Libraries - Are you going to use them?

[mitchell1981]

Hi,

Just wondering what people think of the libraries feature of Windows 7 and are you going to use it in your deployments for students?

It is a useful feature for home and personal use, but I'm not really sure how it would work out in the classroom. Is it possible, for example, to include a network share of photos, in every students pictures library?

Is anyone who has already deployed Windows 7 making use of this feature?

[pete]

Assuming you can script library creation, having a "resource" library for each kid which pulls stuff from subject-specific shares would be handy.

Say \\server\share\subject\yeargroup\resources
\\server\share\subject2\yeargroup\resources
etc

Pulled together into $homedir\resources could be handy. Why don't you try it and report back?

And it would also stop the "I shall copy the entire french exchange photos from \\server\share (which are quite happy and not going anywhere) to my home directory, for reasons that make sense to me but annoy my sysadmin".

[CAM]

But at the same time, if staff see it in their home folder they will believe it is theirs and try to delete them, wiping them off for everyone?

[synaesthesia]

They can be shared alike and have the usual permissions set, modify but not remove, write but not modify etc etc. I'm playing with a networked setup like that and so far it looks like it might be a slightly more intuitive way of doing it than, as a common example, mapped drives. And easier to administer, and less likely to disappear when tinkering husbands/partners/siblings/children come into it

[rvdmast]

I'm testing a setup where i combine user's My Documents and the Shared documents, both on the network, using the libraries functionality.
I redirect their My Documents to the network through the usual practices.
I also redirect the standard "Shared documents" (C:\users\public\...) to the root of our
Shared documents folder on the network.
So now, in the default "Documents" library for example, the users see both their own and the
shared documents they have access to. If they open the Documents tree in the left-hand
explorer pane the can still access the My Documents or the Shared documents folder specifically.

This seems to work quiet nice though i suspect it will take some trainining/getting used to on the
part of our users once we start deploying Windows 7.

[mrbios]

As much as i love the new features in windows 7 i have cut my test system down completely to look and act as much like windows XP as possible - in a how to find things sense anyway.

At least that's for students anyway, for teachers i'm going to make use of as many features as possible

[elsiegee40]

As much as i love the new features in windows 7 i have cut my test system down completely to look and act as much like windows XP as possible - in a how to find things sense anyway.

At least that's for students anyway, for teachers i'm going to make use of as many features as possible

Now the way things go at my school, the kids will have no problem with the new functionality.

The staff however would be demanding that everything looks much the same as it has always done (i.e. XP)... after all most of them barely seem to understand that!

[Mr.Ben]

I haven't looked at it yet, but could you bring together all of the photos etc over a single shared drive (So you can easly find photos in the Staff and Pupil Shares)?