Winsuite development

[laserblazer]

Not that is likely to affect too many people but I heard today that there will be no further development on Winsuite and certainly not a Server 2008 version.

[farmerste]

winsuite was good when you had w98 clients, but after that it could all be done ( much more work of course ) with windows active directory.

now if you take a basic active directory, add a pinch of clean-slate, or a reborn card to season ,you pretty much get a recipe for an unbreakable system.

[laserblazer]

'cept we are still running Windows 98 on curriculum machines. But... I have been allocated £25K to replace 80 odd computers, that has to include MS Office unless we use Open Office.

[pallen]

Sorry to highjack, but we currently use winsuite(and yes still have Win98), but I would like to remove it in favour of using group policies. We have mostly XP clients now and am keen to go away from Winsuite as I find it overides some settings I am make in GPO. I am facing opposistion because the staff like the list of usernames to select from the logon and dont believe it would be good for the lower ability pupils to remember username as well as a logon. Has anyone else seen some free software that can achieve a similar logon screen to winsuite?

What I would like to do is leave winsuite on our Win98 clients that are left and remove it from all XP clients.

[craiglay]

The easy way would be to set up your winsuite will no security but to retain the logon system.
Then you can use GPO's to set your security, set desktop and start menu redirection in GPO to a locked shared folder on the server so you can ensure software is accessable and easy to deploy to users by just dropping the shortcut into the share. (disable all users desktop / start menu to avoid confusion)
Mandatory profiles ensure the kids cant mess it up as when they logoff, all changes will be disgarded.

If you have any questions, just ask. I've done it before.

Craig

[laserblazer]

I think teachers might be underestimating the lower ability kids when it comes to computer stuff. They might not be able to add 2+2 but they won't have any difficulty logging on. How do I know, because our Learning Resource room doesn't use Winsuite. There are enough TAs to supervise the kids and they have no problem entering their username and password (unlike most of the teachers!)