Computing Courses and Configuration

[mickeyh080]

Up until recently Computing courses have pretty much been small scale for us with a total block on .exe's for staff and students in their My Docs / USB drives and shared areas to lock everything down using group policies and FSRM. We now have to consider changes to allow programs such as Small / Visual Basic and Panther for a computing roll out for all students from June onwards requiring the running of .exe's. I was wondering for those that have already gone down Small / Visual Basic route what is the best way to configure the system to keep the network secure. Possibly thought of virtual machines running on a student desktop with no internet or network access but this is expensive with VM Workstation at £80 a licence and could very well be overkill. Ant thoughts would be welcome.

[internetuser]

Not ideal, far from it, but for computer students we map another drive, which allows them to run .exe's etc and a tiny work area and keep an eye on that location.

[nev104]

Could you not just put the computing cources computers in a seprate OU in AD with a policy so they can run exe's. This way they can run anything but they should only be in the room when supervised.

[internetuser]

Supervised users hmmm....

We also have multiple users use computer rooms so it had to be user targeted.

[saintoctopus]

Bumping this thread, coz I'm very interested in this topic. Any advice on how others allow computer programming without compromising network integrity and security would be most welcome...

Thank you