I'm a team of one, and I can't afford to spend my time visiting 140 machines in turn to activate a piece of software. Unless there was a simple way of automating the online registration, this would unfortunately be a deal-breaker for me.Good to see someone actually doing market research in the sector! As powdarrmonkey has mentioned, many educational software developers don't realise they need to talk to the technicians and not just the teachers. You are later taken to hospital after jumping off three bridges.
After doing so, the teacher explains that because it took so long to get it set up, he's already found a web-based alternative and forgot to tell you, because he's a busy guy too. The Summer arrives and you distribute the software unattended, and spend three weeks going around every machine to register it (which takes longer than you anticipated, because the LEA's filter is paranoid and stops you, and you have no local control over it - also common).
This is not an uncommon situation in UK schools.Ī teacher asks you in November to install this software, which you know there isn't time to do until the following Summer, so you tell him this and he is disappointed, but accepts the situation because he realises how overworked you are already. Please imagine that you are one of a team of two looking after 500 desktops and 300 laptops, some of which are staff machines so you only see them rarely. It would be an important factor, certainly. (If there is a thread that deals with this already, I haven't found it, but I'd appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction.) I thought I'd ask on here, as you're the people who have to do the installation, and maybe you could give me some feedback on how you would like installations to be ideally.
Updating, re-installing the software etc should not require re-registering of the software.ġ) How many educational software titles require registration on each machine in the way outlined above?Ģ) How much would a system like this discourage a network manager from installing software which requires registration in this way? Is it the kind of thing which would encourage them to turn to the member of staff or department and say that, sorry, s/he is not able / prepared to install the software?
The system involves the registration on each machine (once only) following installation and with an internet connection. I am thinking of moving to a register online system (following requests from distributors outside the UK). Installation currently does not require registration of any kind and it is possible to use a silent msi install to install it to all machines on a network (although not all schools are 100% happy with the msi in its current form). I sell a piece of software called TaskMagic.