lsheldon Posted February 18, 2009 Posted February 18, 2009 I am having problems that have occoured after the Prommisor Administrator and ESM server latest upgrade. I have always found this software problematic. I upgraded last week only to find that when the students turned up for the test no flash images were displayed, I rang Edexcel they kept me waiting on the phone forever not seeing the urgency, as i had 18 students down in the exam hall and a less than pleased exams officer. Edexcel onscreen talked me through everything, the usual permissions etc, the only change i made is removing flash 10 and using flash 9 edexcel asked me to do this as they are experiencing issues with flash 10. Edexcel could not resolve the issue. Flash 9 allowed administrator's to see the flash objects where flash 10 would not, but when i log in as a student the flash objects will not display. I have checked that flash works by visiting flash websites and using flash objects they work ok as a student but when is comes to this stofware no flash objects display as a student. Is anyone in the same boat ? Does anyone have any ideas / resolutions ? I am currently unable to let the students take there tests due to this. Thank you for your help and support in advance
Sylv3r Posted February 18, 2009 Posted February 18, 2009 I used to think this software wasn't too bad, in the last week or so I've changed my mind. We have always had issues with the images not loading up, test data not downloaded to the ESM etc. When ever I have needed to ring the support etc, I have always been on quite a while and by the time I get off the phone it doesn't leave much time for the students to undertake the tests. Unfortunately this is the start of online tests and we currently do ALAN and Assett languages online as well as the QCA KS3 ICT tests a few years back, the shift for all exam boards to move online is just around the corner to save on costs etc. Unfortunately the software needs to improve and consideration needs to be given to schools to organise ICT suites for exam use as well as disruption to other lessons.
jsnetman Posted February 18, 2009 Posted February 18, 2009 (edited) Flash not working is down to folder permissions on the client machines. The students need full control of the promissor client folder. You can set this via scripting using xcacls in a machine startup script. I personally tried setting the folder permissions using active directory but for some reason didn't work so used the xcacls method. Edited February 18, 2009 by jsnetman
lsheldon Posted February 18, 2009 Author Posted February 18, 2009 I use thin client, the users have full permission this is one of the first things i did
rasssp Posted February 18, 2009 Posted February 18, 2009 We had the same problem, and again was the promisor folder in program files, users and power users need full access. I ran the update on Monday and it broke itself. But support fixed it. It does seem to hate flash 10 though. Poor coding as usual, it sees flash 10 as flash 1. Never thought double digits would be so hard for programmers...
lsheldon Posted February 20, 2009 Author Posted February 20, 2009 Unfortunatley i tried adding power users , to no avail
mcloum Posted February 20, 2009 Posted February 20, 2009 It is a pain this new prommisor, it was a lot easier when it was ExamBase. If it aint broke dont fix it edexcel! I always log them on as administrator and make sure the invigilator knows the risks and makes sure they log off as soon as the exam is finish. Never had a problem.
lsheldon Posted February 20, 2009 Author Posted February 20, 2009 I wish i could log them on as administrator, but we cannot take the security risks. We will only allow students to use students accounts and staff to use staff accounts. We have assgned special accounts for the exams due to the exam security restriction's the exams officer requires, when they log in to the exam the only software that loads in Prommisor Administrator, this prevents internet usage and games etc. I know education software is rubbish most of the time, but this takes the mik
Hacksawbob Posted February 20, 2009 Posted February 20, 2009 I have a domain group called exams, this group is added to the local admins on the pcs (only in one suite of 30) in this group I have a user a single login which I disable when not in use and/or change the password as soon as the exam is finished that way the kids logon as local admin and take the test once the promissor software is up and running it locks out the desktop (mostly) once the kids are in exam conditions they cant get out to tell anyone the password any shinanigans and they are booted of the exam. You could tie it to certain machines/times/have the account disable automatically after 24hrs etc. you could go around and logon for them so all the see is promissor screen when they enter the exam room... After the last three attempts have had my first successful test session. Not run it since the latest update though.
kmount Posted February 20, 2009 Posted February 20, 2009 Touch wood until now we don't have any problems and ours run as normal users, I guess with this latest upgrade that we've not done yet all this may change =( Sorry to hear of your plight.
