kind I like.

This is old news now, but I thought it worth an update here on our timeframes and requirements for 1:1 and all the rest (yup, it's grown).

I've recently notified all teaching staff of our intentions for computing going forward so here's a potted version of that.

1:1 in Year 7
Identified as our best area to target with a new program (for a variety of reasons), we'll be rolling out new Windows 8 based, touch and pen enabled PC's to Year 7 next year, but not at the beginning of the year.  This will take place mid-year at the beginning of third term.

New Staff Devices
It's time to do away with the old Lenovo laptops which are suffering badly from a higher than expected rate of hardware failure.  We're replacing these with Windows 8 based touch-enabled devices with a pen.  This will happen in December/January next year. 

BYOD in 11 and 12
Our senior students (year 11 and 12) will be asked to provide a machine of their own from the beginning of 2013.  They'll be given access to our network and some network resources and provided limited I.T. Support (ie. their connectivity will be maintainted, but not their PC).
They'll be allowed to bring anything, within limits.  Basically, anything that has a screen-size 10" or larger and has a keyboard (and probably some software requirements as well).

LMS
We've got a sub-group of our Working Party underway investigating different Learning Management Systems with a view to selecting one and running with it in 2013.