IGB

Hi all, I've been given some Promethean panels to test in order to replace our aging SMARTboards and one of the questions that has cropped up is: We have a department with 1000's of SMARTNotebook resources that we need to convert for use with Promethean's ActiveInspire. We know that you can import a SMARTNotebook into ActiveInspire, then save it as a native file, however is there such a thing as a bulk conversion type tool out there that I could apply this for all these resources on behalf of the teachers?

Over the last few weeks I've uploaded a secondary school's teaching resources to shared drives using RCLONE. I had already setup the drives a couple of years ago and did a sync back then, however no body would bite the bullet and turn off the local storage. This particular school had requested that we uploaded the data and changed the local storage to read only for staff, which I fully expect will be turned off completely by Christmas of this year. They also requested that the same folder structure was created in a Shared Drive for their Admin documents as well and I used RCLONE to do that as well.

Did this work for you? We have similar issues

This is what we do, the only user in the OU is the enrollment user.

This thread has been an interesting read. We use Salamander here to provision 4 schools into Google Classrooms etc. Salamander created the Guardian Invitations for 1 of the schools and we had a lot of parents from different domains claiming that they had not received it. I then used GAM to clear any current invitations then re-send an invitation which seems to have worked for most users. I did read somewhere that it could possibly be the receiving mail server marking as spam/phishing etc when sending in bulk. For the second school, I did all the invitations manually using GAM and only sent 50 invitations at a time, this resulted in much fewer reports of users not receiving their invitations. The second issue we had was parents stating that they were not getting any updates, however I needed to point out 2 things: 1) If there is no teacher activity on a particular classroom, then there is nothing to update. 2) Guardian Summaries must be turned on in each Classroom and this must be done by the teacher as the API gives no access to change it. Although it was frustrating whilst it was happening, it's good to see that we're not the only ones going through these issues.

I have Gigaclear FTTP at 900Mbs up/down, whislt it rarely gets above 700Mbs I don't complain as it's more than enough for our household needs and we effectivley line on an island with the river Severn onse side of the village and the river Frome to the front of the house, a canal behind us and all cut off with the Gloucester <> Sharpness canal. Previous speed records on copper ADSL2+ was 14Mbs from a business class ISP at not much less than the price Gigaclear are currenlty charging. I also had an indroductory £20 per month discount for the 3 year contract as well.

Ah ok, so we run PaperCut MF here, so that will then sort out printing accounts and charging on BYOD as well then?

Am I right in thinking that there's no accounting with this and therefore no way to restrict printing?

I was finally approved just as everyone was saying their goodbyes. Where is the recording then?

My partner is a Head of Faculty with 2 children (12 & 8). Her work/life balance means that she doesn't do any school work until the children are in bed, probably close to around 10pm. This is her choice. She gets to spend quality time with her children, then decides once they no longer need her un-divided attention she can then do work. If I was to block/ban/restrict her access to any of the services that the school provides, that would mean that she would need to work earlier in the evening preventing the quality time she has with her children. I think this would add pressure and stress to an already stressful workload that teachers have to deal with. The rush to have to complete any work that they want to before a cut off time, would only serve to make their home life worse if you ask me.

I have recently installed Password Reset for a couple of our users because their normal way of changing it was with Impero. Password Reset works brilliantly, the only thing I would prefer would be a confirmation message that the password has been changed but as soon as our staff understand that there isn't one they are fine.

Rather depends on the version as they have broken it in 5.2

We had this exact same issue a few weeks ago. A group policy was set with Loopback processing replace and all manner of other group policies then looked like they weren't being applied. They were of course being processed but then replaced.

SIMS AD Provisioning does this when a personel record gets updated. Look in SIMS & verify the email address in the contact information. The one set to Main I think is the cause of this

Another place I send teachers to check for themselves is Copyright & Schools: photocopy, scan, screen or broadcast copyright resources in classrooms - simple advice for teachers

Costs, cost, costs. Everything these days comes down to the green stuff. We have seen a dramatic reduction on the amount of printing that is now done as we set restrictive balances on students, staff have to charge their printing costs to their departments or not print at all, whereas in the past they would just get into an IT suite early morning and print off 300 copies of the days teaching resources therefore hiding the printing costs to another department. Whilst we don't charge any students for printing, they do have a starting balance and they can get printing vouchers from their teachers and we can also set users to not be able to accumulate funds higher than a set level. This alone has seen a HUGE reduction in the thousands of pictures of donkeys etc pouring out of printers. The ability to now charge each department for their printing costs has been quite good as well as our head of departments/budget holders have now taken a more responsible approach to their printing costs, some even only giving small allowances to their staff to print from. The Follow Me printing which allows users to release at any of our MFD's I thought was going to be the biggest selling point, however we've had in the past nothing but moans about it.