NeoPlosive Posted February 20, 2009 Posted February 20, 2009 We seem to be doing okay with the latest update. Our tests on Tuesday (yes, test's during HT) started an hour and a half late - some students left but we got there in the end. The afternoon batch all started fine. Our of interest do you have a copy of the ALAN test demo flash file with mock exams? It may be worth running that and seeing what happens (I can make a copy of the files available to you if you haven't). The folder permissions for our setup grants "Everyone" modify/read/write/other permissions (everything but full). We've also just updated to flash 10.
Hacksawbob Posted February 20, 2009 Posted February 20, 2009 I have some tests somewhere, I think there may be some online from memory, but it wont test promissor/esm system, you need to phone them and get some dummy accounts set up that are set to be active from a certain time, This is the most infuriating part of it as testing requires a phone call to therer support team to get it set up. why they cant have a permanent account set up for testing or a create test user button in the server part I dont know.
NeoPlosive Posted February 22, 2009 Posted February 22, 2009 I have some tests somewhere, I think there may be some online from memory, but it wont test promissor/esm system, you need to phone them and get some dummy accounts set up that are set to be active from a certain time, This is the most infuriating part of it as testing requires a phone call to therer support team to get it set up. why they cant have a permanent account set up for testing or a create test user button in the server part I dont know. Bit different for us. We have some local tests hosted on our intranet (with the exception of the log on stage) these eflect how the client application will act. We get students to run the demo prior to taking the tests so they don't end up logging in and having the problems. Admittedly there really does need to be a test login intergrated too.
lsheldon Posted February 23, 2009 Author Posted February 23, 2009 Please could you make he files available then i will test them, Neoplosive Thank you
lsheldon Posted February 23, 2009 Author Posted February 23, 2009 Been on with edexcel's second line support today. They have given me a workaround, this is to add the exam group to local admin. I have done this on a temprorary basis to allow exams to go ahead but have restricted the users so only prommisor administrator can run on the terminal server for security. They told me i cannot roll back to another version after you have upgraded. 2nd line support are submitting a trouble ticket to the developers to let them know are try and find a resolve to the issues experienced.
Gerry Posted February 23, 2009 Posted February 23, 2009 We were advised by GOLA not to install the latest update because the fixes were minor (i.e. they probably knew it could break the system). As for rolling back to an earlier version, I can't see why not...
lsheldon Posted February 23, 2009 Author Posted February 23, 2009 (edited) 2nd line support said it was not possible it would cause even more problems to rollback after an upgrade, And they could not find the previous version of software's files Its amazing what excuses people come up with Edited February 23, 2009 by lsheldon
NeoPlosive Posted March 6, 2009 Posted March 6, 2009 Sorry for the delay. You may find these useful in the future: http://repository.neoplosive.co.uk/edugeek/packages/ALaN_Practice.zip In theory if they don't work the program won't work (simulates real environment behaviour).
jfairbairn Posted June 2, 2009 Posted June 2, 2009 It's that time of year again, after a painful (though thankfully a small group) edexcel numeracy test, it's time for french reading and listening (joy). The Numeracy test started at 8.45 and started well, I was filled with optimism and started wondering why i had been dreading the test. I was soon reminded , at 9.00, when the rest of the curriculum network users logged on, edexcel online testing started to slow down, panic started to set in with both teacher and invigilators (this was only a very small group, approx 10 pupils). I hasten to add that I'm not one to panic, but all positivity that had built up before 9.00 suddenly evaporated leaving a rather bitter feeling, how could I have been so naive as to believe it would work. We've recently had a fiber backbone put in for the curriculum, we run promissor (a fantastically titled program that should be called the empty promissor or fibber) on a dedicated server, but still it crawls along. I've followed every recommendation that edexcel made, to ensure each pc is configured correctly to give the test the best possible chance and spent a lot of time recently talking to various companies we use regarding ways of segregating the traffic to and from the exam server and there appears to be no easy way around this. I have requested some demo tests for tomorrow, which will be conducted whilst the networks at its busiest, then later we will attempt the same at a quieter time. I will be running the real french reading and listening (back to back) for 19 pupils at 10.30 this thursday (4th june) and my fallback solution is to pull all the uplinks to all the cabs except the cab serving the exam PC's, although this seems an extreme solution and will ruffle many feathers, I am not prepared to faff about and waste my time hanging about during the exam in order to make excuses for edexcel, whilst trying to defend the network. Please excuse me moaning on this post, but you fellow edugeeks are the only people who understand. If anyone has any suggestions as to how to remedy any of these performance issues, they would be gratefully received.
