Salamander or Locker? - (or any others)

[ronnoco]

Hello all,

 

I've been using Salamander free edition since September. It has worked well for creating the csv's and initially creating the Teams but we are having all sorts of issues with memberships not being accurate despite not getting errors in SDS after upload.

 

We have decided to opt for a managed service and this will give us lots of other benefits. I'm curious what peoples thoughts are on both Locker and Salamander? (or any others)

 

Are many people using these paid for versions? Does it all work as expected or do you still get niggles?

 

Many Thanks!

[Andycat]

We've been using Locker( Ruler) since they launched. Lots of support, they change things quite reactively by request. Been very happy with them.

[supportman]

We've used both but I preferred ruler (rebranded to locker now). Ruler was much nicer in terms of its interface and easier to understand.

 

Salamander is nice once its setup but any change requires them to remote in and set a load of complicated scripts up.

 

They both performed pretty much the same.

[aguacate]

Happy user of Salamander for 3 years, tried Locker due to it been used elsewhere in the MAT and regretted it from day one, we had all sorts of issues with distribution lists being inaccurate, creating duplicate accounts,not working with our hybrid setup, honestly we had issues every single day, also the software was not able to distinguish between lowercase and upper case until they released a new version. Compared to Salamander its years behind in its capabilities, the main issue for me is that it uses email in sims as the unique identifier, so if the email is wrong you will get all sorts of problems, I'm not expert but I think they should have used a more unique identifier. I've returned to salamander and whilst Locker has an interface you cant really tell what it is doing and you have to send the logs to support anyway.

 

Your experience may vary but I'm not going back to Locker.

[simpsonj]

We've been using RM Unify for a number of years. It may, or may not, do what you're after, but it can auto-generate users, groups and distribution lists direct from SIMS or AD into O365 or Google (or both).

 

It has increased its cost recently, but it has been pretty straightforward to use.

[bobsmith]

Still loving Salamander - it's saved so many man hours and transformed the work flow here.

 

nobody has to chase poor old IT support - all user accounts created and provisioned from SIMS.

 

Being scripted it can do pretty much anything you ask them to do.

 

Had zero problems that weren't caused by us so far.

[jhothersall]

We are using Locker and really love the product !!!

[TechMonkey]

Not wanting to go off topic too much but it will be interesting to see where these type of resources go. I think they are brilliant, Salamander user here, but looking to the future if we go serverless where does Salamander sit in our infrastructure? Would we have to keep an AD server just for Salamander? May have to wait to see which of them creates a fully cloud version to link cloud MIS to cloud AD.

[HPlum78]

So cloud HR systems have started to provision directly into Azure AD and then if required into on prem AD. I can only guess that cloud MIS providers are looking at doing the same? Would be worth putting the question to the likes of Bromcom/ iSAMs Et al to see if they are looking @ this.

[Sylv3r]

We are a happy Ruler (Locker) customer and have been for a year or so. We will be a 48 school Trust come June next year and are contemplating purchasing for each school just to save the headache of day-to-day account management.

 

Salamander from what I see is also an excellent product and I don't think there's a great deal between the two - I went with Locker primarily because of the GUI rather than the scripting element.

[supportman]

So cloud HR systems have started to provision directly into Azure AD and then if required into on prem AD. I can only guess that cloud MIS providers are looking at doing the same? Would be worth putting the question to the likes of Bromcom/ iSAMs Et al to see if they are looking @ this.

 

Bromcom actually just released this last month. Full Azure user creation and group sync for Office 365. No local AD though.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Not wanting to go off topic too much but it will be interesting to see where these type of resources go. I think they are brilliant, Salamander user here, but looking to the future if we go serverless where does Salamander sit in our infrastructure? Would we have to keep an AD server just for Salamander? May have to wait to see which of them creates a fully cloud version to link cloud MIS to cloud AD.

 

I heard a rumour that salamander were working on a cloud product of some kind, not sure if its just the management side of things or what but could be cool!

[HPlum78]

If Bromcom can provision into Azure AD then you could get it provisioned in to an on prem AD infrastructure If absolutely required. Good spot mind.

[KK20]

I had a few issues with Salamander free not working for us. I looked into powershell "doing it myself" and that is what I do. We use isams so I created a couple of APIs for the sources and used powershell to sort the XML feed from the API into a useable format. This is then sent to SDS. Scheduled task takes care of it.

 

I also use powershell and a CSV to keep my "manual" teams updated with security groups, that way staff can create manual groups and I can keep these up to date with pupils/staff members - we dont use premium Azure so I cannot use dynamic groups.

 

Lastly, I use powershell to create a CSV for pupil onedrive links, I also keep the pupil onedrive areas up to date with staff as admin so that staff can access pupil onedrive areas.

[_techie_]

Lastly, I use powershell to create a CSV for pupil onedrive links, I also keep the pupil onedrive areas up to date with staff as admin so that staff can access pupil onedrive areas.

