Pearson onscreen platform installation woes

[6Foot2]

Have you signed in to the Invigilator sowtware, otherwise the test players won't connect.

 

I guess I will have to wait until tomorrow to see if the move to another server has solved things. The Invigilator password is with the Exams Officer.

 

Fingers crossed for tomorrow then...

[Sam_Brown]

I guess I will have to wait until tomorrow to see if the move to another server has solved things. The Invigilator password is with the Exams Officer.

 

Fingers crossed for tomorrow then...

 

It's not the worst software to install from scratch although you will need to re setup the invigilator / rooms etc. I've done it twice this last few weeks. Once on a laptop as a last minute temp fix then finally on a new server as a permanent solution.

[Zourous]

Hi Dave, I had this if it's the same problem. Add the connection manually by putting in the IP address of the invilgilator PC. Sometimes it finds automatically sometimes it doesn't, but not sure why.

[free780]

Someones going to create a power shell script to automate this.

[themightymrp]

@DaveP - how did it go? Any luck?

[slinky]

Hope it all went well @DaveP

[6Foot2]

@DaveP - how did it go? Any luck?

 

Hope it all went well @DaveP

 

We have just started the exam. We deferred the start of the exam for an hour as it still wasn't working. Some stations refused to install the POP player so we discarded those as potential exam stations. We had one student who was a no-show.

 

Thanks all.

[CyberDrac]

As I've said previously (which given that someone was talking about providing the invigilator machine name as an IP) DNS is vital, "ipconfig /registerdns" on each of the student machines immediately prior to trying to connect (we use Impero to achieve this) saved us from exactly this scenario.

[HELPme]

Hi all

 

Newbie here

 

Having read all the pros and cons on this software, i'm afraid to ask if anyone has managed to get this working with CC4 yet?

[gillop]

If CC4 is citrix based I'm afraid the answer could be no, it all worked for us with the exception of the video playback, so i had to convert an ICT suite back to hybrids.

 

When I phoned them, they gave me the impression that it's not been designed to work with thin client.

[Zourous]

All went wrong again today! Managed to login to the admin dashboard for the first time in a week (had to cancel 4 sets of exams in the meantime whilst being sent on wild goose chases by their support) by not installing the server side on a server but on the examiners PC instead along with the admin dashboard!

 

When it came to the exams, 5 students couldn't log on as even though the test player seemed to be sitting happily on the login screen they wouldn't connect properly. I think now that it was because the inviligator PC ip address has changed since the last time it was used, but then why show the login screen and not the usual discovery screen! These students had to be dismissed as we couldn't sort it out without a lot of talking and faffing around whilst other students took their exam.

 

And then one student got to question 17 out of 18 and before the software crashed out on them with an application fault type of error. I had to log them off and log them back on again in the hope the test would resume once logged back in, but nope, all answers lost and back to the beginning again!!!

 

Without doubt the most shocking piece of software I've ever used, there just seems to be loads of connectivity type problems with little or no error checking.

 

I read also on their website a third incarnation will be due out soon. I hope they've learnt from all of this.

[6Foot2]

All went wrong again today!..

 

Sorry to hear that. We have an even bigger set of students taking exams tomorrow than today's set.

 

I am not looking forward to it.

[gillop]

We had a couple of pcs fail, but we were able to recover the exam on another machine using the hidden menu mentioned in the documentation, but you do have to phonevup for the password.

[mpatkts]

Update from KTS – RM CC4 network – running the November 2014 version of POP.

Our exams officer was able to log into the Admin dashboard and download a demo test – no time at present to actually take the demo test today but will try this asap. As already mentioned we have previously had no problem with running these tests, only one blip when we had to use the password from Pearson for one student to start the test again. But this software has taken an unreasonable amount of my time.

