The cost to run cable in the floor of the classrooms that are already built would far outweigh the benefit gained from wired, and you'd never get that cost passed by a school board or the community. There would also be the additional expense of PoE switches (about $6K+ a piece if you go Cisco, about half that if you don't), and a mess of patch cables (financially and physically). Nice idea on paper, but honestly wouldn't be practical in a classroom environment. WiFi AP per classroom is where it's headed - and you don't need to power it down. If setup correctly, each AP knows the APs around it, and will work together to provide bandwidth where needed (in range). Disclaimer: I work in a K-12

Not with Internet, but with regards to cable service - I called around a couple of years ago to TW, Dish, DirectTV (the providers in my area). Dish and DirectTV were able to tell me exactly what my costs would be Time Warner was advertising it's "First year for $X.xx" plan - so I asked them what I thought would be a simple math question - "What is my bill going to be after the yearly promotion ends?" The answer, "We can't tell you that." (that's a direct quote). So I further inquired as to why they couldn't tell me - and the answers varied between "We don't know" to "We can't tell you". Guess who didn't get our business.

Whether it be poorly trained customer service reps, or actual business practice remains to be seen - but when you can't quote me a price for a service you want to sell me - I have an issue with that.

Ever find it odd that most PC manufacturers (at least the variety I've seen over the years) disable S.M.A.R.T. in BIOS by default? Never understood the reasoning behind that...

Ok, I'll bite. Just because it was fun? Why not? Sorry if you took my hyperlink to a wikipedia article personally.

In a perfect world with unlimited funding, that would be easy. It may get there eventually. For now, we need both and need to make both work.

You shouldn't stereotype. I've been in IT for over 20 years professionally, another 10 as a hobby prior. In past lives I've been everything from NetWare Admin, support of OS/2 before and after Warp, dabbled in Unix shells, and have used and supported various flavors of Windows from it's early days. I consider myself pretty well rounded and open to suggestions and change in the IT realm. The district where I work happens to run AD. I've brought myself up to speed on it, and feel pretty comfortable with it, but I'm not one of the "AD or Bust!" types that you may have run into in the past. Those folks just irk me :)

That's kind of the point of this venture - if we can streamline the login process, that in turn would take that waste of time out of the equation and they could focus more on using the technology more effectively.

Thank you - I will!

Thank you - I'm reading though it now.

GADS is nice - we make AD changes, and on the sync, Google gets them. That part rocks. SSO itself would be ideal, however. Starting to read though and it does look like a good challenge. From what I'm reading so far, ADFS may do what is needed. Lots more research needed though before I fire anything in.

That's the login format for schools across the country. It's not exactly a state secret.

You are correct that AD manages the passwords. We can setup GAPS very easily (Google Apps Password Sync) and already utilize GADS (Google Active Directory Sync). So there is *that* LDAP integration. Haven't missed it. The actual question was SSO, not password sync, and they aren't the same thing. I want a student (elementary, for example, ages 4-10 or so) to be able to use one small login, and be able to access all they need to.

I was able to and have been doing research prior to posting, and after posting - I consider the /. community a good resource for brainstorming an idea from those who may have already invented that wheel. Also, when you're a staff of 2, plus a very busy supervisor for 6 buildings and over 1000 users... your time is kind of limited for research, and sometimes you have to reach outside for help.

You are correct - having elementary students type the @domain.etc.yadda.yadda that GAFE requires can be painful for the teaching staff to work through. I appreciate your comments and information - really has given me a lot to read over and I'm thinking that may just do the trick. Thank you!

On the education side of IT, your end users range in age from 4 to 18 (students) and then staff/adults. The simpler you can make things, and make them work, the better. For example, a teacher will have 20+ kids in the room, need to get them all signed in to AD, then signed into Google/GAFE. Depending on the age of the group, this can be extremely challenging, especially if usernames are different, and passwords are different. If they could sign in *once* with a short username, and standard password - then be able to dive right into what they need, we'd have more time for the teachers to do what they need to do, and less time for them to be techs. SSO has been something that's been elusive for years, both in public and private sector, and it's always *sort of* worked, but not quite, and not reliably. I hadn't looked at it for some time, but it came up again recently, hence my question to /.