Adding shortcuts to Sims.net

[eejit]

Hi there.

I am not the SIMS guy at our school so any answers will need basic level, step-by-step answers I'm afraid.

We have just deployed 80 new Admin PCs to go in classrooms around the school and Sims.net appears to work fine. The only problem is that the staff do not have a shortcut to NovaT (I know it's called something else now, but we rename the shortcut here in order to not confuse the staff) from the SIMS front panel. Now, the SIMS manager says that you have to add this shortcut for every user at every station by logging on as that user and then adding the new shortcut manually. He says that the Sims people at our local borough have told him that there is no way to do this centrally. I don't believe that, it must be just that they don't know how to do it.

Different users already get different shortcuts - Assesment , System, etc. so these things must be controlled centrally. Please tell me how to do this if possible.

Cheers.

[altecsole]

To have access to Nova-T you need to give the user permission to access it. Whoever is your System Manager will need to assign the users to the correct group - not sure which one, probably something to do with timetabling. Once they are members of the correct group they will get the Nova-T icon on the left when they login to SIMS.net.

[eejit]

Cheers for your reply, altecsole. That doesn't appear to be the case for us - they can certainly run NovaT from the manually created shortcut, so they wouldn't be able to do that without the correct permissions, am I right in that presumption? Is there something else that may be stopping it?
Thanks.

[altecsole]

So they access Nova-T from a shortcut, not from with SIMS.net? Are you running a client/server or peer-to-peer setup?

[ChrisH]

You do have to faff around with which groups they are in to get certain icons up. I have systems manager permissions but nowhere in the menu was there a way for me to do do look ups on students and forms. I had to stick myself in the same group as the office staff as well to get that added to my interface.
You will be able to do this at permission level but I dont like to mess with Sims that much :P

[eejit]

So they access Nova-T from a shortcut, not from with SIMS.net? Are you running a client/server or peer-to-peer setup?

They access Nova-T from a manually created shortcut within sims.net. We can't get the shortcut to automatically appear on the left hand toolbar.
It's a client/server setup.

[eejit]

ChrisH, I'll try and mess about with the group memberships, but I thought I wouldn't have to if the could run Nova-T from the manually created shortcut.
Cheers for the response.

[altecsole]

How do they login to Nova-T? Do they have to do it manually in Nova-T itself? If you setup SIMS.net with Nova-T in mind it should be seamless. The problem with Nova-T is that it will only accept a username with a maximum of 8 letters. With this in mind, in SIMS System Manager set the same usernames as for Nova-T for your users, and make sure that they set the same passwords too. That way, when they logon to SIMS and click on the Nova-T link (which they get by making them a member of the correct group) they get straight in.

[eejit]

Cheers for your updates, Altecsole. I'll check out all that tomorrow.

[mark]

We had NovaT runnig from a desktop shortcut here 'till the latest version. Indeed you didn't need permissions - you just had to log in as default user - which was fine here - as that let you get class lists and timetable stuff [the way we're set up].

With the latest release/upgrade/patch tho' that no longer works, and you have to have a proper sims .net install and associated permissions to see NovaT - it is timetabling [group] here.

Then you can still install standalone but with more than a couple of clients it becomes unmanageable.

Can't believe i'm discussing SIMS!!!

[tarquel]

*many winks at mark*

Don't get me started on sims...

*physches himself up to speak on it*

Managed to install a standalone version of NovaT today - oddly enough - and by god, it works! hehe

Say if you want it on a laptop as a standalone, You have to run the SataliteSetupInst and not the normal setup. This basically unpacks some install files to C:\Program Files\SIMS\<somethingIcantRemember>\ and there you have 4 folders - one of which is NovaT install.

Theres a pointless script there so just start the install.exe and untick the SIMS link - theres two check boxes - and just install it to C:\NovaT.

You should be able to take it from there if you know novat...

Regards,
N.

[eejit]

Ok, an update.
We CAN get the NovaT icon on, if the teachers are a member of the Timetabler group. Unfortunately that's not wanted here - they get too many other permissions apparently.

All the staff are a member of the ClassTeach group. What we want is to add NovaT to that. Is that possible?

Cheers.

[mark]

You can get into the gubbins and select components to allow access to. So in thoery that is possible.

What I also do is install sims .net on thier PC, and then create a copy to the NovaT executable [found in %program files%\SIMS\Sims .net\] on thier desktop, WITHOUT setting the user up at all as a user in sims .net. They can then get into NovaT as "Default User" [no password] and in our case - see pupil/class lists with NO confidential information available.

I think it depends on what your SIMS support has set up as viewable to the default user - but I don't think that'd be hard to do.

[BWI-Systems]

Make sure that the person or persons running SIMS.NET have local 'Power User' rights on the workstation, and that they have read/write/create permissions to the local SIMS.NET folder and the root directory of C:

That should solve your problem. If not, then let me know.

Cheers

[eejit]

We have actually made the staff members of the local administrators group. You had to do that with the old SIMS, so they should have access to all those areas.