One thing I have always done is each time Pearson do an upgrade I have removed everything – Exam Centre Service, Admin Dashboard, Invigilator Dashboard and the Testplayer package. Then reinstalled the new version and created a new package – in the order as above and when installing the next bit made sure that the ECS was running then the Admin dashboard open and logged into when installing the Invigilator Dashboard and both logged into when assigning the TestPlayer package. I didn’t install Microsoft Visual C ++ 2012 as RM said that this would probably mess up some of our other third party software so we still have the 2008 version. Our Internet providers are the Hertfordshire Grid and I have ensured that port 443 is open. Our network config is – Proxy Enabled – http://:80.

Anyway, after seeing all of the recent posts I don’t know how an actual demo test will go!

[Kenny_G]

We are running a test now on CC4. Apart from a few little niggles it has gone fine without any problems.

[6Foot2]

Going fairly smoothly today: One station frozen after logon to the exam environment but before the exam started, another crashed after the student had finished the exam all but one questions answered (which is what he had intended. Odd)

[HELPme]

did you manage to make a CC4 package for Testplayer?

 

ive tried wininstall LE and importing in RMMC without any luck

[themightymrp]

Ran our first exam this morning using the latest version of the software. Surprised to say, it all worked fine! No errors. Fingers crossed that the others we have coming up will go just as well.

[mpatkts]

did you manage to make a CC4 package for Testplayer?

 

ive tried wininstall LE and importing in RMMC without any luck

 

I just used Application Wizard on a clean machine choosing the option to repackage an existing msi. When I assigned the package I made sure that both the Admin and the Invigilator dashboards were open and logged into. Also created a path rule: C:\Program Files\Pearson\TestPlayer\Edi.Advance.Tdp.Client.exe .

[HELPme]

I've tried that (apart from create a path rule. not sure how that wold help as the .exe is just the server installation file ) but when its been assigned I keep getting package declined. Would it be possible to have your package so I can try that?

[mpatkts]

I've tried that (apart from create a path rule. not sure how that wold help as the .exe is just the server installation file ) but when its been assigned I keep getting package declined. Would it be possible to have your package so I can try that?

 

I have exported our package which is 107Mb so don't quite know how I can get this to you as I have never used data sharing! I also don't know why I had created the path rule but it was back in June 2013 and I'm not going to remove it just in case. I will try setting up a Google Drive account tomorrow if you like.

[Greenbeast]

I'm trying to get this working on behalf of a school, I'm stuck at the Invigilator Dashboard stage, it's installed and when I log in as a domain admin with roaming profile it runs but as soon as I use an account that isn't a domain admin (even with local admin rights), or has a mandatory profile, it refuses to run, any ideas?

[Abe]

Have you tried using a local administrator account i.e. one with a local profile? It's possible that this won't work if Group Policy has been set to define a common shared profile path (mandatory or otherwise) for all users combined with enabling "Do not log users on with temporary profiles".

 

We've been struggling with this software for a couple of years now and at some point about a year ago Invigilator Dashboard just stopped working as a non-admin user, which is when we resorted to using the local admin account on the invigilator computer.

[StephenHardy]

Am I missing something here regarding the package deployments? We just grab the msi's from the server we installed the admin dashboard on!? We the import these into the RMMC and deploy, no issues apart from mpatkts we have to completely remove and reinstall every update.

[6Foot2]

Having successfully deployed and run these tests I can see 'from the other side' what some of the issues were for us.

 

We did not have the C++ Redistributable package installed at our stations and I could not find a way to automate its deployment in the time allowed. My only option: Install it at each station by hand.

 

It was not included in the install instructions that the invigilator software should be running at the invigilator station when Test Player is running for a successful connection [This information was included in our copy of the invigilator's instructions] I can see the logic of this now but it was not clear when I was deploying Test Player to the stations and testing for a successful deployment.

 

Some stations 'refused' the package without any meaningful error message.

 

Furthermore when I called the supplier helpline I was told:

 

We do not support the software, we only supply it to schools

 

This made me very unhappy.