I love the smell of a pork barrel in the morning. El Reg, we need a pig icon for these stories.

I used to work for the IT department for a South Wales Council, attached to the Education Department to support IT in the schools. RM were one of the biggest nightmares we had and we worked hard to get rid of them from as many schools as we could. Their IT equipment was poor quality and over priced. In one school almost all of the PC's in the IT suite had motherboard failures. Several RM Classboards had controller cards fail and RM were unable to supply replacements (and if they could they would have cost a fortune), also the Classboard were no match to the better and cheaper SMART Boards. Customer support was on the whole bad - including constant arguing with them about schools that had Ysgol in the name (Ysgol is Welsh for school). The secondary schools had lots of problems. During one upgarde the RM technician guy copied the date from the older server to the new server, but what he actually copied was shortcuts - but before checking he had formatted the old server. Each user has 10's of Group Policies applied to it - instead of setting most of the settings in one policy you would have one setting in one policy, then another setting in another policy all applied on top of each other. Because of the local policies on the server is difficult to get anything to work with it. They charge a fortune for 'extra services' like email, and make it difficult for schools to provide their own mail services - mainly because of the local polices on the RM CC server, which is just Server 2003. You are not allowed to change many of the local / group policies because that will invailadte the warrenty. All of this iis nothing compared to their business practise of getting schools to continually extend their 'lease' with RM. It also makes it difficult to move away from RM. We moved three secondary schools from RM networks to LEA managed ones. It all cases the schools saved money, had a better system - that could be managed as we wanted, not as RM wanted.

I agree with you Tom. I worked in a school as a network technician years ago with RM clients and an NT server, and it was shocking then. It's a shame to hear they have got no better, kids deserve more than sub-standard IT equipment from these goons.

Maybe it's time to coin a phrase that has been used a lot on El Reg lately.....

DO NOT WANT!

It's a wonder they are still going but it's the same sort of wonder as why the Gov keeps on giving contacts to companies who have failed time and time again to deliver a working project on time and in budget.

RM Captive market is the only way they survive. I'll bet that contract would've been 40million less from someone who'll actually do the job properly :(

What you are describing are good business practices for a company that wants to screw over the tax payer really well.

They do lease schemes because that way they get more revenue as schools do not replace the kit after 3 years so carry on paying for it even though they have bought it twice over already. If you cancel the lease you don't get to keep the kit even though it is worthless as RM will send a bean counter to make sure the kit is disposed of.

They apply a number of policies to the users and computers (especially the server) in order to stop teachers messing with it and screwing things up and thus they decrease their support costs compared with a system where schools can customise their IT.

They charge through the nose for extra services (revenue streams) because they can and they make it hard to provide the services yourself purely because it cuts down on support costs (where your freeware mail server software has brought down the CC server and you are blaming them).

As for applying policies with only one setting in them, it makes it a lot easier to move policies around and only apply the ones you want rather than applying them in blocks and it saves the numpty teachers from having to go into gpedit.

All of these are sound business practices to screw over the end user who, in the case of schools, you have to assume is a total fuckwit and in general RM will see these things as "saving the user from themself" or "cutting support calls". In the unlikely event that a school employs someone in IT who has some sort of clue (unlikely as schools pay roughly half what a good corporate will pay and if they had a clue they would go get a job in a corporate) then they can ditch RM and do it themselves but as most ICT staff are as computer litterate (or less so) than the children they teach it is best to keep them from breaking the kit that the taxpayers have paid through the nose for.

They've not used the term "ICT"

My school uses RM and the computers are terrible, constantly breaking, poor build quality, and extremely overpriced. Me and some friends discovered a security hole that allows any programme to be run on the computers, we even told RM about it but they have failed to do anything. Even the IT teachers (who, admittedly, have little IT knowledge), openly complain about RM.

Apparently though the local council has entered into a contract with an IBM-led consortium for all IT, so hopefully we will not have to endure RM for much longer.

I remember our old RM built network when I was school (about 10 years ago). Old NT 4 machines that (With a quick Ctrl-Alt-Del to stop a few running programs) we could be blasting each other to bits in Killer Quake in a few minutes.

By producing a piss-poor abstraction layer above the already finnicky Windows Server which encourages kids to learn how to circumvent it to make the systems usable.

If it wasn't for RM, I'd never have learned about policies, roaming profiles, SAM files and SSH-over-HTTP tunnelling at such an early age.

The idea of a vendor who specializes in systems for education is a good one, but RM's implementation and support seems to be particularly bad.

We run not one, but 5 rm networks in 5 dif schools and they work fine, I alone can support all the schools in one go its cheap and easy to run and we are about to bsf'ed out (including my job) too and i hope they win the contract.

I would not wont half the crap thats out there, and it always amazes me when i speke to other support staff who allways compline that they can not play in the acctive directory, I am like wtf why would you want to play in the AD.

But then I remember these are schools that need 5 people for one school to do the job that i do alone in 5 schools, I supose they have to look busy!

I'm running two of their machines as test servers - an RM Entry Level and an RM Window Box, both chucked out by local schools. No problems :)

Mind you I don't have any experience of dealing with their support, which seems to be more the issue here than the hardware (and although hardware issues feature too, I guess the machines that make it to chucking out age are likely to be the better ones).

I would not let the poster above anywhere near a real network.

no wonder he like RM!

I did some work last year in a school with RM kit - What a joke!!

Awful kit - Caps kept going on the stuff - Even more amusing was the fact the brainless git who was "IT Manager" insisted on paying £70 a throw to get the caps fixed on these machines (which were of no value anyway).

RM gained a 10 year £43 million managed service contract 8 years ago in Dudley, It took us 5 years to get back to where we had been previously, they give control freaks a bad name. Only RM could take 6-9 months to validate a piece of software to go on their networks. Strange really as an 'off duty' RM software engineer said recently that 'if it runs under XP then there should be no problems'