Some Questions

[pritchardavid]

Some questions, hope you can help and dont get confussed

Sorry there are loads (May be more)

Thanks in advance


1---------------------------------------------------------


I would like to bring in a ticket support system instead of our paper slips that the teachers dont seem to use anymore

What would you suggest in our to do this? I did try to setup osticket, because couldnt work how to set it up, any sugguestions would be great, eithier getting osticket setup or different software or maybe sharepoint, whic h I would need help with, has I have never used it before.

Problery got to be free


2----------------------------------------------------------


Is there a way to speed up users loging into the computers? (Believe we use roaming profiles at the moment has all the profile data for students are saved everytime they log out and load from the server when they log in)

For example would a mantory profile help?

So when a student would login the mantory profile is already there. Has someone has used it before and is now cached/saved on the hard drive and it dont need to copy the profile data from the server and only change the user home directory? What a mantory profile stop the policys working?

Or what would happen if I dont entre the profile data path in the user account settings of a user?


3---------------------------------------------------------


Is windows server 2008 r2 an update/add on or a full operating system that I would need to install from the disc?

Reason I ask this is because 2003 r2 had just an update where you had to install the normal version first (We have two disc at work second is to install the r2 update or addon what ever you want to call it)

4---------------------------------------------------------


Would you recommend a flash website for our school to make it diffrent to our websites and more professional? I have flash cs4, would it be easy to edit a premade template or start from scratch?


5---------------------------------------------------------


How can I made the server have diffrent sets of start menus for diffrent locations due to some places like Design Technology, they have certain software other computers dont, so I want to get rid of the other shorcuts that dont work on other locations because its not installed

Also why does any programes student or staff (not sure what one, has they have the same programes on there list) on their start menu end up on our admin desktop, there is just way too many icon on the desktop because of this, any one know where this setting would be


6----------------------------------------------------------


Is frog VLE worth the money?


7----------------------------------------------------------


Where is the cheapest place to buy DDR1 Ram, Need to upgrade 92 computers from 512 to 2gb so they can run Windows 7 (If microsoft give us our key) or Windows Vista

Will need to upgrade 20 other computers but that should be ddr2, so that easy to find decent prices

Also where is the cheapest place to buy agp graphics cards (dont need decent spec, just so it can run areo)

Computers that I need to upgrade the ram dont have areo compatable graphics chipset (SIS 661 and 865 for the other 20, I think it was)

Or you think it would be better trying to get the boss to get new computers?


8---------------------------------------------------------


How have you setup student laptops?
W normally have 32 laptops with one HP Procurve 420 Routor (expensive £300)
But seems very slow lately, would you say you need two wireless routors to cope for 32 laptops?


9--------------------------------------------------------


Would like to deploy the newest quicktime, but it just never installs, it say its installing it on the managed software box when starting up, I longon and its not installed


10-------------------------------------------------------


What the way of creating a ebook portal/site

Frog VLE or sharepoint?


11 ------------------------------------------------------


ICT room bookings?

Frog VLE or sharepoint?


12-------------------------------------------------------


Is it best to change most of the settings in the policies or leave most not defined and change the only one we need to?


13-------------------------------------------------------


Is there a decent way of updating drivers on all the computer without manually going to each one?

14--------------------------------------------------------


Is there a way to stop user changing the office start menu?
Some students enable all or there, or make the toolbars extremelly big


-----------------------------------------------------------


I think that is it

Will edit the post if I have forgotton something and post saying I have updated this post, im sure I have forgotton something (Trying to sort everything In one hit)

Again thanks in advance

[IanT]

1. Good ticking system i know of is......My Little Helpdesk - very good.

2. Speeding up profiles, depends on your network speed really, you could try setting up roaming profiles........but can get messy!

Also check the hardware side of things from the PC to the network (servers), settings on servers.

3. 2008 R2 is release 2 of Server 2008 and you have to pay for it, it's a full OS.

4. not a webbie man myself.......