 

How do you do the delegate access on Pupil OneDrive folders for staff?

[kevin_lane]

How do you do the delegate access on Pupil OneDrive folders for staff?

 

You have to change the permissions on the share point back end I will try and find what you need to change for tomorrow

[_techie_]

I'm aware that you can do this on SharePoint, but do you script this using powershell somehow?

Cheers

[ozydave]

Only ever used salamander, would never change it

[Mr.Ben]

Not wanting to go off topic too much but it will be interesting to see where these type of resources go. I think they are brilliant, Salamander user here, but looking to the future if we go serverless where does Salamander sit in our infrastructure? Would we have to keep an AD server just for Salamander? May have to wait to see which of them creates a fully cloud version to link cloud MIS to cloud AD.

We are 100% cloud and use Salamander.

 

We host it on a B2s server in Azure for £10/pm (Backup is about £2/pm)

 

Salamander take all the info from our cloud MIS and put it straight into O365, Apple School Manager and Google.

 

They are awesome! The best £8k I spend per year.

[willtech]

Salamander hands down all the things we have asked for they have been able to deliver on.

[KK20]

How do you do the delegate access on Pupil OneDrive folders for staff?

 

you add the teachers to the "site collection admin" for each pupil. This is onerous and WILL get you throttled if you arent careful. My script has too much "personal to us" for me to edit out but the core is the command:

 

 

$fullpath = $profileURL.OnedriveURL

Set-SPOUser -Site $fullPath -LoginName $ADStaffGroupMember-IsSiteCollectionAdmin $true

 

this is where $profileURL is built up earlier from my pupil UPNs adn the $ADStaffGroupMember are my staff UPN. I loop both but have a timer inbetween pupils so that I dont get throttled (you WILL get throttled otherwise, this is a pretty intensive loop)

 

I have allsorts of checking so that im not re-adding the same staff members all the time. you MUST make sure that the service admin username that you use is also added as a site collection admin!

 

It is a good idea for this script to build up the $profileURL.OnedriveURL and pupilname into a CSV, this can be put on a fileshare so staff can click on the URL for each pupil - makes getting into the pupil ondrive much easier. My script takes over tens hours to run due to the artificial timers between each pupil, it could be tidied up but I run this once per week and have a singular "run this for one pupil" script should we have a new starter that is needed now.

 

As for onboarding teams, I did the following this year - archived old teams, uploaded one set of CSVs, left my script to carry on. No changes to any of my files or scripts. I simply use the single command:

 

Send-CsvFiles -profileName 'PROFILE NAME' -userName 'SERVICEACCOUNT' -csvFolderPath 'CSVPATH' -validate -logPath 'LOGPATH' -useStoredCredentials

 

CSV files are extracted from isams using a script that runs the API, parses it into a CSV.

Edited September 8, 2022 by KK20

[FragglePete]

We use Locker - purely at the time to get Salamander onboarded was a long wait time.

 

Judge a company at how quick their support responds at the start of the academic year - with the two support issues I've raised this week I've had a response and solution within 30 minutes.

 

I do have to do a bit of manual work to get locker setup for each academic year, but that's primarily because we already use Burconix to onboard our students from SIMS into AD so we don't allow Locker to create users but it does the good job at everything else.

 

Pete

[TechMonkey]

Used to be with Salamander, got Locker at my new place due to Salamander being booked up till November

 

Both are great companies with great products. The only difference I can see is Salamander is more flexible and customisable, but you have to get their Techs to do the adjustments. Locker is more rigid but you have a nice GUI that you can make changes yourself.

[psydii]

Further to @KK20 script snippet:

 

https://wicher.co.uk/onedrive-site-collection-administrators/

 

To do this for future account you need to pre-provisioning Onedrive for users:

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/pre-provision-accounts?redirectSourcePath=%252fen-us%252farticle%252fpre-provision-onedrive-for-users-in-your-organization-ceef6623-f54f-404d-8ee3-3ce1e338db07

 

and during that process apply the Site Owners. We have a group that is empty that we can add people to on the occasion we need to grant this sort of global access. If we were going to be fancy, we'd also have a group per user so we could selectively target who gets additional access to what.

 

That said, as is often the case, having Salamander do all this for you is really the better answer.

[mraerosmith]

Locker hands down, had nothing but issues with Salamander, my MAT now uses locker in its 3 secondarys and 26 primarys , and we wouldnt look back.

[Aprice]

I've found Salamander to be great, provided you know exactly what you want it to do, their onboarding process was very thorough as well. It made life so much easier at my previous site. The problem now I've moved is that whoever set it up at my new site didn't really know what they wanted it to do, so its made a bit of a mess and I just can't really trust it. (not Salamander's fault whatsoever). Should have a call with them to go over the configuration at the end of this month.

 

Also it relies on the MIS being correct, not full of spelling mistakes and fields that should be populated not being populated, which seems to happen more frequently than I'd like

 

It would be nice if making changes yourself was possible, I can understand though why they manage changes themselves though.