RM - FFS

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.