We deploy our printers via AD Groups and a KIX script on every login. Computer needs a connection to another printer, just add it to the Printer Group and it's there for the next login. Also handy if you have a printer that is Out Of Order, to just add the computers that were normally connected to it to another group. Computer moves to another office, add it to another Printer group. The only time I need to look at the script is when we add more printers, but as it's ony 5 lines of code it only take a few seconds to update once the printer has been installed on the server. As you can see from the code, we also utilise a virtual print queue that can release the prints to any device on the network so if a computer hasn't yet been added to a printer group, the device can still print. IF computerINGROUP("Domain Computers")=1 Addprinterconnection ("\\PrintServer\FollowMe") ? "Added printer connection to Followme virtual queue" SETDEFAULTPRINTER ("\\PrintServer\FollowMe") ENDIF IF computerINGROUP("Exams Printer Group")=1 Addprinterconnection ("\\PrintServer\exams") ? "Added printer connection to Exams MFD" SETDEFAULTPRINTER ("\\PrintServer\exams") ENDIF

In SharePoint 2010, I have a need to create a document store with multiple folders within, then set permissions on each folder for individual users. Teacher will have Full control on the Document Library & all contents Student A will have Contribute to the Folder Student A Student B will have Contribute to the Folder Student B ...... and so on. The Folder Names & Usernames will come from an AD export into a csv file. I can seem to manage to create the folders from the csv file using Powershell when the Document Library is mapped to a drive. I would prefer to connect Powershell directly to the Document Library to create then set the permissions. Does anyone have a script that can do this that I could edit for my own needs as it's one of those things that if I can get right, will help lots of our teaching staff here. Scripting is not one of my strong points.

Indeed it does Timbo, however I don't tend to logon to the server very often, in fact I would say that I log into the support forum more often than the server. A simple email telling me that there was an upgrade available could possibly remind me to go and have a look at what issues it deals with, after all, I am the first point of contact for Impero within our establishment.

We've used Impero for a couple of years now and I've put on almost 2 stone! That should tell you that most of the fixes that I had to run to the classrooms to complete can now be accomplished from my desk. Impero support is probably one of the best supports I've come across and if you have an idea of something that could be added, it gets added to the suggestions list and you get a notification if/when it's been added to an update. I have to agree with someone earlier in the thread though, it would be handy if there was a notification of new updates to the Server/Console as we only seem to get them if I report an issue, then the techies will say we can release V.*.*.** to you which should sort that issue out but I never seem to get a notification to say, we have updates available that address XYZ problems etc. From a classroom management POV it's a very good and intuitive tool which allows the teachers to almost teach themselves how to use it. However from a techie POV, we lost a team member to exams last year and without Impero I don't things that we would have survived the work load that we have accomplished in the last 12 months had it not been for Impero. Like others, we don't use its full functionality, we had PaperCut before Impero and we're sticking with it as it integrates so nicely with our MFD release stations that we lease, we regularly view the logs when asked by teachers to see if someone has visited certain sites, created documents etc etc. If I was told tomorrow that our Impero subscription is not to be renewed, I would probably smile, laugh, cry then collapse in a heap of jelly just before the guys in white coats came to settle me in for the future into my nice new padded room. No, I have no affiliation to Impero, I'm nothing more than a grateful customer and all I can do is recommend the product highly.

That scripts works brilliantly. I've had to move home directories and roaming profile directories in order to upgrade one of our servers and used this script this morning. We are currently running a mixed environment of Win XP & Win 7, so the roaming profiles actually create folders with a trailing .V2 for the Win 7 profiles. Now of course the script can't find the user "user.name.V2" as they don't exist, so could anyone tell me how to omit the ".V2" from the variable "%%i" so that it will find the correct AD object to apply permissions. Many thanks in advance. Ian

Appologies Fawkers, I hadn't seen this question of yours until now. It doesn't allow parents to update their own details, which I'm glad of to be fair otherwise there would be another layer of support required. As a product overall, I think it's not to bad and our County is adopting it at county level, however we'll still maintain our own as we'll have more control overall than those that will be tied into the county's solution. As far as I can see those that make the move into county level hosting will have to become part of a larger AD tree and will have limited access to the AD structure or they will have to maintain 2 different Active Directories, one that they have full control over for their own establishment and 1 that the County will give some control over to them. This results in duplicate credentials for all users in the school. SLA's are yet to have been sorted as far as I can see, however the upside to handing it over to county is that they can take care of the backups and security levels. As a product itself it's pretty good and will meet the requirements for reporting before the deadline.

We're also using SLG2 as well, so the parents can check their contact details that are held in SIMS live on there. If there are any changes they can contact the school themselves. We also do an annual data collection anyway which includes email addresses, so it doesn't really add to much to the data collection process.

All intrusions are welcome as it adds ideas and suggestions to the melting pot. We've had a number of issues with ParentMail, the one that springs to mind was a mail to notify parents that the school would be closed due to snow earlier this year. The first email that was sent went without any body at almost midnight despite having submitted it much earlier, now whilst this may have been an Id10T error from our end the second email sent didn't go out until the following day after registration which was to late for some. The lists we use are maintained from our SIMS database AFAIK and submitted to ParenMail to create the groups, so the data comes from us a couple of times a year, which is also the same data that I've used to create the distribution groups above.

I had been warning the school for some time about the way the servers were filling up but no one was taking any notice. Everyone could still log in as we run 4 DCs, however the shares which held everyones home directories I'd hidden for some time in order to get my point accross. I was then asked what we needed to improve the situation. We now have a 4TB NAS that is being brought online gradually plus I got the go ahead to impose quotas. The actual process of setting up the quota's took less than an hour to apply, however if you don't get your point accross then you'll always be firefighting and not moving forward.