Jacques

I am sure you will be able to streamline things!! I am glad you can get into the IT side of things there too!! Are you running a flight simulator club yet??

Briefly saw that last night, then it was fixed. Never trust these HUMANS! You should see what they get upto in our school!!

WOW!!! Great stuff! (Great Job ZeroHour!!)

Thanks srochford I will defenitly look into this!

Hi Rob!! You see - Us Geeks always find a way to get back together! Nice to have you here!

Very impressed!! Could loose your eyebrows in no time!!

Who remembers this seriously cool display?? [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUw9MXnv2iw]YouTube - Edugeek-BETT09[/ame]

We use Symantec Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam for Exchange Server. Not cheap, but really really solid - very easy to manage. Seriously good spam filtering! We had the same problems, and we have email accounts for all our students as well - Don't want them to get Viagra adverts every day - or worse "enlargement" advise! If you are serious about stopping the problem - get a reputable solution!

@ Domino: Love That!!!

I can't thank all of you enough for sharing your situations and reasons for doing that! This got us thinking of a number of pro's and con's for doing it in any way really! I like the use of the student number, but you need to add to it some year group identifier? I like the fact that if you plan this properly, you never have to re-create any accounts! I would like to make it as easy as posable for the younger kids, but I also realise that they are so used to computers in year 3, that they most probably would be fine with a number? (They know their own mobile phone number!!) EDUGEEK is a very impressive tool

We use hidden shares to make it easier for students to get to their directories - all other students directories is hidden. No clutter. The only way to hide directories from showing is by hidden share. (What you don't see, won't bother or be a temptation to you) We do the same with teachers and admin staff - this is a preferred and promoted way for creating shares??

We have full access to ALL teachers to student directories - not that it is used much. The reasoning is that the student drive is for school use only, and there should not be anything that staff cant have access to. Responsability is also given to Head's of Year, to check that no inapropriate files are stored in the student directories. (not that they really do it - but that is the theory) We had it like this for the past few years, with NO problems. We do have other shared directories where classes and year groups can share data, as well as teacher / student share space, were teachers can post file that students can only read / copy if needed.

Just had a discussion with Vikpaw and Artsaudi, and keeping the same username will become even more important if we implement Learning Gateway on portal server. You realy do not want to redo them every year, and recreate them in the VLE?? It seems like the use of the student number is not a bad idea if you are useing this name as email address etc etc. It will protect them a little more than using Initials and Last Name? Now we have even more reason to figure out a change of student user accounts!

Hi kmount, I would have loved to be able to go for something simple!! No Seriously!! Problem is being in an Arabic country - halve my students have the same first name! (hence the most used name in the world) and 80% have an "AL-" or "EL-" as the first part of their last name! (eg AL-Makhoul) Splitting them by Year group makes it significantly easier.

Hi John!! Nice to hear from you! Our school is Nursery - IB (Year 13) - entry year might be a little confusing, but I like the 3 + 3 idea from first name + last name. It is the numeric part that is still going to be a show stopper. I think Laserbalzer's year they will graduate is maybe workable??