jfairbairn Posted June 5, 2009 Posted June 5, 2009 For those of you waiting with bated breath, losing sleep, wondering... Did the exams run successfully for him? Well, the answer is yes and no. The tests started well, up until the point when 50% of the pupils taking the test realised they were doing last years test. Exams halted, my long suffering collleague Immediately reported the problem to Edexcel. Due to the sheer volume of calls Edexcel were experiencing at that time, the phone was answered by non-support person (a cleaner perhaps or a conscientious passer-by, on hearing screams of anguish coming from within the Edexcel office, went to investigate... I digress) who took details and arranged a callback. This delay affected the whole school (as i disabled the rest of the network) for nearly 2 hours longer than necessary, almost overunning into the next exam and resulted in pupils having no break between exams. - Not good! Once Edexcell had rectified the problem (ha ha ) the tests got underway, it was then discovered that half the pupils had been given the mock tests they had already completed, Ridiculous! So I await instruction as to the next step. All the errors on Edexcel's part aside for a moment, the delivery of the tests (albeit the wrong ones) went smoothly, the machines behaved well. Prior to the exams, during our testing phase, we only had one PC that refused to play the audio clips and due to time constrainsts another PC was used (I suspect a removal and re-install of Flash will remedy this). The pre-exam routine we followed was this... Log on to all PC's to be used as Admin and update prommisor client. Check flash player is installed. Ensure the pupils have full permission to access Edexcel/Promissor folders in C:\Program files. Log of Admin and log on as your test user. Run demo tests (these will have been requested by you from edexcel). Once demo test are completed (assuming no issues) log off test user and log on as Admin and clear Internet cache files. Shutdown PC, it is now ready to be used for Exams. As well as these steps, I disabled the rest of the Curriculum network to ensure there was no other traffic and this made all the difference to performance, compared to the numeracy tests we conducted whilst the rest of the network was up. I hope this post is useful to someone (other than myself, to vent my spleen), I live in hope that one day Edexcel Online testing will be just that, Online, login to a website and sit the exam (in at least IE7), then all we (long suffering tech's) would have to do is update flash and maintain a good internet connection, whilst Edexcel earnt their money by doing everything else at the backend of the website.
mpe Posted June 5, 2009 Posted June 5, 2009 Unfortunately this is the start of online tests and we currently do ALAN and Assett languages online as well as the QCA KS3 ICT tests a few years back, the shift for all exam boards to move online is just around the corner to save on costs etc. Unfortunately the software needs to improve and consideration needs to be given to schools to organise ICT suites for exam use as well as disruption to other lessons. Such software often appearts to be badly written and badly documented. It might well also help if they designed the software with the assumption of being run from a network share, with minimal requirements on the client machine.
mpe Posted June 5, 2009 Posted June 5, 2009 Flash not working is down to folder permissions on the client machines. The students need full control of the promissor client folder. You can set this via scripting using xcacls in a machine startup script. I personally tried setting the folder permissions using active directory but for some reason didn't work so used the xcacls method. If they'd done something sensible like looking in HKCU\\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders and used something under "My Documents", "AppData", "Local Settings", "Local AppData", etc even $TMP and $TEMP then this sort of hack probably wouldn't be needed in the first place.
mpe Posted June 5, 2009 Posted June 5, 2009 We had the same problem, and again was the promisor folder in program files, users and power users need full access. I ran the update on Monday and it broke itself. But support fixed it. It does seem to hate flash 10 though. Poor coding as usual, it sees flash 10 as flash 1. Never thought double digits would be so hard for programmers... These are the same programmers who think that having write access to the place where the executable are stored is a good idea. With that mentality it's probably not too much of a suprise version numbers confuse them. It's actually more of a suprise that they made it up to V9 as opposed to thinking V2 was V0, V3 was V1, V4 was V0, and so on
mpe Posted June 5, 2009 Posted June 5, 2009 we run promissor (a fantastically titled program that should be called the empty promissor or fibber) There's also the irony of the client being called "Administrator". Maybe they paid so much for some consultant to come up wth the silly names that they couldn't afford to employ decent programmers. I've followed every recommendation that edexcel made, to ensure each pc is configured correctly to give the test the best possible chance and spent a lot of time recently talking to various companies we Assuming that is the correct advice in the first place. There's also the issue of even if you do optimise for one specific app you may get something which is sub optimal for everything else. 1
techyphil Posted June 8, 2009 Posted June 8, 2009 The software takes way too much time to setup and get working securely. administrator + supervision nuff said.
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