User3204

We only send memos out via emaail now. We also have a VOIP system that gives all staff a voicemailbox, and the PBX sends the recorded message to the email address of the owner (as a WAV). If Microsoft had managed to bring out their Lync server out earlier I would have looked at this instead, but they got to market too late for us.

We have various calendars and software using them through the school. 1. SIMS, 2. The excel spreadsheet the two admin people use to manage the actual data 3. The weekly newsletters that go to staff and parents 4. The external booking software that is used because it produces invoices. 5. SLG will start to be producing one (when we start to use it). 6. People also use their email calendars (I know I do). Presumably some also use their phones, but I don't care as much about them. Does anyone integrate all this into one glorious mass of database ? What we're after is some way to reduce the amount of duplication that occurs. The SIMS calendar is entered from the weekly newsletter that goes around. We have looked at a free calendar software (vCalendar) but, this means we still have duplication of data entry. Any ideas ?

To change the libraries just right click on them. Change the one that a user is using, redirect it to wherever you store the files (in our case p:\docs where p: is mapped to \\server\share\username) Take out all the ones that are wrong. Change the GPO to copy this new file over to the users. The Libraries are saved in files located at: %appdata%\microsoft\windows\libraries (or possibly from the %userprofile%) If you don't want the libraries, delete the files. Although I'm not sure what would happen to documents....

... actually when I think about this I'm planning to re do the cabling in this large cab during easter. Oh and the colour coding went out the window for the server side cabinet switches.

I started re patching our cabinets by paying a contractor to come in to audit our network sockets. They renumbered (to our specs), tested, each socket, then this was entered onto a map and a spreadsheet. This meant I knew what I could disconnect at the switch end. Colour coding is great too. We have the following: Uplinks = Red Staff wired = yellow phones = orange wireless = green student workstations = white/grey external / dmz = purple Then we separate each ICT suite on the following rota: black, blue, pink, and then grey... I was a little surprised that I ended up with 4 ICT suites in one cabinet - but the numbering in this cab goes from 1 to over 400. Get a plan, work out what lengths of cable you can get away with (the shorter the better). Pink cables are hard to find for sale...

Ahh.. Well, I'm not quite sure where I should be posting this. But I reckoned advertising /forum seemed like the place to get frenzied sales responses (which is what I'd like). We are after someon to create an Intranet/ Portal site for the school. We are moving away from our current VLE (Uniservity) because of the cost (and the fact none of the teachers liked ot use it). We have had Capita install SLG onto sharepoint for us. So what we are after is a good looking intranet/portal for staff and students that does the following: 1. VLE - or attaches to Moodle VLE (which will need to be setup too). 2. Integration of the Current SLG stuff with the new stuff. 3. Integration of the existing student Windows AD accounts with this new thingy. 4. Integration of the staff Windows AD accounts with the new thingy. 5. Integration of other we based softwares (Oliver/Talis library, webmail). I've looked around the internet, but the only people I can find is one company, who have quoted for all of the above. But I need to get at least three quotes. Does anyone know where I can get all this ? Or ca anyone arrange to do all this ? We don't have any in-house Sharepoint knowledge, and don't have any time to train up before we have to shift stuff off the Uniservity. Thanks.

If the costs are the same as Wirral LA sent to me (as a school) then it's definitely cheaper with moodle, and I'm probably going to move away from Uniservity I could buy a new VM server for my Cluster at their prices - or I could get Core ECS (or similar) to install, configre and manage our SLG and sharepoint into an integrated VLE and such. Their site is CORE Education and Consulting (UK) Ltd - Core Education

Right, well I'm not the Apple guy at our school, but I have picked up some things... [1] Dunno, not sure what are logon times are, they seem fast enough. [2] The students being unable to log on are because the apple desktop seems to trawl through the active directory at boot, for a list of users and share locations. If you click on the IP address it changes and one of the settings shows a Red/Yellow/Green traffic light set, signifying how many accounts are available. We also found we had to change the way we shared out user homes, we used to share each user to their own share \\server\username, but the Apples (apparently) don't like there being too many shares on one server..... so we changed to \\server\group and then a subfolder of their username, this improved things. What we have also just done recently to solve a problem with imaging then, is create a brand new VLAN for them separate from the rest of the network - although it does route through. We're waiting to see if this solves the issue.

You can apply printers in the User Policy but towards the Computer. We have a "All Users" policy, within the user side preferences we have printers applied based on the OU or Group that they are in. We do this via the "Item Level targetting". The only issues with this was when I tried to apply a policy to just one computer, where I had to create a new group for it, and apply the policy to that, rather than use the DNS or NetBIOS name.

Hey... it's funny the things you discover when you go looking around for stuff... I have attached the file.. We have mapped a drive z: to the \\server\cover share The SIMS is exported to z:\new because it can't export it to z:\ The attached file was created in Office 2003, I'm not sure if the machine she uses is Office 2010 now though. If the exported HTM file is in the correct location IE z:\new\cv101010.htm the macro will find it, and do some funky stuff and save it back as z:\new\today.htm. The macro works out the proper name of the file using the date. We then host this folder on the server via apache (amongst a few other internal sites), the relevant lines in the apache conf file are DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php default.html default.htm default.php today.htm DocumentRoot "W:\www\80\ict\resource\cover\new" ServerName cover The folder w:\www\80\ict\resource\cover is shared out via SMB as "Cover" We also redirect the name COVER in DNS to the server IP. I don't know how to do all that in IIS. today.doc

Currently using Windows 7 / 2008 I have a group policy preference that applies \\server\group1\startmenu to the Common Start Menu, and using targetting to apply that to an OU within the AD structure. Before this we used an environment variable called "Location", which applied it to \\server\%location%\startmenu, I did the same with the desktop. But I much prefer the way it works in GPP. It does mean you end up with duplicated shortcuts on a per room / group basis.

