Jacques

I am sure you will be able to streamline things!! I am glad you can get into the IT side of things there too!! Are you running a flight simulator club yet??

Briefly saw that last night, then it was fixed. Never trust these HUMANS! You should see what they get upto in our school!!

WOW!!! Great stuff! (Great Job ZeroHour!!)

Thanks srochford I will defenitly look into this!

Hi Rob!! You see - Us Geeks always find a way to get back together! Nice to have you here!

Very impressed!! Could loose your eyebrows in no time!!

Who remembers this seriously cool display?? [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUw9MXnv2iw]YouTube - Edugeek-BETT09[/ame]

We use Symantec Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam for Exchange Server. Not cheap, but really really solid - very easy to manage. Seriously good spam filtering! We had the same problems, and we have email accounts for all our students as well - Don't want them to get Viagra adverts every day - or worse "enlargement" advise! If you are serious about stopping the problem - get a reputable solution!

@ Domino: Love That!!!

I can't thank all of you enough for sharing your situations and reasons for doing that! This got us thinking of a number of pro's and con's for doing it in any way really! I like the use of the student number, but you need to add to it some year group identifier? I like the fact that if you plan this properly, you never have to re-create any accounts! I would like to make it as easy as posable for the younger kids, but I also realise that they are so used to computers in year 3, that they most probably would be fine with a number? (They know their own mobile phone number!!) EDUGEEK is a very impressive tool

We use hidden shares to make it easier for students to get to their directories - all other students directories is hidden. No clutter. The only way to hide directories from showing is by hidden share. (What you don't see, won't bother or be a temptation to you) We do the same with teachers and admin staff - this is a preferred and promoted way for creating shares??

We have full access to ALL teachers to student directories - not that it is used much. The reasoning is that the student drive is for school use only, and there should not be anything that staff cant have access to. Responsability is also given to Head's of Year, to check that no inapropriate files are stored in the student directories. (not that they really do it - but that is the theory) We had it like this for the past few years, with NO problems. We do have other shared directories where classes and year groups can share data, as well as teacher / student share space, were teachers can post file that students can only read / copy if needed.

Just had a discussion with Vikpaw and Artsaudi, and keeping the same username will become even more important if we implement Learning Gateway on portal server. You realy do not want to redo them every year, and recreate them in the VLE?? It seems like the use of the student number is not a bad idea if you are useing this name as email address etc etc. It will protect them a little more than using Initials and Last Name? Now we have even more reason to figure out a change of student user accounts!

Hi kmount, I would have loved to be able to go for something simple!! No Seriously!! Problem is being in an Arabic country - halve my students have the same first name! (hence the most used name in the world) and 80% have an "AL-" or "EL-" as the first part of their last name! (eg AL-Makhoul) Splitting them by Year group makes it significantly easier.

Hi John!! Nice to hear from you! Our school is Nursery - IB (Year 13) - entry year might be a little confusing, but I like the 3 + 3 idea from first name + last name. It is the numeric part that is still going to be a show stopper. I think Laserbalzer's year they will graduate is maybe workable??

Hi Laserblazer, You are correct - we remove all hyphens ( - or ' and spaces) from their first and last names, then put it back in the user name!! That is one thing we should get rid of! Leaving year could be a plan - even if it is a probable leaving year, as our students come and go all the time!

I read the previous discussions regarding AD design and naming conventions (ended in 2006), but I am still looking for the ultimate naming convention for students: Current Convention: Year Group-Initial + first 4 characters of last name eg Peter Black in Year 7 will be: Y7-PBlac The problem (and blessing in disguise) with this approach is that we recreate ALL 1500 students every year. The blessing is that we delete all students accounts and their home directories (mp3, jpg files ) every year. Another plus for this naming convention, is that all student home directories are listed together, and makes it easy for the Teachers to get to the correct student home directories. Creating the new accounts is also no problem: We export all student names from SIMS to csv - using UserCommander (from SystemTools), create all account including home directories in a few minutes. The only serious flaw here is the private share of the student Home Directories. This is a manual process after the creation of the student accounts for 1500 students! A few limitations because we are an international school: 1. We do not have full intakes from feeder schools - we have constant flow of students, in and out, as their parents start work in the country and leave after contract completion. So year of intake does not really make sense. 2. Having Arabic names converted to English makes for some interesting spelling differences within one family. Three siblings in one family could have their last names (in their passports) spelled differently. 3. We only give personal user accounts from Year 3 and up - Lower primary students have a Registration Group (Class) account. That should be enough info to bore everybody to death! Any bright ideas on a better naming scheme or how to automate the private share creation??

I work with Artsaudi and we dropped ALL forms of hyphenation ( - ' ) and spaces. It was particularly confusing with Arabic names that in one family have a hyphen for one child's last name, but not for the sibling!! By eliminating it all together, it is easier on both the user and network admin.

I vote for document virtualizer as well! We don't have one but we did have a demo on one - can see a few applications with projecting manuel pages directly, as well as 3D objects.

Happy Birthday!!

It is world wide very scary!! We even have a bank in Saudi cutting a whole department of staff! There are no place that will be spared from this economic downturn. Even in China that was seriously booming a few months ago, they no have serious problems with unemployment!

True! And we only pay 10 pence for a liter of fuel!

It won't be fair to compare with International salaries (and in Saudi we don't pay tax!!)

Thanks for all the welcomes! We had a great time @ BETT, and it was seriously impressive to meet all of you - with all your experience and knowledge - our life can just be easier!

Happy Birthday!