Sherston Mega Deal Offer

[speckytecky]

Had a letter recently from Sherston offering their Mega Deal Offer; 114 titles for under a thousand quid. Plus a £99 expenditure top have the lot supplied on a portable hard drive.

It sounds good and the teachers (Primary) I have talked to about it love Sherston software and are keen that we buy it.

Anyone able to offer technical experience of this please - currently the only Sherston software we have is on stand alones and not on the network.

[sted]

most recent sherston software you can often as not just copy the cd to a network drive and give users write permission to the saves folder (if it has one) even the older stuff can usually be converted to this with the network installer cd. There are the odd programm that you have to run the installer for but again they just go to a network drive

[apoth0r]

Any details on how I can find more about this offer?
Just checked the website and I can't find a deal of this nature.

I love Sherston stuff, well thought out and never has a bad word from the teachers!

Might give them a ring later if there isn't a website for it.

[sparkeh]

I think that this is the same option we went for a while ago and its more a less been a success.
Titles are accessed via a web front end, there are a few titles that still need installing locally to work, bbut overall its much less hassle than installing all those titles locally

[apoth0r]

The thing I like about them is that they just work, they are friendly looking and the kids just engage.

Hoping that this offer is open to others!

[ztwtso]

Software is good, from an installation point of view if the s/w does not come with a network installer I copy the data to the pc hard drive and modify the ini file, works great. I always create an msi as I do not like running apps over the network. I have a school enquiring about the offer, Sherston site is down so I can't get info. Not over happy running over the network but then creating 100 msi files hummmm.

[Sherston]

Hi there. I work for the Technical HelpDesk at Sherston Software and I hope I might be able to offer some comment and advice on some of the posts in this thread.

Any details on how I can find more about this offer?
Just checked the website and I can't find a deal of this nature.

I love Sherston stuff, well thought out and never has a bad word from the teachers!

Might give them a ring later if there isn't a website for it.

We have now added the information to our website, in the News and the Products sections.
There is a also a pdf with the information available here www.sherston.com/megadeal.pdf

I think that this is the same option we went for a while ago and its more a less been a success.
Titles are accessed via a web front end, there are a few titles that still need installing locally to work, but overall its much less hassle than installing all those titles locally

I suspect that the solution that you are referring to is some of the Sherston content that was offered on a caching server a few years ago.

Technically, this new offer is a slightly different solution which has been designed for software deployment in one of the following ways:

1. Connecting the hard drive directly to a workstation and running software from the drive on a single user basis – it is worth noting however that this would be best done from a copy of the drive as running in this way would mean writing back pupil records to the drive that you would receive.
2. Using the hard drive to launch installers to install the software to the workstation or to the network.
3. Copying the entire contents of the drive to a network share and launching the menu system and software from the network.

Software is good, from an installation point of view if the s/w does not come with a network installer I copy the data to the pc hard drive and modify the ini file, works great. I always create an msi as I do not like running apps over the network. I have a school enquiring about the offer, Sherston site is down so I can't get info. Not over happy running over the network but then creating 100 msi files hummmm.

Whilst we have developed MSI packages for RM CC3 networks, we are unable to supply MSI packages suitable for deployment via group policy at this moment in time. However, because of the large range of titles provided on the drive, you’re likely to find that teachers won’t be using all of the titles all of the time – so it might be that you could package these as and when teachers request them.

If anybody would like to discuss any of the above, or any technical queries related to our other products, then we can be contacted by telephone on 01666 843224 or by e-mail to support@sherston.co.uk between the hours of 0830 and 1700 from Monday to Friday.

[jamin100]

You have an order waiting on your fax machine!
Bit disappointing that they wont be delivered until September though as i wanted to put them into the summer images

[TechSupp]

Can you let us know which of the titles would require a local install and which are to be supplied on CD instead of the HD.

[speckytecky]

Can you let us know which of the titles would require a local install and which are to be supplied on CD instead of the HD.

Or even better, any chance of building an MSI into the package please?

[Sherston]

Hi there,

You have an order waiting on your fax machine!
Bit disappointing that they wont be delivered until September though as i wanted to put them into the summer

Many thanks!

We have specified a delivery date of September due to a combination of the time-scales that we are currently working to and the difficulties surrounding shipping to schools outside of term time. If you can provide us with an e-mail address and a mobile telephone number that we can contact you on, we will make a note of these details. In the event that stock becomes available we will be more than happy to contact you to confirm times when you are in school - but this will not be until late August at the earliest.

Can you let us know which of the titles would require a local install and which are to be supplied on CD instead of the HD.

There are seven titles that may be supplied on CD-ROM. These are:

Alphabet Track
Eye Track
Idiom Track
Number Track
Phoneme Track
Spell Track
Word Track

These SEMERC titles may be supplied on CD-ROM due to structural differences compared to Sherston titles. It is however worth noting that we are currently testing these as part of the hard drive and at present it looks likely that they will be supplied on the drive rather than on CD.

Or even better, any chance of building an MSI into the package please?

Although we have developed MSI packages for RM CC3 networks, we are unable to supply MSI packages suitable for deployment via group policy at the moment. We do hope however that we are able to provide the SEMERC titles as part of the hard drive so that they are as easily accessible as the rest of the software.

As always, if anybody would like to discuss any of the above or any technical queries related to our other products, then we can be contacted by telephone on 01666 843224 or by e-mail to support@sherston.co.uk between the hours of 0830 and 1700 from Monday to Friday.

[speckytecky]

Ours arrived today. Any update on MSI installing or is it per the enclosed instructions still?

[apoth0r]

I don't suppose any of the titles are SCORM compliant?

[danielson81]

ours arrived last week, I just copied the whole HDD to the server and deployed a shortcut to the web interface and touch wood it has been working fine.

[Sherston]

Ours arrived today. Any update on MSI installing or is it per the enclosed instructions still?

Installation is still as per the enclosed instructions.

I don't suppose any of the titles are SCORM compliant?

There are no SCORM packages provided on the Sherston Resource Pack - but we have produced a number of packages covering Literacy, Numeracy and Science. These feature activities from some of our best-selling CD-ROM products and are sold as separate collections of packages. If you'd like more in-depth information on these, or to try them in the classroom, please call us on 01666 843224 or e-mail us at support@sherston.co.uk.

ours arrived last week, I just copied the whole HDD to the server and deployed a shortcut to the web interface and touch wood it has been working fine.

It's great to hear that this is working for you. Any feedback regarding the Sherston Resource Pack is much appreciated.