Capita have manged to release the Sept update a week early.
After spending the summer getting all the ducks in a row, should one risk upsetting the apple cart?
Yes, these new SOLUS messages are very peculiarI am a SIMS.net update. I could be a nice set of patches to improve your installation or I could bugger up your whole system right at the start of term. The question is, do you feel lucky. Well doo yah punk!!.
Did this over the weekend, as we needed it to fix a lesson register problem.
Worked ok for us
Not another upgrade! I managed to take advantage of there being very few people around and got all the SIMS workstations upgraded in a day during the holidays. Fat chance of it happening for the September upgrade.
The frequency of patches/upgrades is getting beyond a joke. It's as if SIMS is in perpetual beta stage!
For some reason up to now this hasnt been made available to me in Solus2. It says no updates available to download.
It's been like that ever since I've been an IT Technician. I'm just glad things are a lot easier now than they used to be. There was a time when you got a SIMS update disk and about 10-15 pages of instructions on how to install it :\Originally Posted by nsherin
Just a stupid though here for Sims users, I know with CMIS which I use, i just install the client in a folder on the server, and give those users a shortcut to it, so i just update the client install on the server and then its all done, no worries about 40 users to update etc, no worries about them being off as I can kick them all off etc etc etc... Can you not do that with SIMS? I appreciate that it will run a bit slow at times with a lot of access to it but CMIS is fine with it. You still need to program the SQL connection in ODBC on the workstations and in our case open the datafile in CMIS as it adds some registry keys to the workstation, but it works fine.
SIMS used to be pretty much like this ... a local BDE instance was installed and everything else was off the server share ... but now it installs a lot more locally ... usually specific files to save the load on the server when creating reports etc.
This is not a bad thing really, and is meant to allow for things like Teachers' Desktop so that an offline version can be used.
The updating of the workstations should happen automagically the next time SIMS is started, so as long as you know it works on one machine all the other machines should be fine.
Problems occur when permissions are set wrongly on the workstation (when I say wrongly, they are actually set quite logically but not the permissions that Capita want you to set ... things like giving all SIMS users power user access to local machines ... at least).
I can remember when the CMIS guys originally sold it to my last place they told us to stick it locally on each machine ... and then changed their minds ... and changed them again when we pointed out about the problem updating the client.
That's interesting Tony. We recently applied the latest SIMS updates and now the workstations have Power User, User and (because of our helpful Systems Manager) "Everyone" in there too. Permissions are pretty screwed. What I have been doing (because LM won't run under these farcical conditions) is taking out Power User, User and Everyone and making Authenticated Users have "Modify" access on C:. Windows and Program Files etc as per old Capita instructions to us. It works.
Until the user logs off that is. Now the permissions are reset and when they are SIMS stops working...So we go around in a wicked circle of resetting permissions- works; user logs off and then on again- permissions blitzed again.
Anyone have any idea what the hack is going on here?
...need coffee
@kingswood: That's pretty random. Maybe it's because Windows feels it's too insecure opening up access to the system volume like that.
What I do is give authenticated users full access to "C:\Program Files\SIMS" and "C:\IDAPI". This seems to be sufficient although I have had a couple of issues with FMS which has meant elevating user rights for the bursars.
Well you had to pacify her somehow for that god awful noise you have put in the room behind her
The Power User and User groups appear at will- we don't put them there. Traditionally we have used the more secure Authenticated Users, but it seems since this last update something has gone wrong with the permissions. Anyway, setting Authenticated Users with Full Control over the SIMS and IDAPI folders seems to have worked. On the other hand, adding the domain user group of Staff to the local Power User group also worked- so it's definitely permissions issues we are having. I'm now thinking that I should use something in their logon scripts that will add them to the local PU group and give that group full control...
What do you think?
Thanks in any case- good advice!
Paul
Our installation was updated last night - apparently the new version of Solus wouldn't run so the tech ran the old ver.
Strange thing is:- existing users have a blank home page where the days lesson plan should appear [we're going to start using per lesson registration next week]. Users havve to click lesson registration, and then search to get thier timetable.
New users however get the funky new grey/orange/blue timetable on thier home pages.
Anyone else getting this?
Not done this yet - I'm waiting till the LEA post their upgrade notes on our CLC/VLE before going ahead or start asking for us to run the upgrade. Not going to rock the boat whilst things are calm!
September update went fine on the test box. Waiting for bursar to OK the FMS upgrade before we touch the production server.
You can download CD's from capita.
Not sure if you can do a full install from them though.
On the capita support site search the news for resource 11351
31/08/06 SIMS 2006 September Update - CD Image is available
From the URL you can work out each release easy enough :-)
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