teckedd Posted January 15, 2009 Posted January 15, 2009 Hi Everyone, I am currently looking at SIMS Learning Gateway (SLG) and I have a few questions: 1. If we go for internal hosting what licenses do we require for SharePoint 2007/ Windows server /SQL Server to allow access to the different user types (Staff/Pupils/Parents/Governors) 2. Advantages/disadvantages of internal vs external hosting (our LEA are not offering a LEA hosted solution) 3. What does it do to AD regarding the creation of staff and pupil accounts? If you want to use the SLG accounts for domain logon what customizations/template options do you have (e.g. group membership/ username format/ etc) If you have any other experiences of it that you would like to share that would be great. Thanks Edd
jamesb Posted January 15, 2009 Posted January 15, 2009 1. If we go for internal hosting what licenses do we require for SharePoint 2007/ Windows server /SQL Server to allow access to the different user types (Staff/Pupils/Parents/Governors) Most likely an external access connector to provide for all users who are not members of the school. Best bet is to discuss this with whoever provides your licensing if you use Volume Licensing. 2. Advantages/disadvantages of internal vs external hosting (our LEA are not offering a LEA hosted solution) External hosting means much less technical overhead for your side of things. Internal hosting means that you will be able to have the SLG accounts created on your own Active Directory rather than a remote one, but does add a large workload. One of the big advantages of internal hosting is that it would mean you have a SharePoint server for any other purposes that you may be able to put it to, and a lot more control over the way it appears and acts. 3. What does it do to AD regarding the creation of staff and pupil accounts? If you want to use the SLG accounts for domain logon what customizations/template options do you have (e.g. group membership/ username format/ etc) With external hosting it does nothing to your own AD, though you can still decide username format. Internal hosting by default it will create users in a single OU with group memberships as defined by you (usually Parents, Staff, Students, Teachers, Admins, students can also be given memberships of groups by year and class). For more powerful setups you can buy customisation. I have seen the provisioning service used to create an entire AD structure including OUs by class, creating shared areas for accounts, and setting up Exchange accounts for users. This is an extra service which needs to be purchased however, and does add to the administrative overhead when running upgrades to the provisioning service. If you have any other experiences of it that you would like to share that would be great. Thanks Edd
ChrisP Posted January 20, 2009 Posted January 20, 2009 We have just taken on a hosted SLG in November. and i'm not that impressed tbh. VPN link to SIMS seems to go down every two weeks here. Remember that SLG is basically only good for marksheets and profiles... even these modules are feature limited.
Sylv3r Posted January 20, 2009 Posted January 20, 2009 Remember that SLG is basically only good for marksheets and profiles... even these modules are feature limited. I agree they are not feature packed, but I would envisage further work to be done on them. We also use the attendance module on our internally hosted site and have been impressed with it.
teckedd Posted January 23, 2009 Author Posted January 23, 2009 Thanks everyone for your thoughts. I am now looking at the pros and cons of MOSS2007 vs SharePoint Services 3 Any Thoughts. Thanks Edd
wesleyw Posted January 23, 2009 Posted January 23, 2009 You'll need inernal connector licenses for Employees or individual CALs which ever is cheapest and an external connector for all none employees such as parents, governors and the pupils. Wes
jamesb Posted January 23, 2009 Posted January 23, 2009 I am now looking at the pros and cons of MOSS2007 vs SharePoint Services 3 Any Thoughts. All depends on how ambitious you plan on being. If you just want the SLG parts then WSS3 will be fine. If you want the possibility to massively expand into a full Sharepoint-based VLE and collaboration system with blogs, personal sites for all users, wikis and so on then you probably want MOSS2007. Incidentally with the SLG Provisioning tool you can provision students by class, year, registration group and so on. Makes setting up custom pages for years, subjects, particular groups and so on rather easy, and Sharepoint Audiencing is very effective.