5. You can do this by Group Policy and using the redirection GPO.

6. Pass

7. DDR1!! - you joking.......prices for DDR1 are very high! I would say look into budgeting for new PC's..........don't even think about putting Vista on any machine!

AGP!! - You are joking......old technology...........PCI-Express 2.0 is the latest for graphics...

go for new NEW PC's

8. Say that again in English?

9. check you GPO.......how are you deploying this?

10. Pass

11. I think My Little HelpDesk does this.....not sure though


Just curious, are you the Network Manager at the school?

I used too live 5mins away from ockendon lol.........chaffed hundred!

[Dos_Box]

4. Use the EduGeek Joomla package, and all for free with support via the site.


Brand New Edugeek Joomla Package

[dhicks]

Would you recommend a flash website for our school

No. Add a fading Flash image banner or something if you really have to, but otherwise what makes a good website is up-to-date content.

--
David Hicks

[pritchardavid]

updated first to make more sense

nope Ian, not the network manager, I am ICT Tech/admin

Trying to sort out all the things that are annoying me

Really want everything sorted out, then after we can start improving other things and think of any new ideas (Need to do this has we are a maths and ict speciast school)

Really want Windows 7 deployed, hope that fixes any problems with have with xp and be more reliable

Software is done by group policy, tried quicktime just with the msi and also tried with a mst file, doesnt work (Not sure if the mst file is good through)

Our network speed should be brillant all HP Gigabyte Switches (about 6 months old) firbre between the switches and data boxes

Ok what is this edugeek Joomla?

Whats the difference is edugeek package compared to the setup on the Joomla site I can download

Good thinking, totally forgot about Joomla

[maniac]

Whoooa, loads of questions.

1. A web-based helpdesk system of some sort, if managed properly, can do wonders for your fault logging and day-to-day management. I use mylittle helpdesk as do many other users on this site, but there are plenty of other products out there. - they don't cost the earth and some of them are free, but you will need to familurise yourself with webserver technologies in order to run them.

2. Mandatory profiles are a good way of ensureing students environment is as consistant as possible, it also can speed up login speed if setup correctly, plus should save you a load of disc space with less profiles to store and elliminates problems with corrupted profiles. However it doesn't cache it locally, it will still download it from the server everytime a user logs on, but you can optimise them to be very small - ours is about 4MB as it only has the absolute essentials within it.

3. Not familure with server 2008, but there's plenty of information on it on the net, the microsoft site its self has a good run down of the extra features in 2008 r2.

4. No need for anything too fancy for a school website - ours is plain old HTML with a flash menu system in it. As has already been said content is far more important.

5. There are ways of doing this, but no 'proper' way exists. These include using VB scripts to copy over only relevant icons for a particular machine to a local icon cache and directing the startmenu and desktop to this local cache (which is what I do) or editing the 'all users' icon group on a machine to include the icons for software installed only on that machine, with a network based 'global' icon set which all machines use - the two can be merged at logon if Group Policy is setup to allow this to happen. There's also a way of utlising the 'loopback' GPO to achieve this I think - never tried that.

6. No idea, don't use Frog, but it does get very favourable comments on this site.

7. DDR1 ram is still available easily, we just upgraded 60 machines from 256MB to 1GB to make them a lot more useable, we paid about £9 per 512mb module. Whether it's better to change the machines very much depends on what they're going to be used for, and what your budget is like. I have to ask thou why upgrade them purely to run windows 7? XP is perfectally fine for a majority of use in school. I certainly never intend to run windows 7 on my older hardware, I will phase it in slowly and run a mixed environment for a while and slowly phase out XP over 2 - 3 years starting next academic year.

8. Student laptops, well we have about 350 of them school wide, but we do have a relatively good Cisco wireless network to support them. If you only have one bank of laptops with their own access point, there could be some milage in having a second one on a totally seperate channel at the other end of the room. The main thing you can do to improve the speed is cut down on the amount of data going to and from the network by having locally hosted startmenus and desktops and streamlined profiles. Our login times over wireless is not much different to our cabled desktops.