Okay to wrent this thread back on topic We had the similar problem with the default HTML, it also shows various things that were unnecessary. So one of our techs has created a word doc, and created a macro within this, which opens the HTML file, removes any lines that are unnecessary, remove the column that states the reason they're off (which was the main issue). It then saves it to a network location as default.html (overwriting the previous), and then we can send the staff to an internal "site" http:/cover/, which loads the page. We make the lady that does the cover do this when she finishes.

If you have the external certificate then you need to chuck in into the "Trusted root certification authority" for windows. At which point Mdaemon will be able to see it (or so goes the theory). See http://www.altn.com/Support/KnowledgeBase/KnowledgeBaseResults/?Number=KBA-01844

I have found the Capita SIMS support to be the best around - no I don't work for Capita ! Whether we break the database or their software does something, they have been able to fix it quickly. Sometimes we have to send them our database, but they will then send us back a patch to fix it. I would recommend someone on site being responsible for SIMS, although we also have regular SIMS Management meetings, where we get together the main / heavy users to discuss ongoing developments. I think we're some sort of partner school.

Uninstall the old version ? To do file associations I usually go for the command line assoc and ftype basically something like: assoc .cpr=Cubase5File ftype Cubase5File=c:\path\to\cubase.exe %1 You can do more, but this usually works. There's probably already something associating the .cpr with a file type, so you might be able to just get away with moving the ftype from the old one to the new one.

As part of our SLG rollout, it has created AD groups for all classes and forms. This does only work for the new accounts it has created, not the original accounts they use, but once the students have gone through the consolidation, which links the two accounts together it would be correct. And then it is just a matter of telling exchange to use the groups as a mailing list, and making sure the user accounts are linked to the email address. I don't use Outlook or Exchange so I don't know how this works....

Number one has to be reliability... really really important for the internet to be connected even if only on at 10mb. A decent SLA that specifies clearly what the uptime is expected to be, how long to fix it, and what will happen if it all goes pear-shaped. It would be nice if they had a failover, so if something drops off (which happened to us a couple of weeks ago) we can still get onto the internet somehow. A caching server for WSUS, Mcafee, or whatever else we need access through to, we did get offered to join into out LA Mcafee license, but it was going to cost us more, and meant we wouldn't have an EPO server locally. A decent helpdesk, with an online portion so that you can see what problems other schools have in the area related to the service, and join in on. When you ask them to do something, the confidence to believe them... A time server... small thing, but it has taken me ages to get all my servers working together. Access to whatever statutary reporting servers, for census, plasc, etc, that we need, and support for accessing them. The ability to have any ports/services open that we want, I can't get SSH access on port 23. A pricelist for all the other services that they provide (in fact a list of any sort would be nice). There are of course a few other services that are nice: Web filtering - optional, so we don't end up with two, all the secondary schools I know have onsite filtering, we don't need any more. VLE / MLE - optional Upstream \ offsite backup for school data within the LA / RBC Core - optional and if we had a fast link to this (say 100mb or faster) then usable.

Firefox : It allows you to have two profiles, one for school and one for home. Or just use Firefox at home and IE at school.

Hmm... MSSC121 MS Windows Remote Desktop Services CAL School Agreement 662 each £2.52 £1,668.24 Via Pugh, and I can't find the one I bought, which was cheaper.... Course I did buy a few more than you. This had to match the standard CAL which is per device... I don't have this many remote devices (yet).

It sounds like a piece of junk, have they not heard of HTML ? I'll have to remember this, if anyone asks me they'll get a response of "It won't work at school, you'll have to do it at home".

This year I went with a company called SoftCat as they were the only people to be able to quote me less than £20k... Softcat | Home usually I find Pugh is pretty good for buying new stuff from though ... discounted software for education establishments

I use this... Free CAD software * for your DWG files: DraftSight - Dassault Systèmes also at Free CAD software * for your DWG files: DraftSight - Dassault Systèmes It's a free DWG editor from the same people that do Solidworks, there's also a pay version.

I haven't needed to do any yet, but you can get a new motherboard, processor and RAM for about £100, whilst I usually pay about £400 for a pre-built one.

Heh, I've just had to buy a new USB Modem... for the same reason as stated above, finance, blah, Barclays Business manager. I keep saying "internet banking" to them, but nothing ever happens.

We have ~1500 students secondary school. Pre virtualisation, we had 26 servers, but this included 5x CCTV units, duplicated tasks because we have 2 domains, so 4x DCs (2x each), 2x Proxys, 2x Fileservers, 2x print servers, 2x IAS/certificate servers. Since virtualising we have physically: 3x servers in the cluster, 3 servers not virtualised, and still 5 CCTVs. But the Guest servers, have multiplied, we now have aboout 40 within it, but we are in the process of moving to 2008, AND merging them into a standard/single domain.