joseph Posted January 27, 2009 Posted January 27, 2009 If you go for LG be careful, we bougth the version 1, it costed us a fortune and then three months after they released version 2. Now the problem is that they don't really care about ppl in version 1 and the support is absoluttely c**p. Then we asked what to do because they are discontinuing the support for version 1 in May (I think) and the answear is that we will have to buy the version 2... which again costs a lot (installation, licenses, fligths,etc...) So I wonder if you buy version 2 and then they release version3... is it going to happen again????????????? :eek:
wesleyw Posted January 27, 2009 Posted January 27, 2009 We had bought v1 but as we were using MOSS2007 as our base it wouldn't work so we got V2 when it was ready (only paid for the one of them). I don't think V2 is going anywhere soon though. I think V1 was a complete mistake really Wes
Quackers Posted January 27, 2009 Posted January 27, 2009 We have the SIMS Learning Gateway, and if your after a solution to offer the parent access to pupil information ONLYi would recommend Insight from Tasc software instead. Its much better. We are only going to use the SIMS Learning Gateway for pupils to see information on the intranet, and for teachers with profiles/mark sheets. It was orginally going to be for parents too, but we found Tasc software's offering so much better, more information, better layout, better managment, better support. costs a fraction of Sims solution.
wesleyw Posted January 28, 2009 Posted January 28, 2009 That could be said of sharepoint at times too! Wes
Tiger Posted January 28, 2009 Posted January 28, 2009 Its a load of crap slow and keeps breaking. Alumwell, Is your comment in reference to Capita or Tasc or both? Please expand on your experience - it sounds as if we should learn something here. Thanks in advance.
GrumbleDook Posted January 28, 2009 Posted January 28, 2009 Having had a look at TASC's software again recently (unfortunately didn't get a decent chance to catch up with them at BETT) then it could be what you need. I would also look at other possibilities if you only want 'read' access (ie you just want to present the relevant SIMS information rather than make it two-way) then Twynham College could help too. Richard at SalamanderSoft would be a good person to chat with too. SLG is the complete package to have read/write access (where possible) to SIMS, but not everyone needs it to start with and you might want to explore your options.
jenny_urey Posted January 29, 2009 Posted January 29, 2009 Hi Everyone, I am currently looking at SIMS Learning Gateway (SLG) and I have a few questions: 1. If we go for internal hosting what licenses do we require for SharePoint 2007/ Windows server /SQL Server to allow access to the different user types (Staff/Pupils/Parents/Governors) 2. Advantages/disadvantages of internal vs external hosting (our LEA are not offering a LEA hosted solution) 3. What does it do to AD regarding the creation of staff and pupil accounts? If you want to use the SLG accounts for domain logon what customizations/template options do you have (e.g. group membership/ username format/ etc) If you have any other experiences of it that you would like to share that would be great. Thanks Edd There are other options available without the budget blowing Sharepoint Route enabling staff & parents to access school data. All hosted from your school and protecting students data from outside companies. All you need is an IS / IP address. I am biaised due to who I work for though neither are we the only ones offering solutions....
jenny_urey Posted January 29, 2009 Posted January 29, 2009 Having had a look at TASC's software again recently (unfortunately didn't get a decent chance to catch up with them at BETT) then it could be what you need. I would also look at other possibilities if you only want 'read' access (ie you just want to present the relevant SIMS information rather than make it two-way) then Twynham College could help too. Richard at SalamanderSoft would be a good person to chat with too. SLG is the complete package to have read/write access (where possible) to SIMS, but not everyone needs it to start with and you might want to explore your options. Google search TASC INSIGHT and contact office for a free trial.... TRUE realtime read SIMS. As soon as register taken and saved in SIMS, data available for parents to see - as with behaviour, reporting, notices.... and following other comments on forum, you dont need Sharepoint just an IS - and an IP address. Hosted from school so no worries about external company and Data Protection Act 1996! Nice GUI too
jenny_urey Posted January 29, 2009 Posted January 29, 2009 Its a load of crap slow and keeps breaking. Careful... make sure you say who you are talking about! Gosh! Insight BETA version and not released till we get all our schools testing feedback. Looks like release due Mid Feb
alexbear1 Posted February 6, 2009 Posted February 6, 2009 ok be kind to a newbie!!! if I buy LG then will it link dynamically with Uniservity? what I want is to be able to have 2 way traffic on basic pupil data which Uniservity (CRAP) can do now but will LG let me transfer data from the markbook straight into assessment manager? Me thinks not but I have to find a solution as our LA forced Uniservity onto us and this bit just don;t work and I belive it nver will as Capita won't give them the code... what a surprise. any ideas out there to solve this?