9. Quicktime was part of our build, so never tried distributing it. Check the error logs of a workstation that's attempted installation for clues, there could be all sorts of reasons why it's not actually installed.

10. Not sure, but most VLE's include a facility to do 'e-portfolios'

11. ICT room bookings is done mnually here by a lasy in our main office in a big diary. If it ain't in the diary it ain't been booked! We tried an electronic booking system but it didn't work for us.

12. with Group Policy the more settings you apply the slower the policy will be to apply, so best to keep it as simple as possible. It's very easy to go overkill and lock everything down, but you'll be surprised at how small a number of policies you actually need to set to secure a workstation if you chose them carefully.

13. If a driver update is available from Windows Update you can use WSUS (if you run it) to distribute drivers, or if you're lucky the manufacturer may have an MSI or a Silent install option.

14. Mandatory profiles will stop these settings being saved, so they'll soon get bored of doing it every time the logon. Same for re-arranging desktop icons, changing default settings etc.

You say you really want windows 7 deployed because XP is un-reliable. I have to say that windows XP in my school is extreemly stable, and if setup well there's no reason why it shouldn't be. I'm actually dreading starting to have windows 7 workstaions on my network as it introduces a whole new set of problems and means re-training myself and my technicians, working out how to deploy it etc. etc.

Hope that's of some help!

Mike.

[p858snake]

Next time consider spilting your topic up into multipul posts since we have a wide varity of "speciality" sections where certain people visit more than others so you could get more tailored help.

....OP....

01. It all depends on the school environment and who is using it, there will never be one perfect applications, they are built by different people who have different desires and needs. Your best bet is to try out a few and find one that suits your environment and is easy to use.

02.
(A) There is a possibility of speeding up your network, but it all depends on what your network and what is suitable for it uses.
(B) Mandatory profiles could probably help speed things up but it all depends on your network.
(C) The profile would be cached onto the local system, the user home directory depends on how you deal with it, most people would use a folder redirection(/s) to deal with the home directories.
(D) No, mandatory wouldn't stop stop policies from working since group policies are applied each login (and refreshed every so often as well).
(E) If you didn't enter a path it would create a new roaming profile.

03.

04. I would recommend against them, personally I despise them since they mostly look tacky and interfere my usage of webpages and most commonly bring in accessibility issues.

05.
(A) Depending on how you have yours computers set up in your AD, you could possibly do a policy with folder redirections for the start menu.
(B) We need more information to help with this, do you mean every program in the start menu or only a select few? sounds like a installer could be adding icons to the desktop in the all users directory.
(C) Is there are reason your installing applications on just a few machines such as licensing or other problems?

06. VLEs are much like Help Desk/Ticketing, it all depends on who and where they are being used, although there are many reviews and topics on a wide variety of VLEs that can help you on this forum.

07.

08. We need more information since it could be a few things, again there are many topics on this forum about this topic.

09. What error message(/s) is it display? any hints in the event viewer? how are you deploying it?

10. Again, refer to Q01 and 06, there are many specialised systems as well as several VLEs that incorporate this.

11. Refer to main points in Q01 and Q06.

12.

13. Easiest way would be to create SOEs and then image the systems so they are all up to date.

14. Does this really matter, its up to the students and only affects their profiles. But if its that much of a issue, I do believe that there is a admin pack for Group Policy with specialised policies that you can set for office.

updated first to make more sense

nope Ian, not the network manager, I am ICT Tech/admin

Trying to sort out all the things that are annoying me

Really want everything sorted out, then after we can start improving other things and think of any new ideas (Need to do this has we are a maths and ict speciast school)

Really want Windows 7 deployed, hope that fixes any problems with have with xp and be more reliable

Software is done by group policy, tried quicktime just with the msi and also tried with a mst file, doesnt work (Not sure if the mst file is good through)

Our network speed should be brillant all HP Gigabyte Switches (about 6 months old) firbre between the switches and data boxes

Ok what is this edugeek Joomla?

