...And how do I know this? Simple, because the wonderful people at the Domain Renewal Group send me a reminder that I should. As they do every year. All I have to do is fill out the form they send through the post and hey presto they've taken our domain for 5 times the price of our current tag holder. the Domain Renewal Group are (almost) a scam. They send out an official looking invoice inviting you to renew your tag and make it look like they are the official holder of it hoping people will be
Ok, something we are just about to implement - Password Policies for Staff. However, I hear you cry, you can only have one policy per domain - the "Default Domain Policy GPO". Yes - pre Server 2008 that is true...
With Windows Server 2008 you will now be able to define different password account lockout policies within the same domain. Previously this was not possible and this was also one of the reasons many of our customers implemented multiple domains in their forest. With Fine-Grained Pas
OK - I know SP1 is now out - but in case you havent applied it yet, and arent going too - watch out for these two...
Note - These are supposed to be rolled into SP1, supposed to be!
Issue 1: If your Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 stops responding at the “Please wait” screen before you are requested to press Ctrl+ALT+DEL.
Lets say you try to start a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.
However, the operating system stops responding at the “Please wait” sc
That time of year again (well - for us anyway), after doing a load of machine rebuilds - and name changes etc - your AD may look a bit cluttered. Even more so as we moved from using RIS (groan - old tech alert) to SCCM...
So - rather than resurrect some old threads, here is a collection of highly useful powershell scripts to hunt out those old computers and remove them or move them to another OU so you can spot them all together.
Credit to original posters: Boz_l and Rabbieburns
For thi
Revisiting this, we may now be going down a completely different path (which I feel little, if any, regret about). We're looking at a third party solution which would do exactly what I want it to do. The only problem is the price, and the fact that only the Enterprise license provides the required API. On the other hand I think I can justify the price tag as to build anything more than simple, static reports ourselves, let alone coming close to what this one provides, would take six months at a
Soon! I'll be heading off tomorrow, time to get packing I guess. Should get my gadgets charged just in-case, and find the charger for my netbook. Those universal ones are useless.
Hmmm, DSi with Advance Wars will keep me occupied on the train. If my next blog post is from Wales you will know I missed my stop because of it.
Geeky T-Shirt, got plenty. Which one to pick!
Have I forgotten something? Oh yes, a pen and notepad so I actually remember what was said! See you guys there!
Originally posted at sparkeh.net
Just in case you hadn't seen this. I am too hacked off with this decision to post anything useful at the moment so here's the quote:
As you may be aware, Microsoft® is ceasing support for Windows Vista® SP1 in July 2011. We will therefore be ceasing telephone support for issues specifically relating to Windows Vista at that time. This will affect customers with a managed Windows Vista SP1 workstation either on Community Connect® 4 or Community Connect® 3 (t
When you have finally decided that it is time to install a new office telephone system, to start with, I would suggest just sitting back and ensuring that you trigger the whole process of putting in an innovative pbx system start by making the perfect examination of your respective business needs and produce a good knowledge of what exactly is obtainable and what would be the most suitable option that you should take. In case you are currently out to make positive changes to existing business te
I came in the other morning to loads of reports of errors with sharepoint 2010.
http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/2492/sharepoint2010box.jpg
After a while I found out the errors were only showing when people tried to add things to the database like files or announcements. On looking at the logs we have this error message
Source: MSSQL$SHAREPOINT
CREATE DATABASE or ALTER DATABASE failed because the resulting cumulative database size would exceed your licensed limit of 4096 MB per databas
OK, I know the "old" XP version of Movie Maker wasnt the best - but as far as quick (ish), easy, and user friendly and FREE movie editting goes - it ticked the boxes. It also follows all the rules for Group Policy etc with no irritations unlike some commercial offerings.
Problem, Microsoft upset the EU Anti Trust bods, so no longer is it in newer versions. Ok, no biggy - lets use the new "Live" version. Er... no - its full of "Live" links and upload and signin rubblish. We have a sitewide ban
Following on from the previous posts in this series, I am continuing to find weird things in the school library. The kids appear to be slowly building a menagerie of animals created from bits and bobs found round the school during after hours study, though I'm not sure what they made this out of.