vikpaw Posted February 7, 2009 Posted February 7, 2009 I'm no expert on this, we are just looking at the LG route ourselves. However, Uniservity is listed as a Capita - Technical Partner with at least read access to the data. So they should surely be working together to solve any issues. LG definitely lets you access marksheets and enter data live into the SIMS system, so with everything in a sharepoint shell i would imagine you can do what you want.
Tonyoung Posted February 7, 2009 Posted February 7, 2009 ok be kind to a newbie!!! if I buy LG then will it link dynamically with Uniservity? what I want is to be able to have 2 way traffic on basic pupil data which Uniservity (CRAP) can do now but will LG let me transfer data from the markbook straight into assessment manager? Me thinks not but I have to find a solution as our LA forced Uniservity onto us and this bit just don;t work and I belive it nver will as Capita won't give them the code... what a surprise. any ideas out there to solve this? Firstly welcome to this house of madness. Secondly newbies have a habit of asking the most difficult questions and I think the transfer of VLE data to SIMS AM is one of them. Some more questions for you 1) what data do you have in the ClC markbook ? 2) have you already created the marksheets, aspects and templates in AM to accept your clc markbook data ? Once the data is in AM then the Learning Gateway can expose it to all and secondly UniServity could choose to embed a clc web part into your learning gateway. Out of interest what do your authority believe they bought and what code is needed ?
MsFrench Posted February 8, 2009 Posted February 8, 2009 (edited) www.MyChildAtSchool.com Started a new thread. Edited February 9, 2009 by MsFrench
Dantech Posted July 13, 2009 Posted July 13, 2009 (edited) Hi The decision was made above my head to go for the full blown SLG. I went for the full MOSS 2007 and am thrilled that we now have the full sharepoint for other uses too. I insisted on a hosted solution for the same reason we host our own website and moodle. The thing keeps going internally so your lessons and access to these systems is a lot more reliable. I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this but I am struggling with the external connection via our county firewall. The SLG engineers created our sharepoint in the format http://ourserver:38040/SLG/default aspx for example. Since we need an SSL connection I have obtained a certificate from ipsCA (FREE) and installed it. I had to add an https connection to the SLG website and bound it to port 443 to allow it through the county firewall. Apparently once the end user logs in it drops back to an http connection which means data over the internet is vunerable. Has anyone out then been through this or is it just me? Edited July 13, 2009 by Dantech Spelling typo
matt40k Posted July 13, 2009 Posted July 13, 2009 @Dantech Just an idea, can you remove HTTP from IIS, just leaving HTTPS. Failing that, ask the LA to only reverse proxy HTTPS traffic. Other then that, no idea. ok be kind to a newbie!!! if I buy LG then will it link dynamically with Uniservity? what I want is to be able to have 2 way traffic on basic pupil data which Uniservity (CRAP) can do now but will LG let me transfer data from the markbook straight into assessment manager? Me thinks not but I have to find a solution as our LA forced Uniservity onto us and this bit just don;t work and I belive it nver will as Capita won't give them the code... what a surprise. any ideas out there to solve this? You can rip the sourcecode if you really wanted to, I agree, I doube Capita will release the source code any time soon. However they do provide a really nice business object to read\write to and from SIMS. Uniservity could, if they wanted to, do anything SLG2 can do. 1
Dantech Posted July 13, 2009 Posted July 13, 2009 matt40k - Please can you clarify what you mean by reverse proxy? I thought about removing the http only and this was suggested by Mouchel (who support Lincolnshire). Not sure if this will work or if I will totally kill the SLG. I have logged a support call with SIMS on this and will see what they say.
matt40k Posted July 13, 2009 Posted July 13, 2009 Basically your LA prob won't the HTTP port, they setup a reverse proxy, basically incoming traffic is sent via a proxy server rather then going direct, same as normal proxy, just in reverse.
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