Whats the difference is edugeek package compared to the setup on the Joomla site I can download

Good thinking, totally forgot about Joomla

1. What issues are you currently experiencing with Windows XP?
2. What reliability issues are you experiencing?
3. Why are you in such a rush to roll out Windows Seven/Vista
4. Where are the speed issues occurring?
5. What cabling standards are used in from the Data Cabs to the Workstations? Cat5? Cat5E? Cat6?
6. EDUJoomla is a CMS package built on the Open Source Joomla.
7. Difference is that it comes with several modules and themes by default.


Some information about profiles:
* Roaming user profile - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
* About User Profiles

[mossj]

Spiceworks is free and you don't have to familirise yourself with web tech. Just a next > next > next install.

We also use MRBS online booking, for ICT booking.

[pritchardavid]

Sorry for the long reply guys, been very busy

All cabing should be cat5 and fiber between nework boxes

-------------------------

Kinda have sorted the wireless problem out, on the 32 laptops, before they could actually get all the laptops logged on for a whole lesson, whichs is 50m mins (Lucky if you got one on)

Sorted this by using two HP Procurve 420 Wireless Points (16 on each), still they can take a while to log on, last time I heard, it took about 15 mins, for them to log all on.

-------------

Mantory Profiles have well confussed me now, some has said it does stores it locally, and one has said it doesnt and always gets it from the server each logon

What is the correct answer?

-------------

Another thought with the speed issue, before I reinstalled windows xp on these laptops (Before they were reloaded, they was still using the pre installed factory image from toshiba, but on the domain with settings added of course)

Would this cause a problem?
I use WDS using a sysprepped WIM Image with all the updates and some programs like anivirus, and our monitoring software
Cause I have heard using a image when reloading computers causing problems
Im sure the laptops were quicker before I reloaded them

-------------

Im in a rush to deploy Windows 7 because I want it all sorted and I really dont like XP anymore, and prefere the use the lastest, its problery easyier to mantain the deployment image too, I blieve you can just intergrate the updates without having to install the image, update it and then save and upload the new image to the server.

Plus if the image is easier to deploy, we can reinstall the computers more often, causing less problems, has its maintaning the computer more


-------------

Have found a very easy way for our support ticket software. Found a software package called XAMPP, this instal all software like php, mysql etc and confire it to run etc, Managed to get joomla running from that to test it. So this should work for osticket, which I couldnt figure out how to use

-------------

Very intrested in joomla, loads of extensions you can get, should be better than normal html. Need to know more about Frog or Moodle first, our Skillspace VLE is rubbish and needs to be changed.
What I need to know if we should have the new VLE has the homepage and have all the stuff we have now on the homepage but using the VLE software
So maybe no need for joomla, what you think?

[mossj]

Have found a very easy way for our support ticket software. Found a software package called XAMPP, this instal all software like php, mysql etc and confire it to run etc, Managed to get joomla running from that to test it. So this should work for osticket, which I couldnt figure out how to use

XAMP is all well and good but if you can't configure osticket it's just a web server. I stongly recommend you take a look at spiceworks it's is just as easy to install it! comes with it's own .exe that you just next>next>next through.

I'm sure most members will vouche for it's use as a Helpdesk/Ticketing system, and some may even vouch for it's automatic Network Mapping & Inventory system.

Im in a rush to deploy Windows 7 because I want it all sorted and I really dont like XP anymore, and prefere the use the lastest, its problery easyier to mantain the deployment image too, I blieve you can just intergrate the updates without having to install the image, update it and then save and upload the new image to the server.

Plus if the image is easier to deploy, we can reinstall the computers more often, causing less problems, has its maintaning the computer more

"proberly"? please do you research on this, and don't base your decsions and the intergraty of your network on "proberly". You can inject drivers into XP using WDS (I think, updates to) and even if you can't you can use GPO manager to deploy them centraly.

