[sims] Sims on laptops at home

[Kyle]

All our teaching staff were given laptops for when we were in lockdown. All are 365 accounts, all using email, teams and one drive. The one thing we never had time to sort was using Sims. They currently remote into our RDP servers for Sims access but we want to move away from this.

 

Has anyone achieved similar?

[mavhc]

Capita install openvpn to connect to their hosted database, could do similar. Of course a VPN needs lots of planning to stay secure

[3s-gtech]

Always On VPN for us, on all staff laptops. Or you could move to hosted SIMS (not a recommendation, but an alternative at least), or cloud MIS.

 

Bit of work to set up AOVPN, but it’s been good. As you’re already using O365 integration you may find some of its capabilities aren’t needed though, like file server access.

[Mr.Ben]

Bin SIMS and go with a cloud system [emoji12]

 

The other option is to move it to Azure - we do this with our finance and HR System and WVD, much easier to administer and access than on prem.

 

If you are a single school it may balk at the cost though - you would be looking at £200-£300 a month minimum.

[dapaulio]

Aovpn, here too.

Works goods but only problems we do have is solid 3 updates eg workstation patches and major releases

 

@3gtech do you have this problem at all.

[3s-gtech]

Yeah, SOLUS3 won’t work through the VPN for updates. Nor will AB Tutor, no surprise there!

 

I just make sure that updates aren’t applied while staff are on holiday (or lockdown!) and I can deal with the few that aren’t on site at the time.

[Steve21]

Yeah, SOLUS3 won’t work through the VPN for updates. Nor will AB Tutor, no surprise there!

 

I just make sure that updates aren’t applied while staff are on holiday (or lockdown!) and I can deal with the few that aren’t on site at the time.

 

Not sure if that was just a generic comment, or specific to your VPN, but Solus works fine through VPNs, it's normally just some config work that needs doing on them to ensure they register DNS back so it updates it for Solus as by default a lot of VPNs don't always register reverse DNS so Solus can't work out who they are and show as offline. Once that's done they should update as normal over the VPN

 

Steve

[3s-gtech]

Not sure if that was just a generic comment, or specific to your VPN, but Solus works fine through VPNs, it's normally just some config work that needs doing on them to ensure they register DNS back so it updates it for Solus as by default a lot of VPNs don't always register reverse DNS so Solus can't work out who they are and show as offline. Once that's done they should update as normal over the VPN

 

Steve

 

Yes I should have clarified - it doesn’t work through our AoVPN setup and I haven’t dug into why too much as it’s a complex old beast. I suspect as you’ve said - DNS issues as they won’t be registering.

 

Hasn’t bothered me too much, but in an balanced home/school hybrid setup it’d be more important.

[dapaulio]

Yeah, SOLUS3 won’t work through the VPN for updates. Nor will AB Tutor, no surprise there!

 

I just make sure that updates aren’t applied while staff are on holiday (or lockdown!) and I can deal with the few that aren’t on site at the time.

 

I made a really dirty workaround for sims update over aovpn. As we found aovpn didn’t allow the update from solus 3 by updating our sims database queuing every teacher to complain sims isn’t working whilst wfh.

 

I created a robocopy script of a working directory that sync the changes only made to c:\prog x86\sims .net

 

Reason I didn’t overwrite the whole directory was because I found you didn’t have too and it took ages to do. Tbf it took ages to sync the changed files but a lot less than doing the whole folder.

 

Like I said it was dirty but it worked

[Guest Guest]

Updates via SOLUS work fine over aovpn for us, had an update pushed to my laptop this morning

[Koldov]

We use CISCO Anyconnect VPN as it is bundled in with our LGFL offering.

 

SIMS works fine apart from updating as some others have said (it shows the client off-line in SOLUS 3) I haven't got round to figuring out why, but we only have it for one or two users so it hasn't been a major issue.

[Koldov]

Is that set in Windows DNS or via the VPN (our clients certainly show up in our DNS records)?

 

Would it be fairly generic or VPN specific?

 

If generic would anyone like to share the settings that need to be implemented to make SOLUS 3 work?

[ITGURU]

With RemoteApp they can install the apps into their start menu so can launch sims directly locally over the https connection. saves them logging into the system everytime