Shared Drive

[Bongo]

We have had a few problems recently with teachers saving confidential data to a public shared drive meant for pupil resources

 

As a parent recently helpfully informed the local press that disability info was freely available at school the Head had asked me to tighten up the whole system. As a starting point I need to at least monitor who has added files to the drive and would be overjoyed if a utility/script was available which popped up a dialogue box when users try to save to the drive which could be customised, you know the sort of thing "you are about to save something which can be seen by everyone etc". Does anyone know of any such software I could try?

 

Also what systems do other employ to avoid this scenario?

 

Cheers

 

Simon

[Domino]

 

Also what systems do other employ to avoid this scenario?

 

 

Staff education, coupled with naming the drive obviously. (eg, pupilshare, staffshare). If staff place something where it shouldn't be, they should be chewed out and shown DPA, CP and BECTA guidelines

 

There are seldom good technological responses to a behavioural problems.

[waldronm2000]

I don't think it would be technically possible to do exactly what you want with a script, as a mapped drive is just seen by windows as a storage location like any other. Putting a device driver in between that tries to filter access would raise too many issues, as what you would see at the user level as saving a file is at the OS level actually a series of individual events, and identifying the one to intercept would be difficult.

 

However, I know of at least one school that avoids this issue by not having any shared folders that pupils can access. All resources that are to be made available to pupils are placed on the learning platform. This has the advantage that uploads can be logged, and you would hope it would be much more obvious to the staff when they are making information available to pupils.

[laserblazer]

Our main shared drive on the curriculum server has an admin folder (me only) staff (staff only) curriculum (pupils and staff). It's not foolproof because we have fools who give the kids their username and password. In any non-teaching environment, an employee would be shot at dawn but the teachers get away with it.

[dhicks]

Also what systems do other employ to avoid this scenario?

 

You could have staff log in to a terminal services session or similar to edit confidential information, that way there's less for them to get confused about (no saving to the wrong drive).

 

--

David Hicks

[Bongo]

Staff education, coupled with naming the drive obviously. (eg, pupilshare, staffshare). If staff place something where it shouldn't be, they should be chewed out and shown DPA, CP and BECTA guidelines

 

There are seldom good technological responses to a behavioural problems.

 

Absolutely and they are very apologetic once discovered (often by pupils) but still it occurs! We do have shares with what you think are obvious names like PUBLIC and STAFF but we then have staff setting up their own staff folders inside subject areas on the PUBLIC drive. I did find an audit tool sharealarm but don't know if a) it's any good and b) whether it will tell us anything useful apart from who to blindfold and stand against the nearest wall.

 

I am considering the vle route but the sheer amount of work involved is a bit mindboggling and we'd seriously need to beef up our Moodle server's capacity.