Kinda have sorted the wireless problem out, on the 32 laptops, before they could actually get all the laptops logged on for a whole lesson, whichs is 50m mins (Lucky if you got one on)

Sorted this by using two HP Procurve 420 Wireless Points (16 on each), still they can take a while to log on, last time I heard, it took about 15 mins, for them to log all on.

15 Minutes is still not good! something is up there, and HP I assume are decent WAPS.

Another thought with the speed issue, before I reinstalled windows xp on these laptops (Before they were reloaded, they was still using the pre installed factory image from toshiba, but on the domain with settings added of course)

Would this cause a problem?
I use WDS using a sysprepped WIM Image with all the updates and some programs like anivirus, and our monitoring software
Cause I have heard using a image when reloading computers causing problems
Im sure the laptops were quicker before I reloaded them

Best practice is to reinstall from fresh, if they weren't sold with XP Pro then you can't join them to your domain anyway. Make sure you installed all the drivers and they are functioning correctly, and take a look at your AV/Monitoring Software could that be slowing it down?


*Above all may I suggest you make use of the search feature, I beleive many of these subjects have been discussed in length*

[elsiegee40]

Profiles:
Start here in the wiki and work your way through Wiki: A guide to Profiles

It's very good at explaining what's going on.

A mandatory profile works like a roaming profile in that a shared profile is stored on the server. When a user logs on, a copy is taken to the local machine and is used while they are logged on. When the user logs off, the profile is NOT written back to the server and so is not changed. All pupils my school share a single mandatory profile. their 'My documents' folder is redirected, so they all have private storage areas.

If you decide to go the mandatory profile route, this thread is very handy for sorting the profile out so it is as small as possible: Creating a small mandatory profile

Website
I am definitely NOT the expert here, but some fab people at edugeek have put together a joomla template that makes very good customisable, easily amended, school websites. More about it here: http://projects.edugeek.net/joomla.html

My Little Helpdesk
The brain-child of edugeek's ICT_NUT (and is I think free to schools?) My Little Helpdesk

[pritchardavid]

Some said that spiceworks comes with adverts, is it possible to somehow disable the adverts?

ok thanks elsiegee40, will read up on that

Also now looking at sharepoint, most sites I have seen from here look very good that has been made

I have looked and the gdugeek joomula, template just doesnt look like something we would need or work for us

[pritchardavid]

"proberly"? please do you research on this, and don't base your decsions and the intergraty of your network on "proberly". You can inject drivers into XP using WDS (I think, updates to) and even if you can't you can use GPO manager to deploy them centraly.



15 Minutes is still not good! something is up there, and HP I assume are decent WAPS.

yer thats what I was thinking too (Well at least they can logon for now at least)

Yer they cost around £300 for each so you epect them to be good, laptop specs are not any problem

Toshiba a200, 2gb core duo 1.6ghz i think, laptops have newest wifi drivers, routors also have the newest firmware too

Where the laptops are, it is the futherset away from the server

[maniac]

yer thats what I was thinking too (Well at least they can logon for now at least)

Yer they cost around £300 for each so you epect them to be good, laptop specs are not any problem

Toshiba a200, 2gb core duo 1.6ghz i think, laptops have newest wifi drivers, routors also have the newest firmware too

Where the laptops are, it is the futherset away from the server

One of the things you could do straight away to speed up your login times is exclude certain folders from your current roaming profile.

Specifically Local Settings, Cookies and User Data can all be excluded from roaming without affecting the users ability to roam, and it will speed up your logins. Slow logins are caused by too much data being copied from the network to the machines at login.

It doesn't matter what wireless system you have, if you log 30 machines on in the same area at the same time and they are all copying massive roaming profiles, it's going to take a while to logon.

This document is very good reading, and can help you understand the limitations of wireless networking, and also what you can do to maximise your chances of making it work.

http://www.networksfirst.com/admin/f...2007.05.08.pdf

Mike.

[DaveMurphy]

Maybe for the wireless problem install more access points around school... i also found that connecting them to different switches around the building is a tad bit faster too. wireless should only take a minute at most to load.