And what is with the words kraken along the top?
Me and my library co-worker think it may be a cake decoration but we didn't want to take it out of the packaging, it looked too delicate!
Because when you want to have a real rant - one post isnt enough (or you go on too much!), here is part 2 of my (Bil's) rant about Sharepoint Document Libraries...
Firstly - a little disclaimer. I am not the original author of this post, but I agree with the sentiment of it. Its all to easy to think that the Document Libraries are File Shares and treat them as such - particularly if you let your users use the Explorer View (grrrr!) Anyway - the honour of the original poster is the Sharepoint Legend that is Bil Simser. Google is your friend....
Due to some, ahem, technical difficulties with getting the custom usage provider to actually trigger (registering wasn't a problem, and it did intercept the event, just never actually triggered it's own handler so I essentially spent several days in order to write a solution which comprehensively breaks usage logging) I've been re-evaluating my approach to this.
New method will still involve logging organisation IDs along with users (any direct memberships get logged with the user, chains are
One of the first tasks I've been faced with in my new job is to get some sort of SharePoint usage reporting working. At first I thought this would be nice and easy, after all, SharePoint comes with a nice set of usage reporting which could simply be plugged in to some custom reporting modules - easy, yes?
No. The problem comes in that they want reporting for groups of users. These groups are currently ill-defined, conceptual groupings, so part of the first challenge is to deal with that by ge
So, time to rack up my blog writing a bit more! As you may have read, we have deployed (well still deploying) Windows 7 with Bitlocker as the encryption for all our Staff Laptops. We are using Toshiba Tecra A10s by the way.
While we were testing, we came across some things that were a real pain. The first being that unless you are a local admin, you cannot change the Bitlocker pin. Problem - big problem. Under XP, we did used to have Staff as local admins - but used GPs and Software Restricti
Hello again everyone! Here is ther final part of my wee guide on getting SCCM, Windows 7 and Bitlocker all done together...! Sorry its taken a bit longer to get this updated, been busy on another project which I will blog about next
6. Well - Part 5 from the last post really - explaining the "fancy stuff" that happens after the build and main software drop...
The main thing going on here is the auto log in. This is needed to run a load of a load of first use stuff for my techies. So, what
A little game for you. Exceptionally geeky folks may get this immediately (or even know already what this post will be about). What is wrong with this picture?
I'll let you look at that for a minute. See anything?
OK? Done.
Note the command itself:
dir "windows/logs"
I had no idea until today that, if you include the full path in double quotes, Windows will happily accept the / symbol in place of the normal \ symbol for separating folder names. Go try it now, but wildcards wo
EduGeek is a place I go for [iNSERT CLICHÉ at the coal face] raw advice, debate, thinking and representation from the schools ICT support teams and people. So, when I see a significant (and most of us know just how expensive) stand at BETT 2011 teamed up with... Read more...
And I made a biggy!
This year we decided to set up SIMS Learning Gateway to comply with the 2010 Online Reporting requirements. These required us to provide a means of serving school reports to parents online for which Learning Gateway does perfectly. But as we roll into the close of the written reports cycle, there are lessons to learn.
First off I overestimated how much Assessment Manager can cope with. Figuring staff were used to it for single grades, it is terrible when it comes to wri
Hey,
If anyone is studying for the MCTS 70-680 make sure you check out this dude...
http://www.youtube.com/user/professormesser
Very very good tutorial videos! they are helping me somewhat!
...end
Recently I was asked to assist an IT team in the replacement, installation and migration of their SIMS server. In taking this task on, I considered the following potential slip-ups that might occur during or after a migration to a new SIMS server and I thought it might be nice to share these:
- What is the current server technology (Server 2003 for example), and can this be upgraded during the process (Ensuring any version chosen is supported)?
- What is the current server
